TITLE: Starvation Angel AUTHOR: Vehemently (vehemently@yahoo.com) SPOILERS: none in particular RATING: R, purely for disturbing subject material CATEGORY: X-File ARCHIVE: Gossamer; The I in FBI. Others please ask. DISCLAIMER: Characters you recognize belong to Chris Carter / 1013 and are used in loving violation of Title 17 of the U.S. Code. SUMMARY: Bernadette, people are searching for The kind of love that we possess . . . * * * * * * * Starvation Angel by Vehemently * * * * * * * Dana Scully awoke in that strange way of sleep-in mornings: with a slow, growing realization that the dream she was having wasn't actually taking place. She felt her arms clasped to her chest, one hand curved between her breasts; with her eyes closed she reached up and felt her face and found that she was crying. Only now did she notice the heaving sobs which had thrown her out of dreaming, and the hand cradling her right breast as if to stifle her distress. She sat up quickly, in the dark, eyeing the corners of the room. Already the loose bits of the dream were fading into imagination and reference -- something about a long tan hallway, and that beat-up old blue car she had in college. And the dead child crying, and being lost in a dark room that had no walls. She wiped the tears off her cheeks swiftly, but the paranoia was more difficult to dismiss. Her throat hurt, as if she had been choking. Scully didn't know what to think. The telephone next to her bed did not ring -- if she were in a movie, it would, and she could confess her vague terror while her social defense grid was still down. For once, Mulder was asleep somewhere, hopefully in his bed, hopefully not dreaming at all. Scully threw off her covers in an attempt at decisiveness, and went to the bathroom for a drink of water. Palming the acrid cold water from the tap, she felt the drops rolling down her chin to the hot flesh of her body, and her heart was still beating inordinately fast. Carefully she avoided looking in the mirror at herself. Tousled hair and the otherworldliness of sleep were too vulnerable to be seen, right now. Scully padded back to her bed, sure in total darkness of her surroundings, brushing fingers against the edge of her night table. She climbed back into bed with only a glance at her glowing clock: 4:12 am. Too early by half, and too late to return to restful sleep. Irritably Scully rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position so she could drift off. The blanket was all the way up to her chin, as if it could ward off further fears. ** It hurts. There's something important I should be thinking about but it hurts and I can't think about anything else. An awful headache in the front that pulses down the right side the way Mom describes her migraines and maybe that's what it is. But I can taste blood in my mouth and a slow ache on my wrists and there's something terribly wrong. I can't open my eyes. My eyelashes are crushed to my cheeks and they tickle a little. By wrinkling my forehead I can tell there's a cloth over my face, over part of my face, something tight so my eyes won't open. I don't want to move, something bad will happen if I move, so I just lie still and count what body parts I can feel. Wrists, ankles, a line around my front -- that dull hurt like being touched on a sore spot with hay. I breathe and can feel my elbows against my waist. No shoes, I think. Why am I barefoot. What's going on. There's blood in my mouth so I don't open it to ask. I don't know if someone's in the room with me -- I don't know what room I'm in. Something awful is here. My head throbs like a heartbeat, in time with it, I can feel it hot in my neck and all of my skin is on fire. My breaths come in little gasps and I can't stop myself. Something awful. What something. Something awful. When I start to feel lightheaded I know I must be panicking, like that time Julie wouldn't go on in the school play, and Mr. Cray had to go get a paper bag for her to breathe in. She sat on the floor and all the teachers knelt around her and maybe that's what's going on with me. But I can't open my eyes to know and nobody's putting a paper bag in my face. I think about Mr. Cray, and how he kills bees with his bare hands, and I know he wouldn't panic. He sits on his desk in front of the class and says We have a problem, and then he starts to give us clues to solve the problem. And when he stands up and writes on the board, and turns back to us when we get it right, it feels so good to know we solved the problem. I don't think he's here. I can't smell that chalk smell he always has. He would help me solve this problem. He would lead me to what the clues mean. He would pick up his fat blue chalk and write on the board: 1) sight -- nothing. Eyes are closed by a cloth. Bandaged? 2) hearing -- nothing but heartbeat. Too loud to tell about anything else. 3) taste -- blood. No medicines and I can't taste what I had for lunch. 4) feel -- headache, tightness at arms and legs, lying on side. I'm lying on something hard like a board or the floor. 5) smell -- nothing. My nose isn't covered so I can breathe OK. Writing down in my head in blue chalk makes me calm down a little. It's just a problem, like in class. Mr. Cray tells me, Now speculate what kinds of things could be happening. What kinds of things. Maybe I was in an accident and I'm blind. They took me to the hospital and I'm blind so they covered my eyes. Maybe I fell off the jungle gym and I'm just lying in the teachers' lounge with a blanket over my head, like they did for Tim when he got sick that one time. Lots of maybes, but I can't remember anything since lunch and I'm hungry again so it's a long time. Something awful is what it is, something bad enough to not remember. Mom's gonna be so sad, if I'm hurt bad. Maybe she'll be in the hospital with me. What are we going to do, Mom? Help me, Mom. Mom would tell me to pray to God. Something's wrong and I don't know what to do. There aren't enough clues to figure out what the problem is, Mr. Cray. I'm scared and I don't want to cry, I'm too old to cry now, but I'm so scared. God, help me. ** They arrived at the mother's house at nine the next morning, and the red rims of eyes showed that the mother had not slept at all. A man in a sober navy suit introduced himself as a lawyer, but while Scully was still thinking, Already? she realized he was someone from the mother's office. He jutted his unremarkable chin and handed her his card, with his name and firm blazoned in royal blue. The mother just shook hands limply. Mulder stood back from the interview, as he often did, scrutinizing reactions and gathering his vague impressions. Scully knew he enjoyed discomfiting people, standing around tall and silent, but his grave expression and the case's circumstances suggested a different sort of silence. Scully arranged her skirt as she sat, fussing, and finally she turned to the chintz couch on which the mother perched. "You didn't see any strange behavior out of Bernadette when she left for school in the morning?" Scully's tongue felt furry, her consonants slurred, but the mother did not notice. She just shook her head and crushed a tissue. The lawyer leaned forward, as if confiding in a friend. "Bernie follows a schedule, always. She's never late getting home, or she calls the office." He straightened his lapels, a nervous gesture. The mother was staring at him, and Scully imagined poison in that glance. "She hates when you call her that," was all the mother said, and then she looked at her lap and the strangled tissue. She used it to wipe her eyes, which were dry. "He's my boss," apologized the woman, her dark curls bouncing as she gestured with her head. The lawyer put his hand on the mother's shoulder. Scully realized the woman was wearing day-old clothes and felt a little guilty for speculating about the man's false familial gestures. They resolved to go to Bernadette's room together, Mulder trailing behind as if idle, but his scrutiny of the photographs on the stairs belied his laconic shuffle. The girl was dark, bony, turning eleven in a month. Various lengths of hair and degrees of baby-fat roundness were arrayed without order in walnut frames. She was an only child. Scully was so tired and four adults did not fit comfortably in the bedroom. The lawyer displayed some tact and guided the mother back down the stairs. The tissue was put to use again; this time the eyes were wet. Mulder flipped morosely through the plastic notebooks the girl kept at the foot of her bed. Scully saw his broad fingers bending the pages and was suddenly bothered by his size. "Do we know what happened to her father?" asked Mulder suddenly. He did not look up. Avoiding looking at him, Scully turned to the bureau before she answered. "Vincent Golka. They divorced when she was three; he died when she was seven." So much for the custody-kidnapping theory. Scully had rediscovered in the field what she learned in the classroom: a child who disappears with a relative may be found alive, but a child who disappears with a stranger is almost assuredly dead. There was no way yet of correlating this case to one of the other serial child-murder cases that habitually dotted the national map. Scully suddenly felt dirty, pawing through the girl's sock drawer, finding a much- folded note from a boy named Bobby. So far Mulder had not advanced an alien-abduction theory, for which Scully was grateful. She did not want to argue with him when he was so moody; it drew out her rancor and her impatience. Mulder just sat on the neatly-made bedspread -- he looked absurd, a monster, on the rainbow print -- and touched the notebooks with his heavy hands. "Poetry," he said obliquely, gesturing. "Bad, but considering she's ten, it's not so bad." A page flapped into the air. "Part of a diary. Some movie star's name in loopy cursive. Half a homework assignment." Scully said what she knew he meant. "She didn't run away." He looked up at her, his expression a little seasick. "No, she didn't." ** Big D is who I see when the cloth comes off my eyes. I was dreaming about a special angel who would hold my hand till I was better, a shining bright angel with tears in her eyes. I woke up shaking, and then I heard the footsteps that woke me up, and he picked me up by my arms till I could lean against a wall. Now I'm squinting at him after too long in the dark and he just looks at me, like I'm a bug he's poking with a stick. I don't know if I should say anything, or if he's taking me to the hospital, or if I'm dreaming every- thing. I just look at him, trying to blink sleep away since I can't move my hands to pinch myself. He gives me a big toothy smile like he always does and it makes me feel so much better, I smile back at him. "Am I hurt bad?" I ask, to show him I'm tough, but his smile falls off his face and he just stares at me for another minute. It's kind of bright in here, I guess there's a fluorescent light on the ceiling, so his eyes are milky-pale with little tiny points of black. His face is empty and he's scaring me again. It must be pretty bad after all. I count the wrinkles on his cheeks so I won't have to look into those eyes. I feel his hand in my hair, soft and careful. I lower my head and he moves his hand more, and it feels good, comforting. He makes a little noise that sounds happy. While he plays with my braid I look around at the room, it's all plain gray concrete with a little couch against the other wall. A stack of magazines, and a pile of blankets, maybe this is a hideout Big D keeps just for himself for when he can't handle the grownups any more. What am I thinking. He's a grownup too. He is squatting in front of me with his fingers tickling the hairs at the back of my neck with a silly look on his face, still wearing the red plaid shirt he always does, and then I look down at myself and I know everything. My hands are right in front of me. They are crossed in my lap with my palms facing up. They are tied with twine, hairy strings wound around and around my wrists. God, do you see this? They are tied with twine. I am tied up. Big D is rubbing my neck and I am tied up. I look even further and my feet are tied up too, slung together and the twine makes white marks it's tied so tightly. I saw that movie even though Mom told me it would give me nightmares. She was right and it did but now I know what's going on. I know exactly what's going on and Big D looks at me confused when I start screaming. ** The school was dull and tinny as middle schools often are. Scully was glad to leave it, and forbore being angry at her partner for disappearing to the police station early. If he wanted to be chummy with the local detective, she would let him, and get the work done herself. She knew she was being unfair to him and she didn't care. Interviews with the principal down to the janitor had not contained any great revelations about Bernadette's movements the previous day. Josiah Cray's ashen face swam before her as she approached the Bureau car and it made her tremble. The teacher had seemed so capable when he stepped into the long dim brown hallway, and she had watched as his confidence putrefied under her questions. The rain outside only made the hallway darker. She had learned very little from Cray in exchange for his horror; now he was back in his classroom as the children straggled back from recess in the gym. Scully closed her eyes against his explaining Bernadette's absence to the class. Abruptly she dashed a pair of tears from her cheeks and jerked the car door open. She could not blame the drops on the rain, which had slackened to a drizzle. This was no time to be sentimental. The child was dead already, more likely than not. She ducked into her car just in time, as a news van swung into the school parking lot. A white van, marked only by the transceiver on its top -- minus the equipment, it was a kidnapping vehicle if ever Scully saw one. It would hit the local news by five, if they didn't break in on the soaps before then. In this struggling small city, Scully didn't doubt the reporters would ignore the taboo against identifying child victims. She pulled out into traffic more forcefully than was necessary, flicking on the radio, and drove herself for a lap around the edges of the city before she was calm enough to head to the police station. Her anger at last cooled to plain melancholy, Scully was rounding a turn when the radio started to play that old Motown song "Bernadette". She pulled into the police parking lot and sat in the car, mesmerized by the lead singer's cri de coeur for his girlfriend, ringing out in counterpoint to the windshield wipers. But while I live only to hold you Some other men they long to control you But how can they control you, Bernadette When they can not control themselves, Bernadette It was a strange, magical moment, as if the radio were speaking directly to her, as if the song and the singers and the rain were created just for this moment of convergence. She sat in the car, engine running, until the song was over and the spell broken. Then she shuddered, clearing her head, and dodged bullet-sized raindrops on her way into the station. In the detectives' bullpen, there was cursing. Detective Wozniak nodded at her presence, and asked, "Did you hear on the radio?" Scully shook her head, splattering rain. Wozniak turned away, and poked a cassette tape into a player. "This just came off the oldies station, WOMR. Listen." She listened, and heard that rubbery voice of radio announcers, saying, "And this is for Bernadette Golka, we hope you get home safe. Folks, if you see her, call up your neighborhood watch or the police. This is the Four Tops, with 'Bernadette.'" Behind Wozniak, Mulder made a noise of disgust. None of them looked at each other. They all knew that bringing attention to her absence would only incite her kidnapper. Scully was a little ashamed at her earlier behavior, glad that she had been alone. Wozniak did not stop the tape and the song began again. But while I live only to hold you Some other men they long to control you But how can they control you, Bernadette When they can not control themselves, Bernadette This time Scully heard the lyrics and they became ugly, creepy, a foretelling. She did not know what to think, now. ** It's so boring in here. He untied me while I was sleeping but all he left me was the stack of magazines and they're all full of naked pictures and no stories or articles. Naked pictures and I'm naked too, he took my clothes when he took off the twine. He's not here so I don't have to think about that. It's God's problem for now, it's my angel's problem. She'll think of what to do when that time comes. I curl up on the couch wrapped in all of the blankets and stare at the empty wall, pretending it's a TV. I don't even know what time it is, or what day, or else I could pretend I'm watching my shows. If it's Thursday then Felicia will be investigating Mac's deals again, she just can't leave well enough alone. I think something's going to happen with Lucky and his girlfriend on Friday, some kind of cliffhanger. Mom hates that show, but she's at work so she doesn't know I watch it. I wonder if Mom's at work today. If it's still Wednesday then she is I bet, maybe she doesn't even know I'm missing yet. I wish there were windows so I could guess whether it's day or night. Big D left me a TV dinner, but it was cold by the time I woke up and I can't eat all of it in case I'm hungry later. It's later and I'm hungry, but he hasn't been back at all so maybe he's going to wait till I'm asleep again before he comes back. I still have the peas and the dessert and I'll keep them till I can't stand it any more. It was actually kind of funny, eating the turkey dinner with my fingers. But in all the stories people escape from jails by picking the lock with a fork so maybe that's why I don't have any silverware. I can't even find the lock, it took me feeling the walls to even find the door, so I guess Big D is smarter than everybody thought. My angel isn't so hot at giving me clues. I don't know what he's doing or what he has planned, but I can guess it's something terrible so I don't even think about it. Next time he's back he will leave me more clues and I'll solve this problem. I'll figure it out, drawing in my head with Mr. Cray's fat blue chalk. Come back, Big D. You scare me but at least it gives me something to do. If I start talking to a dream angel I will know I'm really crazy. I can't talk to her but I need somebody to talk to. I'm afraid I'll just turn gray like the walls and shrivel up to nothing. ** The next day it was sunny and warm, an impudence to the gloom that had settled over the police. It was so unlikely that nobody saw her taken, and yet there it was. The children in her class kicked their heels against the wall as they sat, sober, in interview. Scully had a headache and was tired of hearing the rosy gloss the children put on their answers. "Everybody likes her," said a boy named Bobby. It occurred to Scully to wonder if he was the Bobby of the note she had found earlier. Then she was repulsed at her invasion into the girl's privacy. The boy went on, "She never gets sent to the principal. And she's good at word problems, everybody wants her on their team. She's good at everything." Mulder, returning from a different interview, made a noncommittal noise as he came in. Bobby turned to his new audience. "She always helps people, you know? I just moved here last year, and she was all nice so I wasn't left out. She's even nice to the janitor. He's weird in the head." Mulder raised his eyebrows as if interested, but his glance at Scully said something else. She thanked Bobby and sent him back to the class, and he left wide-eyed, excited, as if he did not understand that the girl was probably dead. Mulder shifted, unable to fit his body into a child's chair. His stance might have seemed a casual sprawl if she did not know him so well. "One of the boys wanted to ask her out," he offered, touching his fingers to his lips. "The girls are calling her a tomboy, but they like her. She's the best at dodge ball in the class." He stopped, and stared into space. If he was thinking of his sister they did not acknowledge it between them. Nor had he mentioned her own resonances, for which she was grateful. Wozniak broke the tension by wandering into the room, flipping through his tiny notebook. "No records so far on the school employees or the neighbors. Nothing on the registered sex-offender lists for her neighborhood." This vulgar presence startled Scully back to business. "Her face is all over the news now," she said, and resigned herself to it. "We'll have enough volunteers to start walking the woods. If we're lucky, she isn't buried too deep." Mulder's face sagged, but he wasn't shocked. Wozniak, on the other hand, visibly startled before his face turned red. His hand reached out to point, but nothing emerged from his mouth. Scully watched him impassively, her surety doing its work better than words ever could. She could see the glassiness that presages tears in Wozniak's eyes when he cursed, turned away, and left the room. She envied his naivete immensely. Mulder was at her side, and she hadn't noticed him approaching. He took her elbow and guided her out the door, after Wozniak. He didn't say anything, only walked alongside her down the dim hall, breathing in her hair. To the clicking accompaniment of her heels, Scully felt the brittleness in her throat and the hard frown wrinkles around her mouth. Mulder's hand, brushing up and down her back. She closed her dry eyes against the sunlight. ** When he opens the door I'm ready. I can hear it, the key in the lock from the outside, so when the door swings open I jump up from the couch and bang my shoulder into the edge and smash it back into him. He makes a big noise "Oof!" and I pull the door open to see if I got him. He is staggering back, and I take the only chance I'll get, jumping past him and racing down the hall. God, God, God. I can hear him swearing, using the words Mom smacked me when she heard them from my mouth. I can hear him breathing hard right behind me, and I'm running as fast as I can, past windows with sunlight in them, down steps, and he grabs the blanket I tied around my waist. He pulls on it, pulls and I'm so terrified I scream and wriggle out of it, wriggle free. While he's sorting out the blanket from me I turn a corner and there's a front door. Outside it's cool, getting towards evening, the sun late and falling red in front of me, shining bright. West, that's west, I'm thinking stupidly, standing in his front yard. I start running, any direction, I don't know, down the street wishing my angel would guide me, and it's only when I have gone a whole block that I realize I am naked. I am naked and running down a street with woods on both sides, a thicket of creepers and tall weeds leading into walnut and maple trees. No houses I can see at all, noplace to go for help. I put my hands over my titties and keep running, my feet raw against the pavement, and up ahead a stop sign. I go past it, see a car ahead of me, but it's empty as I go past. Another, nicer maybe, and I trail my fingers on the wooden paneling as I go past. It's parked in front of a house. A house, wood and not painted in a long time, a house with no lights on even though it's getting dark now. I stand in the front yard, and start up to the steps, then stop, and I can't decide whether to try the door or keep going, what if they won't help me, what if nobody's home. Help me decide. I am jumping up and down crying when I hear a car's engine, and I know Big D has come looking for me. I take off running down the street, the car roaring in my ears, it must be right behind me. I cut across a front yard, seeing another house, this one with lights on, and I shout and shout but the wind of my running takes the sound away from me. The car right behind me, heavy footsteps thumping on the ground, and I know I'll never make it. He tackles me while I'm still a long way from the house. His heavy arm wraps around me, one big sweaty hand over my mouth so I can't scream again, his hand is so huge it covers my nose too and I can hardly breathe. He lifts me up and I try every trick I ever used on the playground, jackknifing against him but he is so huge and he lifts me up like a toy and marches back to the car. It's a blue car. He has gone up on the grass, the engine is idling, and he climbs into the car with me in his lap, that one huge hand still covering my face. I don't know how he drives back to his house, but he does it, even as I kick at his knees. I can't quite reach the pedals and no matter how I pull on the wheel he is stronger and keeps it going straight. He is swearing above and behind me, his breath hot in my hair, he calls me bad words and the sky is going dark. It's night and he carries me back into the house again. I've never been to his house before. I don't know where I am. I am stuck here and now he'll be ready if I try to get away again. I'm stuck here and he'll do whatever he wants to me. There's no solving this problem, is there. He shoves me into the gray room with one last swear word and locks the door behind him. Then he turns off the lights and leaves me here, in the dark, in the complete dark, like the night outside, and I collapse crying on the couch. I dream of my angel tonight, only now she is sitting in the corner crying with me. ** The rest of the afternoon had been a blessing of inconse- quential details, organizing volunteers into squads for tomorrow's search. Laid-off construction workers and an entire high school homeroom and housewives and off-duty cops had milled the police station lobby, mixing between groups and then self-segregating again, awaiting orders. Hushed gossip had hedged around the main topic of conversation. Now it was late at night and she was free even of the requirement to be social and professional. Mulder was as familiar with her moods as she with his and he did not comment on the mirror over the bureau in her hotel room, turned to the wall. He sat patiently shuffling papers on her bed, sitting in his sweatpants while Scully locked herself in the bathroom to think. But there were no thoughts in her head, so presently she emerged and asked him what he thought. He looked at her with his sad eyes, the eyes that penetrate too far, and she turned away. He cleared his throat before launching into his theory, all the apology she would get. "She's not part of any discernible pattern. The guy who's got her likely isn't, or hasn't been, serial. That's a start." She stood loose before the bed, waiting for him to go on. His eyes were on his hands, now. "There's still a chance Bernadette is alive. Lucy Householder was kept alive for years." He was lying to her. Not in fact, but in assumption, and she had known him long enough to be insulted at his soft- pedaling. The dead child sat between them, forbidding. She couldn't say anything, only bore into him with her own eyes, and he had the grace after a long while to look guilty. "Anyway, it seems unlikely she would get into a stranger's car," he said at last, and Scully allowed her professional shell to come over her. She climbed onto the bed beside Mulder and looked at the papers he held. "She's old enough to know better. And if there had been a struggle, chances are someone would have seen something." Between them he waved the list of neighbors and school employees. On that list was their suspect, probably. It made Scully's eyes ache. The list was too long -- forty or so names and addresses -- and short enough to imply a proliferation of murderers. She was marshaling herself against the unfairness of it when her door started thumping frantically. Mulder flitted off the bed and towards the door, catlike in his weaponless movements. Scully was lifting her gun when she heard Detective Wozniak's voice from outside, shouting frantically. "Agent! Wake up, Agent Scully!" A nod between partners and Mulder opened the door. Wozniak seemed not to notice the tense readiness of his audience as he stepped inside. It was nearing midnight and he was still in his ill-fitting suit jacket, a five o'clock shadow darkening his jaw. He clutched a scrap of paper in his hand like a reprieve from Hell. "A sighting," he confided, eyes jumping with excitement. Scully felt her face screw up in disgust, and was about to round on both Mulder and this gullible detective for their stupid alien fantasies. But Wozniak continued, smoothing the paper he held and offering it. "An old woman down in Loose Pines heard something early this evening -- a girl crying in her yard, and then a car, and some shouting. She didn't even think of Bernadette till the 11 o'clock news." "Wait, wait." Mulder waved his hands, hunching his shoulders. "She didn't see Bernadette, but, but what?" "She's an old woman," Wozniak gasped, swallowing against his heavy breathing, "and she can't see so well. But she lives alone down in Loose Pines, and she heard things that could be our girl. I've got a uniform down there already." Scully watched Wozniak's shoulders shake as he calmed his breathing, the paper he held between his fingers trembling. Mulder was clearly being caught up in it, rushing back to his hotel room to change out of his sweatpants. She was so tired. She didn't want to accept this sliver of hope. It was too great a burden. She shooed Wozniak out of her room and pawed through her suitcase for her pantyhose. ** I know what is going to happen now and it's almost a comfort. He wants me to behave and be good so he can do whatever he is going to do but let's face it: he will kill me when he's done so there's no reason for me to behave. He'll kill me anyway so what's the point. Either way I go to heaven and get free of this stupid room. I keep thinking it to myself -- he'll kill me anyway -- but I don't say it out loud because I figured out he might be watching me with cameras. I can't see them, but on Dateline they had cameras you could hide in a picture frame. He turned on the lights, and now he leaves them on, and he isn't doing that for me. He's got to be watching. He knows everything I do. He is the grownup here and I am the child. The couch isn't very comfortable, it's a scratchy fabric and a really ugly orange color, but it's all I have, so I put up with the lumps. All the blankets in the world aren't enough to make me feel clothed. I know he will be coming back again, and he will see me and know what I've decided. God will understand. That's why He let me dream about the angel. The TV dinner tray is sitting on the floor and I haven't touched it at all. I didn't even pick up the peas that spilled on the floor when he slammed it down. It's sort of satisfying to see him so mad but I didn't say anything to him or even let on I'd noticed him. I just sat in the couch and looked at my fingernails. There's dirt under my fingernails from outside. I keep realizing maybe that was the last time I would see outside, see the sky, and I want to cry but there's no more crying inside me. The door comes open and he's standing there, hands on hips. Still in his red flannel shirt, he must only own one shirt. I don't look directly at him but I think there's a frown on his face. He comes in and picks up the TV dinner. He's wary around me all the time now, ready for me to jump at him. As he straightens he eyes me and says, "Aren't you hungry?" I don't say anything. It's hard, I want to talk back, I want to say something good that will make him feel small and give me back some power. I don't say anything. I am doing what Mr. Cray does when Tim gives him lip: I Am Not Dignifying That With An Answer. This is all the power I have left, refusing to talk to him, refusing to play by his rules. God will understand. I pick at my nails, smelling the rich dirt smell and closing my eyes, trying to imagine my back yard. Playing in the back yard with Julie and the MacNamara twins, teaching Julie's baby brother to walk in the grass last summer. I will never play there again. Big D doesn't like it. He drops the TV dinner, which clatters on the floor, and now I know the peas will be everywhere. He reaches out and grabs my jaw, turns my head forcibly so I have to close my eyes not to see him. So I close my eyes, forcing myself not to wrinkle my nose at his bad breath, sitting still like a statue of a girl instead of the real thing. A gray, gray statue in a museum, still, serene, no worries. There's no man here. I imagine a beautiful shining woman, standing in front of me admiring the statue I am. She thinks I'm pretty, she thinks I'm tough. Maybe she is my angel. I know Big D says something but I am hearing the bright woman say nice things about me in my head so I don't hear him clearly and that way I can't answer if I wanted to. He shoves my head away and I bounce on the couch, my whole body going limp. I keep my eyes closed, trying to kill the sudden hope that he'll think I'm sick and take me to the hospital. He won't do that. He growls some awful curses and walks away. The door closes behind him and then the lights go out again. This time he won't turn them back on till he's ready to do what he wants to do. I will never see the sun again. There are peas all over the floor and I can smell the turkey dinner, even cold it smells great but I've decided what to do. I'm not playing by his rules, period. Even in the dark he might know I was weak and took a bite and I won't give him the satisfaction. If I die of hunger I won't give him the satisfaction, and at least that way I died my own way instead of letting him do things to me. I huddle in the absolute dark and wonder what dying will be like, if I will know it when it happens. God will hold my hand. The beautiful angel woman will hold my hand. ** It was very late and the old woman, an Anita Popovich by name, was getting less and less coherent. Already she had described her experience six or eight times, and her phrasings were becoming rote. It had been hours since she called the police, and more hours before that since she had heard the child in her yard, and the time was slipping away. Scully squeezed her hand as kindly as she could, and told the old woman how helpful this information would be. Standing, Scully looked around the dim house, a rickety wood contraption better suited to Little House on the Prairie. The few lights in the house were all on, and still her surround- ings were in half-darkness; Mrs. Popovich's blindness was so severe she hardly bothered with lamps at night. Mulder was standing by a window, still staring at the house next door. He had questioned them two hours ago, at which time they had replied testily that they hadn't been home and that they needed their sleep. It was doubtful they would be of any more help in the morning, and they were the closest neighbors by far. Despite herself, Scully was beginning to believe that Bernadette was still alive, or had been at sunset. She came to stand next to Mulder, wondering what it must be like, to escape one's captor only to be taken again. She thought of the horrifying blank of her own abduction, the haze of helplessness that kept that memory locked away. Almost better to be dead, she thought, and then was shocked at her own musing. Mulder stood beside her, silent, staring out the window. "Some kind of girl," he muttered, after a long while. Scully looked up at him, and he continued. "She somehow got out of wherever she's being held. She got up to this house, and cried in the front yard. Maybe she didn't think anyone was home. She shouted for help. She did everything right." Scully caught herself rooting for the child. She felt Mulder touch, release, then take her hand in one of his own. She closed her eyes against the death of that clever little girl. Wozniak broke their reverie with his brand of physical enthusiasm, hefting a large flashlight and a folded paper onto the coffee table. "Agents," he said, ignorant or tolerant of their philosophizing. "Still no luck in the woods, but it's so dark we could trip over her and not notice. We can get dogs in there at dawn. I got a map of the neighborhood. I think we'll have more luck canvassing in the morning than now." Scully decided optimism was this man's only refuge; be had become brighter as she herself slid into despair. She consented to hold the flashlight as he and Mulder wrestled open the folded map. All of them got down on their knees, elbows on the table, as Wozniak circled Mrs. Popovich's residence in red. Their job would be made simpler by the fact that the house sat at the edge of the woods; only three or four homes lined the street in that direction, nearly a mile distant. Even so, it would be a long morning of questioning to come. ". . . and team three can take Russell Road down to Waverly," Wozniak was saying, apparently to Mulder, who could look attentive even when he was miles away. Scully stopped herself, and rewound this statement in her mind. She tried to sift through her memory and couldn't quite capture something. "Mulder? I'm sorry detective. Mulder, do you still have that list of neighbors and school employees on you?" He stared at her, patting down his suitcoat. "I left it in the hotel room. What?" He leaned closer, intent, and Scully could see in her peripheral vision Wozniak's distrustful look. She shifted uncomfortably under their gazes, trying to recreate that almost-flash that stopped her. Slowly she said it: "Russell Road." She closed her eyes, but it was no clearer in her head. A hand on Mulder's forearm, as if she could suck from him his visual memory. "Didn't somebody on the list live on Russell Road?" "I don't know," confessed Mulder, at the same time that Wozniak jumped up, muttering "I'll check." He rushed brusquely out of the house to his squad car, leaving Mulder and Scully poleaxed in the living room. "She can't have run far," they told each other, eyes wide. Mulder straightened, stood, his hands fluttering around. "Automatic hostage situation, we'll need SWAT. Do we have enough for probable cause, just by the location? They can't make us wait till morning, can they?" He paced a short circle, and Scully, kneeling on the floor, looked up at him. They remained like that, he in motion and she very still, till Wozniak returned from the car. He was walking now, with a perplexed expression on his face. He stopped in the doorway, leaning, and gave them both a long look. Mulder fell still and the silence in the room was oppressive. "Derek Duramian. 34 Russell Road." Wozniak frowned, as if doubting his own words. "The janitor." She could hear Mulder punching the air, or some kind of masculine adrenaline response. Scully closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands. ** It has been a day, I think, since he went away and Big D has not come back. I know it has been a long while, because I got up off the couch to pee in the corner twice, stepping on the spilled peas with my bare feet and making squishing noises between my toes. It's still dark and I'm so hungry, I'm hungry and thirsty, I didn't realize it would be so hard. I can't feel anybody holding my hand now. Mom will be so sad when she finds out I'm dead. It's sort of awful to wish for it but I know I will die anyway so I don't feel guilty at all. I can imagine Mom in my head, in her black suit she wore when Grandma died, and her makeup will run down her face as she cries for me in the church. I wonder if she'll invite Mr. Cray to the funeral. I wonder if he'll come. I am thinking these thoughts when suddenly the door booms a hollow noise, a noise Big D never made before when he came to see me. Thud thud thud, over and over, and if it's a new way to drive me crazy he might be succeeding. It's like hearing the footsteps coming at me from behind, knowing I could be caught, and I can only sit twisted in my blankets and watch where I know the door is. The noise stops, then it gets deeper suddenly, as if he's banging on the door with a baseball bat or something heavy. A crack and then another, and skinny pale shafts of light are coming from the doorway, showing bright specks of dust dancing away from the thud thud thud. The hinge gives suddenly with a squeal, and the door falls in. The sun blinds me, a pure square of light, like God staring at me. I screw up my eyes and shrug the blankets up around me. There is a silhouette in the doorway, head and shoulders. Now is the time. I didn't starve to death after all. It's over. I reach out for the angel to take my hand. ** Scully stood in the living room, examining the bachelor dinge of the place, the way the walls were marked gray where hands had moved over light plackets and doorways. The floor was dusty and bits of paper and a few dishes marked the furniture. A great sagging Barcalounger sat in the middle of the room, a throne placed in front of the TV. Scully stood still, cataloging her environment, listening for the SWAT boys' little shouts of cleared rooms and encouragement. Derek Duramian already sat in the back seat of the squad car outside, surprised in his bed just as the sun rose. He stared sullenly at anyone who approached him and said nothing at all. He did not appear to have an opinion of a police team tearing his house to shreds. Mulder had gone on ahead, as reckless as ever, and SWAT looked him up and down and let him join in the advance team. He was somewhere in the house now, pawing through piles of dirty laundry for the body, holding to a hope even he knew was desperate. Scully had already holstered her gun and stood with her arms crossed, blocking from her mind the masculine loneliness of her surroundings. The ambulance waited outside, doors open, the social worker and paramedics fidgeting in the early morning sunshine. A commotion caught Scully's attention, armed men in black bunching in the hallway, nervous clearings of throat and glances in all directions. She recognized that unease, or something much like it, in medical students with their first corpse, trying to decide whether the first incision could be made with dignity. She knew they had found something even before Mulder came into the living room. He bore a pile of dirty blankets in his arms and a pale, blank expression on his face. She looked up at him from across the room, voiding apprehension from her mind with brute force, and watched him open his mouth but say nothing. Somewhere in her head was a rebuke for moving evidence from the scene of the crime, but surely Mrs. Popovich's testimony would be damning. All that remained was the dead child, and then Scully realized with numbed shock that that was what Mulder carried so reverently. He stood just inside the doorway and looked at her tenderly, strangely, and she withered under his gaze. She was struggling to contain a frown and to say something to fill up the awkwardness when the pile of blankets moved. Scully felt a physical jerk go through her, watching as the blankets fell back a little. The body twisted so its head rested against Mulder's chest, and dark brown eyes blinked myopically at the world. It was only when the girl started screaming that Scully became aware that the child was alive. Stumbling past the Barcalounger, she came to Mulder's side with no coherent thoughts in her head. "Bernadette," she heard herself repeating, "Bernadette." Her hands reached up of their own accord and touched that dirty, tear-streaked face, captured and calmed the waving arms. "Bernadette, you're safe." The screaming subsided to low sobs and the child cried into Mulder's collar. Scully muttered reassuring noises and held the girl's head and kissed her hands, folding them together as if in prayer. Suddenly she realized why Mulder carried Bernadette in dirty blankets; inside the woolen nest in her partner's arms the girl wore not a stitch. Mulder tucked Bernadette's head under his chin, as naturally as if he had children of his own. He stared down at Scully, a funny look on his face, and she abruptly realized her cheeks were wet with tears. She turned away, wiping her eyes, and gathered up the shreds of her control. "Let's get her to the hospital," she said, her voice low to avoid cracking. "Let's notify her mother." She led Mulder out to the ambulance, where the nervously idle dithering broke up into efficient barked orders and the hand-wringing of the social worker. Her partner carefully lay his burden onto the stretcher, blankets and all, and she remained curled up in her dirty raiment even on the crisp white sheet. As the paramedics hovered over her, the girl twitched, wild-eyed, and Scully twitched with her. "It's okay, honey," she murmured, trying to sound sure. "They're the good guys. They're taking you to the hospital, and then you'll get to see your mom. You want to see your mom, right?" Bernadette nodded at that, her face still a rictus of crying, and Scully found her hand clutched so tightly it went bloodlessly pale. The stretcher began to move, being loaded into the ambulance, and Scully went with it without question. She spared a quick look back at her partner, who stood in the daylight in his bulletproof vest and his tear-stained dress shirt, hands loose at his sides. They nodded at each other and Scully knew they would find each other at Bernadette's bedside. Scully took a seat in the ambulance, as far out of the way as she could get in the cramped area. The vehicle started up, and the uniformed man next to her started into his routine, checking things off on his clipboard. Above her head, the sirens began their crescendo of wails, and Scully felt a tug on her hand. Bernadette was staring at her, lying almost straight under her modest coverings, gravity and distrust in her white features. She said, "I knew I would get rescued," and turned away. Scully didn't know how to respond to that dignified doubt. So she hid her confusion and with her free hand she smoothed the dirty brown hair away from the girl's forehead. "Of course," she lied. * * * * * * * end NOTES: Longtime residents of Connecticut may recognize the basic scenario, which I have stolen from events that really happened about ten years ago. I remember watching the news when the girl was rescued, her being herded away from her prison under the TV lights. Come to think, she should be in college by now.