Story 259: "The Ghost of You" by Julie Fortune

[wendelah1]

Julie Fortune's "The Ghost of You" is a casefic that is also an X-File, and a very creepy one, too. At only a little over 10,000 words, it's less daunting than some of the other fics sitting in the nomination post. In structure, it reminds me very much of the much earlier fic by Jane Mortimer, "The Sin Eater." Mortimer's fic might even have influenced it, who knows?

In any case, the prose is high caliber because the writer is a pro, who has published novels under several pseuds. She even published a tie-in for Stargate SG-1 under her fandom penname, "Sacrifice Moon." It's very good.

Here's a short excerpt from near the beginning of the fic. Mulder and Scully are at the crime scene in Restonville, West Virginia.

Strobe flashes from a wandering photographer lit up the interior. It was nothing more than more grass and mud, and in the middle –

Mulder blinked. "What the hell – "

Scully stepped forward, went to one knee next to the nude body. It was dug into the ground to a depth of nearly three feet, mud squashed up around it. It had been embedded in the mud, face down.

"Mulder." Scully gloved up and reached out to take hold of the woman’s hand, lifting it by the thumb.

Hands did not move that way. Not like – empty sacks, the fingers bending like rubber, no stiffness to it at all.

Boneless. Scully lifted higher. The arm followed the hand, a piece of dead spaghetti.

"Christ," one of the deputies said softly. Detective Harmon didn’t say anything at all, but his face paled. Scully carefully, almost reverently, let the woman’s hand fall back in place.

"Can we turn her over?" she asked.

"Yeah," Harmon said faintly. "We got all the pictures. Better you than me."

She looked at Mulder. Drafted. Nobody wanted to help – twelve deputies and forensic specialists crowded in the room, and every shoulder was pressed firmly against canvas. Mulder tried for a cool expression and took hold of the dead woman’s shoulder.

It felt like a cut of meat at the supermarket. Boneless. He swallowed hard as the body folded down the middle, like a paper doll. Scully helped him get her all the way over and in something like a normal position.

She had no face. Whatever bone structure had been present was obliterated, the face a mass of soft tissue, ruptured like something pulled up from the ocean too fast. No eyes. No teeth, either; the mouth, or what had been the mouth, shifted like jelly, and there were audible gulps from the others in the room.

"Scully?" Mulder cleared his throat. "I take it she’s real."

Scully has a theory, Mulder has a different one. There's thunder and lightening, reports of lights in the sky. They'll identify the body and...I don't want to give it away. It's a ghost story, but with a couple of twists.

You can the read the fic two different places. I like the link at the internet archive that's from her old website because I can copy, paste and print it for reading. I hate reading on computer screens.

At Fanfic for the Fearless via the Wayback Machine: "The Ghost of You" by Julie Fortune. You can find her other fic there, too, if you're interested.

And at the Enigmatic Doctor's site in one long narrow column: The Ghost of You.

She's deleted her non-fandom livejournal, and let her fandom website go down, but juliefortune is still there, and she left her gmail address on her last post.

The nomination post is always open for your suggestions. Thanks to everyone who helps keep this site running and (relatively) active, with your comments here, and your links on other social media sites.

Comments

[kate-11111.livejournal.com]

I feel awful going into super-critical mode, but this story didn’t work for me at all. To me, the characters seemed dumbed down and their actions, thoughts and dialogue read like a cop-themed airport paperback (and at times didn’t even make sense.) The story itself was a bit all over the place – it had elements of intrigue, but didn’t have much structure or resolution. Why were there time-shifts and blue lights dropping people from the sky? Why was the course of space-time only corrected after the characters slept together? (That especially seemed contrived. As an aside, the sex-scene was cringe-worthy, in that it wasn’t honest to the characters’ relationship, and also inappropriate in the context of the story.) Anyway, we’re left to guess. The plot seemed an excuse for the characters to hook up, and wasn’t really fleshed out beyond that. It’s a shame, because a boneless body, time-shifts and ghosts are all promising premises. I know it’s meant to be a short, light read, and it was, but I just didn’t feel like there was much substance. Sorry! I’ll stop whinging now and get stuck into a deep-and-meaningful character study ☺

[wendelah1]

No need to apologize. We like it when people disagree here. If everyone loved everything there would be no point to discussing the story.

I'm going to have to print the story out to really look at it critically. Okay, I'm back.

This is a Groundhog Day story. It's kind of like the episode, "Monday"? The structure is tricky, and circular. The day is repeating, with slightly different outcomes. She's playing with that, bringing us in at different parts of the day instead of taking us back to the beginning each time it resets. This creates suspense and mystery. The reader is supposed to be confused at first.

There isn't always an answer given to the question of why time is resetting itself. It's just a convention of this kind of story. We don't ever find out the why in "Monday" or in Groundhog Day, for that matter. It just does--until something happens and it doesn't.

In "Window of Opportunity," my all-time favorite episode of Stargate SG-1, there is a reason--someone on one of the planets has a time machine. Every time he turns the machine on it resets time for all of the planets in a certain section of the galaxy. Their resident physicist, Samantha Carter could explain it better than I can. He has to be talked into giving up his need to see his dead wife and move on with his life.

In "Monday," Pam Driscoll has to be killed by her boyfriend, sacrificing herself to save another life. You could say that the purpose is to save that life--Mulder or Scully, depending on the rerun. But I think it's really about Pam.

Back to "The Ghost of You." Mulder notices that Scully is getting upset over things that wouldn't normally faze her and he can't figure out why (but he knows). It's because on some level she already knows that the body in the morgue is her--because they've lived this day over and over again. She's terrified. So is he. She feels out of control. So does he. She's ready to leave Mulder--and it's not over the diet Coke. Mulder knows that and he doesn't know that. They're both traumatized and hurting by the time they have that one, desperate act of sexual union. It's not out of character at all. It's an act of healing, of being together that is completely in character given who these people are, how they feel about each other, that mixture of admiration and love and lust and utter exasperation. Take that complicated relationship and combine it with the horror they've been experiencing, of losing one another and feeling powerless to stop it, over and over and over again--who knows how many times.

Why do they have to have sex to stop the time resets? In one sense, it's because every other solution they've tried doesn't work. I think it's because Mulder and Scully getting to express their love openly and passionately is the most powerful force that exists in their little corner of the universe. It's a love so strong, so elemental that it can save both their lives and literally reset Time back on the course. And, ironically, in doing so, they go back to their professional and repressed former selves. This doesn't feel contrived to me. In fact, it feels less contrived than most fanfiction, and many of the episodes of the series. It's a casefile and an X-File, and character-driven, too.

As far as you not liking the dialogue and so on, that's a matter of taste. It works for me. The dialogue sounds acceptably like Mulder and Scully to my ears and it all made sense to me, in context. I could pick on an occasional word choice. No one's perfect. Julie Fortune's Mulder isn't quite as witty as Vince Gilligan's but then whose is? Kel, I guess. I'd put her Mulder up against Gilligan's any day of the week.

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

Super-critical mode is good! I often find it hard to clearly discuss what I didn't like about stories, but I think it's important if you want to know what makes a good story good (and I do).

I mentioned above I don't always need solid scientific explanations for weird goings on, but maybe some discussion of it would have helped the story become more solid. I enjoyed reading it but was kind of left hungry at the end, I think.