house, a x-files fanfic

Disclaimer: I do not own nor do I claim to own any characters or concepts related to The X-Files or House of Leaves. This is a nonprofit work of fanfiction.

This story is a crossover with Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. Due to FFN's formatting restrictions, I've opted to replace the blue font for the word "house" with underlining.

house.

The phone rang at 01:13AM according to her bedside clock and 01:12AM according to her watcfh. Roused from unsettling dreams of corpses and talking dogs and Mulder turning a lollipop over in his mouth, Scully turned her face into her pillow and played an idle game of who could possibly be calling me at this godforsaken hour? The phone stopped ringing, then started again. Who else could it possibly be? Mulder.

"So," he said. "What are you wearing?"

Scully covered her eyes with her hand. "It's one fifteen in the morning," she told him.

"Not according to my watch it's not. I've got one sixteen."

"I'm hanging up now." It was more warning than he deserved.

"Scully," he said. "I found the house."

Mulder came over and Scully let him in against her better judgment, as was so often the case. He lurked in the entryway, examining photos with an absent eye and shooting meaningful looks at the door every four or five seconds.

"C'mon," said Mulder. "Aren't you even a little curious? One night in a bona fide haunted house. Just you, me, and the ghosts whistling through the eaves."

Scully arched her eyebrow. "Sounds spooky."

Mulder pulled a face. "Ha ha. You're killing me, Scully."

He turned back to the door, his head dipping momentarily, jacket stretched across his too broad shoulders, loose around his waist. He wheeled back around to face her. In the weak light of the entryway he looked pale and too thin, his cheekbones dark shapes pressing against his skin.

"Let me get my shoes," said Scully.

November, end of, the year preceding:

Scully returned from a medical conference with a mild headache and six voicemails from Mulder, each more gleeful than the one preceding.

"Zampanò," he greeted her that first morning back.

"Excuse me?"

"Main character of an Italian film called La strada, released in 1954," Mulder clarified. "Also the name, presumed, of a man who died about a week ago in sunny L.A." He turned around in his chair in increments, following her as she crossed the small office. "No friends, no family, no passport, no driver's license, nothing to identify him whatsoever."

"I don't see what's so strange about that," Scully said. "Thousands of people enter the United States illegally each year, with fabricated identifications if any at all."

Mulder pressed on. "So Zampanò croaks. No surprise. He's getting on in years, no girlfriend, probably doesn't have much to live for. I got this for you, by the way. Coroner's report." He tossed the report at her frisbee style.

Scully clapped her hands together, nabbing it by the corner and earning a thumbs up for her troubles. "This says he died of natural causes," she said. "Heart failure. Hardly abnormal for a man of his age and physical condition."

"His presumed age," Mulder said. "Interesting thing, though. Guy who found him noticed a series of gouges in the hardwood floor right next to our dead friend. About six or seven inches long. Look an awful lot like clawmarks.

"But the really interesting thing," said Mulder, hefting a sizeable cardboard box onto the desk, "is what's in this. His life's work, apparently. Something called The Navidson Record. All of it handwritten, corrections, cross-references, annotations, on napkins and envelopes and there's even a stamp in here with a couple words on the back.

"Strangely enough," he added, "Zampanò was blind."

Scully's headache redoubled its efforts.

One Ash Tree Lane.

Scully held her flashlight steady, staring down at the address painted onto the curb as if she could through the application of willpower alone change it to something she knew must exist, as opposed to something she knew could not.

"Mulder," she said, "this is ridiculous. One Ash Tree Lane doesn't exist; it's a fictionalized address with no real world counterpart."

"And yet here we are," said Mulder. Already crossing the lawn to the house situated back near the trees, Mulder turned briefly to shine his flashlight at her before proceeding. His light bobbed in the dark, then vanished as he rounded the corner of the house and passed beyond view.

Scully spared the curb a final look, but the number did not change, nor did the name of the street. She started across the lawn, her flashlight passing across the house, innocuous and shadowed in the pre-dawn darkness.

"What exactly are you doing?" Scully said. She crossed her arms against the chill.

Mulder didn't look up. "Counting steps," he said, walking even with the wall. A twig snapped underfoot, and he paused briefly before continuing.

"Is there a particular reason why you're counting steps?"

"Just a hunch," he said. "Let's go inside."

"Mulder," she said, exasperated. "We can't just go barging into someone's house--"

"It's fine," said Mulder. "No one lives here. Not anymore, anyway."

Zampanò: that was when it started.

She visited him sometime around Christmas, one friend wishing another friend well. Even then, that early, it was The Navidson Record that consumed his apartment, supplanting the usual chaotic jumble of new cases and old cases and pornography and the occasional sports magazine, half-read, the cover creased and coffee-stained.

Scully stood over the coffee table, touching the papers, the envelope coated with a thin, dark scrawl, lines drawn through entire paragraphs, notes scribbled on top of the crossed out sections. None of it meant anything to her. A notebook rested on top of it all, a new notebook, turned to a page somewhere near the middle, and decorated with Mulder's distinctive cramped scrawl.

"It's a work in progress," Mulder said, leaning in over her shoulder, breath hot on her ear.

Scully started, bumping against his chest. Mulder shifted back, straightening up and away. He pressed the mug into her hands, hot chocolate by the smell of it.

She didn't say anything then. She was used to his eccentricities, accustomed to the particular rhythms and patterns his obsessions followed. But later she would think, I should have.

The house was empty. Barren. Scully crossed the floor, flashing the light before her. Her footsteps resounded strangely, like a raindrop falling into an empty barrel, echoing within something much larger than itself. As if over a great distance she could hear Mulder's own footsteps, ringing out in an opposing rhythm, slower and steadier, more deliberate, she imagined. What they were looking for, she didn't know.

She flashed a light at the window as she passed it and caught her reflection oddly. Like looking into a funhouse mirror, her image warped, distorted outside reality. Through the window the sky was beginning to lighten; yellow threaded through the black, a faint glow emerging along the horizon.

Scully covered her mouth and yawned. Her eyes burned and when she cleared her throat, the noise caught in her throat. The thought of bed, her own bed precisely as she had left it, loomed near in her mind.

"Mulder," she said as if he were right beside her, "please tell me you know what we're doing here." It was too much to hope for. Her throat scratched.

From the other side of the house, Mulder said, "Ha!" but the sound of it was dull, lost over a distance. Scully turned, her flashlight sketching a line across the floor, then the wall.

Mulder popped his head through the doorway. "I found it," he said, grinning at her.

It was a hallway, connecting the parlor with the living room.

"Mulder," she said. "Please tell me you did not drag me down to rural Virginia to look at a hallway."

"I counted the steps," Mulder said. "Thirty-two outside. Thirty-five inside. The same wall." He rested his hand against the wall.

Scully massaged her temple. "Steps are variable," she said. "That isn't a reliable system of measurement."

Mulder stepped into the hallway. "You coming or not?"

The hallway was longer than she expected, for which she blamed the relatively little sleep she had received both the night before and the night which preceded that. Sleep deprivation promoted chemical imbalances which could account for alterations to sensory perception of the environment; though she did not think she had suffered so severe a deprivation, the failings of the human body were many and varied, as capable of spontaneity as Mulder himself.

Scully took another step and slipped suddenly, violently. The jolt of a step down where she had expected none tossed her off balance and she caught at the wall with her fingers. Her flashlight clattered down a long staircase, turning over and over, the light bouncing up the wall and vanishing into the black.

"Mulder," she said.

Four steps before her, or twenty, on the far end of the hallway, Mulder turned to face her. He brought his flashlight around to bear upon her. She squinted into the light and said, "There's a staircase here."

A staircase Mulder had somehow missed as he inched through the hallway before her, feeling the wall with his fingers, searching for cracks, a nook, a weak spot; searching, she had thought, for a door.

She couldn't make out his face.

"Hang on," he said. "I'm coming back."

He took a step toward her and the floor fell out.

Scully woke in the dark to the dark. Mulder slapped her face again and she struggled upright, sucking in dry air and pushing him away. She covered her face. Scratched at her hair. Her back ached and so did her head, a dull ache that flared when she turned to find Mulder in the dark. She reached out and touched his cheek, her fingers brushing up against his eyelashes.

"Where the hell are we?" she said.

"The basement," said Mulder. "I found your flashlight, by the way." He flicked it on and held the bell up to his chin, flashing his face in faint relief. The light was thin and wavered slightly. "The bad news is, it's crap." He clicked it off.

Scully got her feet beneath her and leveraged herself up, hooking her fingers in the sleeve of Mulder's jacket for balance. On her feet again, relatively straight and prepared to test her balance, she let him go.

"Any idea how to get out?"

"There was a staircase," Mulder said.

"Was?"

"That would be the operative word."

Scully closed her eyes, then opened them again. The darkness was the same either way. "That doesn't make any sense."

"Yeah, well," he said, "none of this does. All of it does. The house changes," he said. "It grows, and it shrinks. The Navidson Record," he said and abruptly stopped.

Scully took a step into the dark, hand stretched out for a wall and finding none. "The flashlight," she said. "We should try to find a wall and follow that out of here." Mulder said nothing.

Scully turned back, her hand lifted to touch Mulder's shoulder. Her fingers slapped against something hard and smooth instead: a uniform surface; a wall.

"Mulder?" she said, but there was no answer.

She asked once to see his notes on The Navidson Record, of which he was ever secretive, so much so that if she had not seen the state of his apartment and the nature of the papers which decorated it, she would have assumed he had lost interest in it. Mulder looked at her strangely. The skin under his eyes was dark then, darker than usual, and the cut of his shirt fractionally looser around his shoulders.

He shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich, turning his eyes back to the road. He tapped his thumb against the steering wheel. "I still have some research to do. I'm thinking of checking with the Lone Gunmen, see what they've got. What're your thoughts on frog boy?"

Scully picked up the file in her lap and with it her argument on the resolution of this latest case. Mulder made a finger gun and a pow noise at each of her points, but only refuted two.

That was another chance, lost.

Scully followed the wall, her hand scraping along the smooth surface, fingers trailing after the palm. Her father had taught her that trick when she was small, daunted by the thought of the corn row maze erected at a nearby farm in preparation for Halloween. Follow the wall and you solve the labyrinth. Every puzzle has a solution.

Her throat itched. Her head throbbed. She swallowed convulsively and thought of: a pebble held on the tongue to stimulate the salivary glands, producing saliva to keep the mouth and throat moist. She had no pebble; she had no water. No light.

In the black, from a distance, she could hear a low rumbling noise like a growl, which came and went, along with the sound of footsteps, steady and distinct. It came near once. Scully called out to Mulder and the sounds stopped, not returning again for hours, or minutes. She had her watch, but without a light, she couldn't read it.

The thought occurred to her twice that perhaps it was not Mulder she heard, but someone else entirely. Improbable: the house was uninhabitated. She stared into the blackness, impenetrable and infinite, and felt for her gun holstered at her waist.

"Hey, Scully," Mulder said, his voice rattling over the phone line. Paper rustled faintly on the far end, near the phone, but not beside it, and Mulder made a sound low in his throat. "I need you to look something up for me. It's an address: One Ash Tree Lane. Located in Virginia."

Scully set her nailfile aside and wriggled her toes one by one, the big toe first, followed by its companions in quick succession. "Is there a reason why you need me to do this for you?"

"I'm looking for a house," said Mulder. "But I'm having a little trouble finding it. As near as I can tell, the house doesn't want to be found."

Scully arched her eyebrows for her own benefit, but promised to do her best. She hung up and decided on the spangly red nail polish instead of the blue. She deserved it.

When she called Mulder that evening, she said, "I found an Ash Tree Lane, but there's no One Ash Tree Lane located in the state of Virginia."

Mulder was silent for a long moment. Scully set her book down.

"Right, well, thanks for looking, Scully," he said. "I appreciate it."

Scully said, "What's this really about?" but he was gone.

She heard the growling constantly now, forever at a distance, but forever drawing near as well. Scully unholstered her gun; she weighed it in her hand and held it as a comfort, knowing full well how little use it would be with nothing by which she could see. The hands on her watch tick-tick-ticked away, measuring out time in fractions she could not quantify. The dryness in her throat persisted; it worsened.

The wall continued. She turned the corner.

In the distance: footsteps ringing out. Slow. Steady.

She slept without intending to sleep.

In her dream she stood in Mulder's apartment, the walls covered with sheets of paper, all of them black, layered even over the windows. Mulder said, "I found the house."

Scully said, "None of this is real."

Mulder said, "You just need to adjust your baseline for reality."

And the growling came behind him, and with it a wind so fierce it tore all the black from the walls only to reveal more black, and beneath that a smooth stone the color of ash. Scully closed her eyes against the wind and the darkness.

Scully opened her eyes to the unchanging darkness of the labyrinth. The growling thundered in her ears, as near to her as the steady ticking of the hands of her watch, pressed up against her cheek, her arms folded beneath her. The wall vibrated against her back; the floor was still where she lay upon it. Scully fumbled for her gun, then lurched to her feet, her hand pressed against the trembling wall. She saw nothing but the darkness. She heard nothing but that growl, constant and ever increasing in volume, as if it were coming closer. As if it were already there.

None of this is real, she thought. A complex hallucination brought on by a potent combination of sensory deprivation, exhaustion, physical discomfort, and thirst.

Beneath the growling, the scrape of a foot over rock: something drew near to her. A light, thin and yellow, shone into her face.

Scully lifted the gun.

discovered in the woods one mile outside ________, Virginia, at 4:00 P.M. on the afternoon of June 3rd, 1997, bringing to an end the week-long search and rescue operation being conducted in the metro area. One of the agents is currently recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center following an operation to repair a gunshot wound; the assailant responsible remains both unknown and at large. Authorities claim public efforts

Mulder wakes in the hospital. His tongue is thick, his throat dry. Scully is there. She takes his hand in her own. He speaks, but it is difficult; the words scrape over his tongue, rough and poorly formed.

"The house," he says.

Scully rubs her thumb over the back of his hand, once for his comfort, again for hers. She says, "There is no house."

Mulder closes his eyes. He sleeps now, his palm flat against Scully's, his fingers curled against her wrist, and as he sleeps Scully counts the minutes out on the clock beside his bed.

This story was originally posted at livejournal on 08/20/2009 for the fic challenge cliche_bingo, hosted on livejournal. The prompt was "crossover: books and literary."