Story 168: "The Crouching Thing" by Sarah Ellen Parsons

[wendelah1]

This story was suggested by infinitlight (thank you, thank you, thank you), who thought it might generate controversy and discussion! Though I'm just back from vacation, and I'm still pretty jet-lagged, I'm always up for that. Since I haven't had a chance to read it yet myself, here's the header.

TITLE: The Crouching Thing
AUTHOR: Sarah Ellen Parsons
E-MAIL ADDRESS: se_parsons@yahoo.com
DISTRIBUTION: Wherever you want, just tell me.
SPOILER WARNING: Very mild spoilers for: Everything including Requiem
RATING: PG-13
CLASSIFICATION: Story, horror
KEYWORDS: Scully, Scully-angst, Skinner
THANK YOUS: To M. Sebasky and Perelandra for uber-beta and, Sab, Ropobop,
Livia, Alicia and the YV gang for comments and nit-picks.
SUMMARY: Sometimes we see things we don't want to see.


"The Crouching Thing"

Ready, set, read!

Please leave your recs for next time here.

Comments

[mosinging1986.livejournal.com]

Ok, that was just creepy. Not sure if I quite understood it. I may have to give it a second read.

[wendelah1]

It was very creepy! I felt the same way, but there's some good discussion going on now that might help if you do decide to give it another go.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

WELCOME BACK!

TCT is one of the genuine horror Xfics. Haven't read it in years. Will, since you ask.

It's effective.

[wendelah1]

THANK YOU! I'm still so jet-lagged, only now it's in the opposite direction. The last three mornings I woke up at 3:30 am.

I've never read this fic, horror not being my thing. But I'm going to now, just based on the list of people who read it before it was posted. To M. Sebasky and Perelandra for uber-beta and, Sab, Ropobop, Livia, Alicia and the YV gang for comments and nit-picks. I'm dying of jealousy.

[coldthermistor.livejournal.com]

I am....confused :S I think I'll need to do a second read too. I definitely picked up on the Lovecraftian element, though! Rather creepy.

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

Welcome back! I hope your vacation was great.

The thing in "Waiting" that reminded me of this story was Mulder's presence. In "Waiting" he's sitting in corners or standing in doorways, waiting for her. In this, he's waiting, too, and following her. Like "Waiting", as well, I think it's not completely clear if what Scully is seeing is real. I like unreliable narrators, and I like that this is a pretty unusual position for Scully to be in. Usually we can completely trust her viewpoint, but in these stories it's not so certain. She's not so certain.

The aspect of "The Crouching Thing" I've always liked best is the atmosphere--it's so strange and foreboding. It reminds me of some unsettling dreams I've had--where most things are normal but there is one thing that's horrifyingly turned on its head.

I think it is a story that's challenging to understand, so I'm not surprised to hear it being described here as confusing. I've read it several times but I think I still only have my own interpretation to go by. The summary is: Sometimes we see things we don't want to see. Sometimes the past won't leave us alone, no matter how much we want it to. Is Mulder a ghost? Scully can feel him touch her (and he punctures the basketball), so he's corporeal. No-one else can see him--but as she points out, she's the only one who knows how to look. Scully thinks she needs an exorcism; thinks simultaneously that he (it) might go away if she can ignore it. And yet the only thing it wants is her attention. Her son and the crouching thing both are trying to get her to pay attention. Is this a story about Mulder? I wonder.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Scully can feel him touch her (and he punctures the basketball), so he's corporeal.

Does he? I know he was trying to puncture it, but I can't find the part where it says he actually does. It's an important distinction, one way or the other, because if he really does puncture the ball before her eyes, then it's harder to explain him not being real. It sounds as though Scully thinks he's broken other household items in the past, but we have no evidence that she's actually seen him break anything. She may well have found things broken and attributed it to the creature's doing.

Also, throughout the fic the creature seems to become more agitated and more spiteful whenever the conversation between Michael and Scully takes a turn that would not, we can presume, be to Mulder's liking. The more Scully refuses to speak the truth, and the more Michael pries, the more proactively invasive the creature gets. Does the creature have extrasensory powers of perception? Can it hear/sense their kitchen conversation from out in the yard? Or is Scully's conscience reacting to the conversation and projecting her own guilt and agitation onto her imagined ghoul?

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

Good point. The story doesn't say he actually punctures it. I found the line:

If she didn't stop it, her grandson's toy would be destroyed.

So *she* believes he could break it, but we don't actually know that he could. His touching her and breathing on her is subjective, too; we don't know whether we can fully trust her judgment. Later I found:

Its feet tore at the grass

but the description then goes onto his actions, rather than being more specific about whether the grass is damaged.

Scully says the agitation also increases when he sees Walter, which would definitely make sense in terms of the creature reacting to conflicted feelings about her marriage.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

She thought back. When exactly had she first seen it?
It seemed to her that it had been hanging around
forever, but it hadn't been. But remembering its
advent was very nearly the same thing as trying to
remember what Mulder had been like.

Another part that could suggest the creature is imaginary. Scully doesn't remember when she'd first seen it, which makes sense if it's imagined, but seems unlikely if it's really there. Thoughts - even thoughts that seem to have a reality of their own - are much less concrete, and easier to forget the specifics of, but Scully one day out of the blue actually, literally seeing Mulder, who also happens to be a supernatural entity? I think she'd remember a thing like that pretty clearly.

[kitnkabootle.livejournal.com]

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It's just so sad and depressing. For the first half it does seem as though the creature lurking is some sort of actual X-Files entity though I appreciate the little hints that it's not. While I would hate for Scully to end up that way, it was somewhat comforting to know that the bond between Mulder and Scully was so strong that even after death (?) it remained.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

This is a real stunner. I've always been a sucker for horror fiction. And somehow Chris Carter never scared us the way this does.

I'm not certain whether the crouching thing is real; the story is hideously sad either way. Actually, I think that TCT is something rare: a tale of terror--pity and terror as the tragedians put it--that really could only occur in fanfic. I mean, I've read "ghostly tales" like this since my grandma quit pestering me to learn crochet, but this is a special experience of chill. This is *Mulder,* our beloved, turned into some kind of monkey's paw cadaver intent on stalking the only thing, he says, that ever meant anything. The thing that deserted him.

Well, Scully can be assigned the Catholic Guilt thing, I guess, but I don't believe that carries water. Our Scully is too sensible to blame herself endlessly for what she tried so hard to prevent, for finding contentment with the only person who knew what it all meant. (Her kid is so hot to find out.) This thing is *real.* This thing is *Mulder,* stripped of common sense and morality and life itself, become a creature of pure fixation. It is dreadfully lusting for her love, a thing he might have had quite easily before this appalling Lovecraftian transmogrification. Now he is a monster of anger and need.

It wouldn't matter in some Horror Classic. It matters here. It's our Mulder.

So it's very, very sad. Because he won't stop and she won't stop knowing he's there. It's as if all the more negative aspects of their codependency have been reduced and tightened into an oubliette for two.

I love this story for its originality and its kick, but I would never be able to do so without all the sunnier, more forgiving, sexier versions of life with Mulder and Scully. Thank God for alternatives. Fanfic taketh away and giveth.

But it's never given us anything quite like this.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

Reference to The Calusari. Relevant, I'm thinking. Remember that final scene.

[mosinging1986.livejournal.com]

This thing is *real.* This thing is *Mulder,* stripped of common sense and morality and life itself, become a creature of pure fixation. It is dreadfully lusting for her love, a thing he might have had quite easily before this appalling Lovecraftian transmogrification. Now he is a monster of anger and need.

Ok, that freaked me out me out as much as the story.

*goes to turn on every light in the house*

I was confused on my first reading, because all you've said here (and what others have said) was what I was thinking I was seeing in the story. But I kept telling myself... that can't be it. I must be mistaken. That's too creepy and awful!

Glad I read this one. I don't remember the title from Way Back In the Day.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

My initial feeling was that I didn't like this one much. Mainly, I don't like who Scully - and Mulder, in a way - have become in TCT. It's not that I don't believe Scully would try to forge a life for herself if Mulder had never come back, and it's not that I have a problem with the S/Sk aspect of the fic. In her position, Skinner is basically the only person I can see her settling with, so that works alright.

But I just can't see her trying to close herself off to the past this way, and expunge Mulder from her life. The betrayal of that feels huge to me - and it's not just a betrayal of Mulder, but also a betrayal of herself and all that she became over the years she and Mulder spent together, working. By closing herself to Mulder and the past she is closing herself to so much of who she is. I know there are times and ways in which Scully does tend to want to repress and compartmentalize the bad things that have happened in her life. But Mulder isn't a bad thing. His abduction was a terrible thing, but I think Scully would have wisdom enough to realize that just because it ended poorly doesn't mean sweeping it all into a dark corner of her psyche is the way to go.

The writing itself doesn't help me like the fic any. It's plenty good enough writing in a technical sense; I take no issue with it except that I find it just as tonally stony and unyielding as the emotions present in the fic itself. TCT is a bitter little fic, and such bitterness to me carries the sting of the character's ultimate failure. Which doesn't mean I think the fic failed. On the contrary, I'd say it succeeded, in the sense that it conveys what SEP seems to have intended it to convey.

Another criticism I have is that it's a fourteen page fic with a twist up its sleeve, but I was pretty sure I knew what the crouching thing was at the end of page three:

She didn't want to look at it any more, to watch its
pathetic antics. She wanted it gone.

"You know, I've read through all those case files,"
her son said.

Not that I wouldn't have suspected anyway, but the transition between the creature and the files in this part really pinged my 'there's a connection here' radar. But really, what else could the creature be? Nothing else would make any sense. There's only one thing that really matters in this universe and it's the same thing Scully is so obviously avoiding: the past. And why is she avoiding the past? Mulder.

I hung on for the reveal anyway, and it was still chilling and saddening, in a sour, hopeless kind of way. The last page or two, in the attic, were basically the pay off for making it that far, and a strange kind of pay off it was. Personally I was just relieved to find she still called him Mulder and he still called her Scully. That was something, at least - something left that was still genuine about them, that they hadn't let wither beyond recognition about themselves. Not that I would have wanted a happy ending - not for this fic. I think TCT ended exactly how it ought to, and that the ending was very effective.

More criticism, jeez: It turned out that two of my favorite lines of the fic were quotes from other materials, and not SEP's at all. I like the description of the bat in the attic, which introduces a slight twinge of real tenderness the rest of the fic has so little of. And the line, It seemed to always be somewhere, though sometimes it would vanish outside, and she would not see it for days, only to spy it later, in the yard, dirty and matted, chomping on a vole or eating old snow. which, come to think of it, I also like for the way it introduces a pang of tender feeling for the creature into the narrative.

Rereading this comment, I've been a lot harder on TCT that I actually feel towards it. It's a very decent fic. The trouble is that the premise is everything. There is no concrete character/plot arc, only the change happening in the reader's mind as more of the situation is revealed, and the writing doesn't seem meant to do anything other than convey the raw happenings. So if the reader doesn't click with the premise, as I didn't, then the whole fic is mainly just a less-than-pleasant "what if" - no matter how well realized that "what if" is.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

One thing I do like a lot about TCT, though, is the way it leaves Mulder's existence up for debate. (this was a good fic to follow up Waiting with, infinitlight) Personally I don't think Mulder's presence was real - a real paranormal occurrence - but I like that SEP leaves that possibility open.

I read Mulder as being a manifestation of Scully's conscience, as well as, in a strange way, probably a manifestation of her longing. Even though she spends the whole fic trying painfully to ignore him, I read it as that some part of her still desperately wants him there, and that's part of why his apparition is so determined.

I don't believe for a second that Mulder would have become such an awful and pitiful creature - not with Scully still alive anyway - but it makes sense that over time he's become this to her, if he is indeed a manifestation of her conscience. She's riddled with guilt at having tried to cover over his existence, and she's terrible lonely for him, so she's conjured him up like a ghost, to haunt her.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about your response--well, I just saw the last part--and I had actually crafted a post. It disappeared, no doubt interfered with by beings from another mode of existence. I guess inhabitants of the demon dimensions dimensions are pondering it now.

Your dislike of TCT is understandable, amyhit, and surely shared by most readers. I think I like it because I approach it from another point on the compass. HP Lovecraft having been mentioned, we can glance at the huge influence he had on the American consciousness. Lovecraftian horror did not value character highly, and that applies to most of his fictional tradition. It's one reason the 2oth-century realists ignored horror fiction; it just wasn't literary in any way they understood. Henry James yes; Howard Phillips Lovecraft no.

The point of HPL's universe is that humans count for nothing. They are the occasional prey of hideous creatures so large and powerful that there is no hope of rescue or even recognition. You might have charm and brilliance, like Mulder, you might be a Providence brahman or a mud person (Lovecraft was a terrible bigot), it just DOESN'T MATTER. Evil beings hold all the power, and the only hope is in their lack of interest in us.

So, yes, I believe that Mulder has been changed into something horrible by something irresistable. It hurts us terribly because he is our hero. It is, according to respectable analysis, preferable to think that Scully has conjured him up out of her repression and guilt. It can be argued either way.

But I don't want to. I still think the power of this fic is in confronting Mulder as monster. And the agonizing detail is that he has been reduced to his own driving inner force: his obsessiveness. He wants. He will never stop wanting. And he has become a torturer to the only person he ever really wanted.

Yes, you're right. I'm a cold-blooded individual. (Except at this moment I'm melting away like a candle in hell.)

[wendelah1]

I agree with you, EC. "Confronting Mulder as Monster" is what gives this fic its narrative thrust. Now that you've pointed this out, I can't see how the author could want us to think anything else. Everyone's reactions to the piece are completely understandable--they want to hold it at a more comfortable distance. I do, too. But so far yours is the only analysis here I can support as being completely true to the text itself.

And the agonizing detail is that he has been reduced to his own driving inner force: his obsessiveness. He wants. He will never stop wanting. And he has become a torturer to the only person he ever really wanted.

When I read that line, I just froze because I know sensed this as I was reading, but couldn't make myself believe it. I had to turn away. But it's a much better, more effective story read this way. Reducing Mulder to a delusion or a guilt trip doesn't give the story its due.

Your greater familiarity with the horror genre has served you well.
Thank you.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

Your appreciation is very appreciated, Wen. I'm responding because I remembered a thought I had much earlier.

I'm thinking of Jen's "The Other Man." (Actually, I seldom stop.) Those fics could hardly be more different, but the sadness and--what?--sense of appalled recognition comes from the same place. Our hero has had his identity stolen. He is not who he is.

That's the worst, isn't it?

[wendelah1]

Yes, very true. The difference there is that in "The Other Man," the emphasis is on character, and the horror comes out of the reveal that our Mulder isn't who we thought he was, or who he believed himself to be, and that the impostor is more true to our idea of Mulder than the original. And then there's Scully's actions, which call into question who she is at her core. Which brings us to the most horrifying idea of all, that identity is always mutable, according to circumstances, that none of us really know how we'll act when confronted with Sophie's choice.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

You're right that it's easier to think of Mulder as Scully's imagined creature than as a real creature, in all his wretchedness. But that's not why I choose to see him as imaginary. I simply cannot believe in the alternative, and not because the alternative is unpleasant (there are tons of upsetting fic scenarios I can believe) but because I just can't see the characters ever coming to this. (This, as well as a few other reasons I find in the text to question his reality.)

Why has Mulder become this crouching thing? What has caused it? Is it supposed to be a condition of his being dead, that he is in some kind of spiritual decay? Was he always this wretched, or when he first appeared to Scully was he the same old Mulder? Or is his wretchedness something he grew into on his own, out of estrangment, solitude, and bitterness? Or are we supposed to assume that he has been affected by some combination of spiritual decay and personal bitterness? And if so, then which came first? Did his estrangment and bitterness lead to his ultimate decay, or did his inevitable decay make him increasingly vulnerable to estrangment and bitterness?

Is he responsible for letting himself become this way? Did he let himself succumb to the worst aspects of his nature? Or is it an inevitable consequence of his otherworldly condition?

But the part of the fic I really take issue with is that Scully would repudiate Mulder if he appeared to her. Not if she felt any part of him was still Mulder, she wouldn't. So what if he creeps about like gollum in LoTR, speaks oddly, and covets her? If he were all that was left of Mulder, I think she would value him, even though it would be heartbreaking to see him like that. If she hadn't closed herself off to him then he would have nothing specific to be bitter about, and this whole waking nightmare they're both locked in wouldn't be what it is.

Going back to Mulder's character, does it even make sense for him to have evolved into this creature over time, considering how Scully treats him? If he'd originally appeared to her as Mulder, and then slowly decayed, surely Scully would have accepted him and gotten used to his devolving form. Yet for my money the story is considerably less effective if Mulder just blinked into existence one day as this pitiful monster. So much of the horror of it is in his becoming this creature, not in his simply being it.

Arguing for the other scenario, if someplace in her subconscious Scully knows she's imagining Mulder as a manifestation of the darkest, loneliest, guilties parts of herself - and that he isn't real - then I can understand why she'd repudiate him with so much horror. She's repudiating her own worst feelings and thoughts - guilt and loneliness and estrangment so deep that her attempts to cover over it have driven her partially mad. And she's also repudiating her own insanity, though she doesn't consciously know that's what the creature is.

So really it isn't as much a question of which scenario carries more weight or more narrative thrust - simply which scenario carries more weight for which character. For my money, TCT says more about Scully if the creature is of her imagining. It says more about Mulder if this thing is really him - or whatever's left of him. And, furthermore, I think by far the best quality of the fic is that by making both scenarios seem equally possible, SEP says a lot about both the characters. The only conclusion I don't like is that one scenario is more valuable than the other. I favor one over the other, but objectively I see them both as equally important alternatives.

[coldthermistor.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but that's actually how I see this fic, really. Either I'm projecting, especially since I know this was Lovecraft-inspired, but there was always a sense of helplessness in this fic that I liked...I guess a lack of active agency. Which...is how it's supposed to be.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

A couple of hits there, amyhit: the fic is a bit too long (I almost always think this), and the point about Scully not remembering when the apparition appeared is a good insight about the imagination. I'd never heard it before.

Yet I still believe you're staring into the wrong corner while the Ultimate Horror looms behind you. Neither Mulder nor Scully are very sensitively characterized. I mean, can we imagine well-dressed Agent Mulder with his Vineyard rearing chomping on voles? And I really, as I said, can't see Scully walling herself into such a stubborn little domestic role. All either convincingly own is a personality hook: Mulder is driven, Scully is denialist.

Character is not where the emphasis lies. There's a sense in which TCT is almost a crossover. It's as if Parsons decided to mix the X-Files personae into the sort of big, bombastic, totally unvarnished disgusto stuff that a neurotic failure of a writer somehow fascinated the public with, even those who prefer not to read. (Sandra Dee in The Dunwich Horror? Geez.) And, with her stony, unyielding prose, I think she did a pretty good job. Mulder is dead. Something unmentionable killed him and turned him into a pathetic, predatory presence that his own beloved can't stand to see. By HPL standards this is pretty tame. By X-File standards--sorry CC--it's shocking and tragic and unforgettable.

Anyhow, that's what I think.

[write-out.livejournal.com]

And, with her stony, unyielding prose, I think she did a pretty good job. Mulder is dead. Something unmentionable killed him and turned him into a pathetic, predatory presence that his own beloved can't stand to see.

You pretty much nailed it for me here. This is such a creepy story and I can appreciate it on one level (I do read a lot of horror and think the author nailed some aspects), but this:

Yet I still believe you're staring into the wrong corner while the Ultimate Horror looms behind you. Neither Mulder nor Scully are very sensitively characterized. I mean, can we imagine well-dressed Agent Mulder with his Vineyard rearing chomping on voles? And I really, as I said, can't see Scully walling herself into such a stubborn little domestic role. All either convincingly own is a personality hook: Mulder is driven, Scully is denialist.

Is what stops me from buying the story as a whole. Scully as Skinner's wife and mother to his children? It's really hard for me to buy that. Then again, I do love to read a story that challenges my own canon, but does so in an original way.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

No, I don't buy Scully this way either. But TCT already establishes her as denialist, whether she's imagining Mulder or he's really there. As I see it, this creature is the psychological consequence of her supressing her own nature. If the creature is real then Scully is far more of a denialist, and I can believe in her characterization even less.

ETA: I think I may have misread you, EC. For me, her denial of the past and of what's going on in the present is more of her efforts to 'wall herself into a stubbor little domestic role'. Canonically, denial can be a Scully trait, but in TCT I don't see Scully's denial reinforcing her Scullyness, but actually negating it. I'm not sure if I'm disputing or agreeing with you here.

I still believe you're staring into the wrong corner while the Ultimate Horror looms behind you.

I don't think one of these scenarios is inherently more horrific than the other. In one of them, Mulder is a ghoul and Scully is repulsed by him. In the other, Scully is insane, and not only is Scully repulsed by Mulder the ghoul - it is her own mind that has turned him into this horrid, pitiful creature. The deepest horror of all is that Scully can never know for sure which is true - if he's her own madness envisiaged, or the worst of realities. I understand what you're saying, EC, about one of these scenarios being a more genre adherent form of storytelling . But I don't find it more horrific.

[estella-c.livejournal.com]

Okay. Pretty good point.

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

We've debated to a stand-still! *g*

You know, I really don't think you're wrong, and I don't mean to argue that at all. I don't even necessarily think I'm right. I just don't think I'm wrong. The sense I get from TCT, as a whole, is that it does lean slightly towards your way of seeing the story. I just feel that both options are very valid. It's like if Schrodinger himself says, "BTW, I have a feeling the cat in that box is dead," the whole point is that you can still say, "Nope, it's not." You can still make that choice, determine your own reality.

And hey, I like the fic a fair bit more now that it's inspired such good discussion. *g*