#and it's impossible to me to not thinking about steph when it's something dna related 🌷

[jkvjimin]

he? precious! 💗 for @cosmicdreamgrl [cr. namuspromised]

[frangipanidownunder]

Returning the Past: Part 5

Mulder and Scully are honeymooning in Far North Queensland. Much to Scully’s chagrin, Mulder has delved headlong into a mysterious case of strange lights, Tasmanian tiger sightings and abductions. It’s not long, before they run into trouble…

Read part 1, part 2 part 3 and part 4.

The facility ‘Eddie Romero House’ was ensconced behind a security fence. She frowned at the recurrence of the name. Years of being an investigator made it impossible to think of coincidences and serendipitous happenstance. Years of being an investigator on The X-Files showed her that even the smallest of coincidences was likely to be anything bug.

Sunlight filtered through menacing clouds and pinged off the metal pickets. Mulder buzzed the intercom and itched at the skin on his arms. A security guard walked from the main building to stand outside the gate.

              “We’re looking to talk to somebody in charge,” Mulder said.

              “Do you have an appointment?”

              “It’s urgent we speak to somebody. It could be a matter of life and death.”

              Scully looked at the ground, impacted red dirt crumbling at her footfalls. Mulder’s flair for the dramatic, coupled with this dogged insistence often got them entry into secure facilities but the guard didn’t seem impressed. They had no badges to flash, they had American accents, they had no jurisdiction.

              “Professor Callow is in meetings. He won’t be available until tomorrow.”

              “Callow?” Scully said, looking at Mulder. He did the customary slow blink that told her he was on the same page as her. “We’re friends of his daughter’s. Please tell him it’s urgent that he speak with us.”

              The guard lifted the radio to his mouth and static crackled. She rubbed the back of her neck and Mulder paced. A pair of green and red parrots screeched past. A vehicle reversed from a steel shed to the left of the main facility, stirring up a plume of dust.

              “He says he’ll see you. Follow me.”

 Professor Callow was seated behind a wooden desk bearing all the hallmarks of an office that hadn’t seen a change in twenty years. A Rolodex next to a rotary dial phone, a blotter pad, a stationery holder filled with Biros, pencils, a plastic ruler, Tippex. There was a framed photo of two men, one a younger Callow, rifle propped against his shoulder, standing over the corpse of a large animal that Scully couldn’t make out. She peered at its familiarity, then recalled the crumpled version of the photo on Steph Callow’s living room floor. There were glass cabinets along each wall, containing skeletal remains and stuffed animals with blank eyes and dull fur. Faded posters on the wall depicted a variety of Australian marsupials, and directly behind the Professor’s chair was a map of Queensland.

              “You know my daughter somehow?” he said, his accent clear-cut English.

              “She took us on a walk through the Daintree.” Scully looked at a poster of endangered and extinct animals. Toolache wallaby – bearing similar markings to the kangaroos they’d seen that first morning, broad faced bandicoot, lesser bilby. She checked out the small signs propped up against the stuffed creatures, Eastern hare wallaby, brush-tailed bettong.

              “She was a promising zoologist, she had a knack for research. Stephanie studied hard. It’s a shame.”

There was something tight about the older man, Scully thought. Something closed off. She’d seen the same thing when Mulder was returned. An outward show of vagueness that really just covered up an inability to articulate the heart of the issue. He was scared.

“What’s a shame?” Mulder asked, picking up a jar from a shelf. He held the jar out as he continued to challenge the professor, rattling the brown seed pod inside it so that it drummed with each word he spoke. “That Steph became a tour guide and not a Professor, like you?”

“No, no. It’s…her mother…the family. It was difficult. For all of us, but for Stephanie, a teenager at the time, it was. Well, she struggled.” Callow took the jar from him and set it back on the desk. His hands trembled.

“Your wife, Steph’s mother, what happened to her?” Scully watched the way he sucked in a deep, long breath, chest puffing out. The seed inside the jar, labelled Idiospermum australiense was pale yellow on the outside and a ridged red inside, reminded her of a golden apricot and she kept her eyes on it while Callow sunk back into his chair.

“She disappeared. Just vanished.”  Callow’s voice was shallow, like he’d told the story so many times it was just a rote response.

She looked back at Mulder, pressing her teeth into her lower lip. She wondered if they would ever relate any of their own history like that, without the passion, without the fire needed to continually reach for justice.

“Miriam went out to buy milk and never came back. We…just carried on. You do, don’t you? But Stephanie was never the same. Went to university in Tasmania, as far away from here as she could get. She worked hard but the spark, the passion for it had gone. After she graduated she went on a gap year to South America and when she came back she couldn’t settle. She told me once that being a tour guide was a way of always looking for her mother. As though she might just find her out there in the bush somewhere all these years later,” he smiled sadly. “She likes being outdoors. Just like her mother.”

“Have you heard from her recently, Stephanie?” Scully stepped towards him. “She’s missing, Professor Callow.”

Callow shook his head, an absent expression clouding his eyes. “I’m afraid that Stephanie has often gone ‘walkabout’ as they say in these parts.”

“We were with her when a group of men dragged her into a four-wheel-drive and we haven’t seen her since. The police don’t seem interested. Her house…there was a disturbance there.”

The old man pushed himself up from his desk, knuckles turning white. “She kept some strange company too. Abductees, she called them. She was adamant she’d been abducted too. Told me fantastic tales of being on board UFOs and lights in the forest. Crazy stuff. Nobody believes that kind of thing, do they?” Callow looked at Mulder and Scully lowered her gaze, breathing through the awkward silence.

“What did you make of her company? TasTiger Tours,” Mulder said, not rising to the bait.

“Taking tourists to see thylacines in the Daintree? When she told me what she was doing I told her that people would either see her as a lunatic or a scam artist. But it seems I was wrong. There are plenty of fools…” He stopped and Mulder offered him a accepting grin. “Sorry. You are entitled to spend your dollars any way you see fit, but Tasmanian tigers have been extinct for decades and most certainly did not inhabit tropical rainforest.”

“And yet both Dr Scully and I have seen thylacines in recent days. One was inside your daughter’s home.”

Professor Callow blanched and held on to the edge of the desk. “In Stephanie’s house? That’s impossible.”

“It wasn’t so long ago that this facility was being funded to research thylacine DNA with a view to potentially reviving the species. It’s not much of a stretch to consider that the animals might have escaped and thrived in the wild.”

Callow sighed and shook his head. “You sound like Stephanie. She had a penchant for the arcane. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d faked her own abduction by this group of men, simply to get my attention. I’ve suggested she see someone, you know, a psychiatrist to help her with her troubles, but she wouldn’t be told. She seems to be a lost cause.”

Mulder continued to talk, despite the old man walking past him to the door. “There are precedents where animals have created their own enclaves in non-native regions. The fabled big cat stories around the world can be explained in this way.”

Callow opened the office door. “What you say is true, Mr Mulder. And I may agree, except for the fact that my project never created a single live specimen. The trials all failed.”

Mulder swigged from the water bottle as she drove. The light outside was weak and grey. “What do you think, Scully. Is he involved?”

              “He was frightened, Mulder.  I saw a man cowed not just by the weight of his wife and daughter being missing, but by fear.”

              “He certainly knows more than he was letting on, Scully.”

              She watched him lean his head against the window. “You need to rest, Mulder. You still look like you’re running a fever.”

              “I’m fine. I just need to clear my head to think. Callow’s experiments didn’t yield a live thylacine, according to him. Yet we know they exist. What would be the purpose of recreating extinct animal lines, Scully? Where does that fit in with the abductions, the lights? And why would the police dismiss the case? Even if Steph was well known in these parts as someone with a psychiatric history, why deny she even existed?”

              “I’ve been thinking about that too, Mulder. And did you notice the name of the guard at the front gate?”

              He turned to her, cheeks flaming. “No, what was it?”

              “Galea. Same as the police officer.”

 They drove to the police station. The car park was deserted. Grey clouds pushed low over their heads and Scully scratched at the back of her neck. Mulder was slow to get out of the car. A sheen of sweat sparkled across his brow. She walked up the steps and rapped at the door. No answer.

              “Do you get a weird feeling, Mulder?”

              He didn’t answer but mopped at his forehead with the back of his hand. His chest rose and fell laboriously. She twisted the handle and pushed at the door. It didn’t budge. “If this is a joke, I don’t like the Australian sense of humour. Mulder,” she said, stepping back down to where he was leaning against the car door. “Get back in the car, out of the heat. Drink the water. I’m going around the back.”

              She knew he was sick when he complied without complaint. There were garden beds either side of the building, leaf litter piled high. Tall palms swayed on the increasing breeze and a pair of bird of paradise plants pecked at the empty air with their resplendent bronze beaks. The windows of the house were covered in cobwebs and the side door was locked. How had they not noticed the state of the place when they spoke with Officer Galea? Who were the other people in the building? Were there other people? She peered through the dirty glass of the back door but saw nothing but the marks of a building that hadn’t been inhabited for a while.

A car engine caught her attention and she hurried back round. A small blue SUV swung into the gravelled space next to their hire car and a middle-aged couple got out.

“If you’re looking for the police station, you need to head back that way, to Port Douglas. This one hasn’t been used for a few years now.”

“We were looking for Officer Galea,” Scully said, keeping an eye on Mulder, who was leaning his face against the window.

The woman shrugged. “The last copper here was Sergeant Blythman and she left to have a baby. That baby’s at primary school now. We just tidy up the yard. Len, give me that fertiliser. Those plants need a good feed.”

Scully opened the driver’s side door, but turned back to the couple. “Have you ever seen strange lights in this area? Blue lights?”

“You’re Americans.” Len joined his wife.

“We’re here on our honeymoon,” Scully said, as much to remind herself as to inform the couple. “We came here to report a crime here just the other day. Now it’s empty.”

The couple continued to remove gardening equipment from the back of the car.

“Who is Eddie Romero?” Scully asked. “It’s the name of a local research facility. It’s the name of one of the forest tracks. Our accommodation is Romero Sands.”

“He’s no-one special,” the woman said. “Enjoy your honeymoon. Go swimming. Do some bushwalking, but don’t stray off the tourist tracks. Have a nice time. Go home to your families.”

“Do you know Steph Callow?”

The woman exchanged looks with her husband. “Who are you?”

Mulder got out of the car, his body sagging. “What’s going on in this town? What are you afraid of?”

“We’re not scared,” the woman said, straightening up. “We’re just invisible. Nobody listens to us. They just want people to come here, spend their money. The tourist dollars rule. It’s like that film with the sharks, isn’t it, Len? You know the one, where the mayor of the island won’t shut the beaches down for the long weekend.”

“Jaws,” Scully said, looking over at Mulder. “Have people been hurt here? Killed?”

The woman looked at Len. “They’ve disappeared. But the government people say that they just lost their way, the forest is dangerous if you’re not careful.” She walked up to Scully and took her hand. “You two look like lovely young people. You don’t need anything like that happening to you. It’s the worst thing. People go missing and you never know what’s happened. You live every day like they might just come home and fling their coat across the hall and sit on their favourite chair and ask for a cup of tea, you know? It’s cruel, is what it is. Hope and dreams. It’s just cruel.” She rolled her lips together and took a long, slow breath. “You take care now. Come on, Len. It’s going to rain soon. Let’s spread this stuff and get home.”

 Mulder groaned in his sleep, deep guttural sounds that held fear. She often wondered how he processed all that happened to him. Besides the abject terror of the abduction, he had faced the death penalty. They had spent months on the run, looking over their shoulders, living out of cheap motels and even cheaper cars. He held it in, he held it together, mostly. She knew he thought he had to be strong for her, as she did for him. They both drove for days wearing their stoicism like armour. Back then, she knew the day would come where one of them would crack. She lay odds that it would be her first. That she would flip tables and throw away the hair dye and the Walmart underwear. That she would call her mother and write her brother. That she would tell Mulder she didn’t really love him and that she was leaving. That she would lie to save him. To save them both.

But in a long-forgotten town, in a long forgotten state, she returned with two bags of groceries and found him balled up in the corner of the darkened room, furniture broken around him, sobbing. The bags dropped to the floor and split open spilling the tins and packets in front of her. She let him cry against her chest until his tears soaked her vest. He didn’t talk, didn’t need to. She was grateful for that desolate place, grateful for the onerous skies and the stares of the townsfolk, grateful for the one store and flickering neon motel sign, grateful for the gritty coffee and the faulty ice machine. It drew out his sorrow and suffering and pushed hers down. She would never leave him. She would never lie to him.

 Now, she dabbed his brow with a cool washcloth, then pressed it around the back of her neck, easing the itch there. Wherever Steph Callow had gone, the dark forces in the forest were responsible. But with Mulder tossing fitfully by her side, there was no way they could go forward with any kind of investigation. She’d have to find a doctor’s surgery in the morning. He needed treatment.

“The light was so bright, Scully. It was so bright it felt like my eyes had been sliced open and silver was poured inside.” He pushed himself up and bunched the sheet across his lap. His voice was groggy, his skin tacky to touch. She gave him water. “I dreamt that Steph Callow was there with me, on that ship, Scully. She was trapped too, helpless and that bright light burned her and she burst into flames.”

While Scully made tea, he played with the remote, and a news anchor read out details of a mysterious death locally.

A member of the public called in the discovery of the body. At this stage, the police have not issued any details of the circumstances or the victim but there is a presence at Eddie Romero House.

“It’s Professor Callow,” Mulder said, calling her back to the bedroom. “He’s been killed.”