X-Files Book Club

"You want to hear my mummy theory?" he asks in the bath.

"Hit me." The wet kelp of her hair sticks to his chin as she reclines against him. Earlier, she yelped and gasped, and knocked a candle, hissing, into the water. He smells hot freesia wax, wet woman's hair, female smells in his dingy bathroom.

"Our mummy has gone to Albuquerque."

"Mulder..." she growls and sighs. His arms around her slippery body ride out the upheaval. She speaks with exasperated precision. "A cadaver stuffed with natron reanimates and locomotes its way to New Mexico. How's it going to get there, Mulder, thumb down a dromedary?"

The mirror he wedged over the faucets is fogged, but in a water streak he can partially see her face, her eyes heavy-lidded, color in her cheeks. His dark head is above hers, his arms are crossed beneath her chin. She turns her head and idly licks a drop of bath water from his shoulder.

This isn't real, he thinks.

This cannot possibly be happening.

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."

juliefortune

This is how she prefers to remember Mulder's abduction: he was a bird, once, and he flew back home to her.