(Good Vibrations -- Chapter Four)
Scully's Dream
When she dreamt she dreamt that she walked through the motel hallways until they turned into the halls of her partner's darkened apartment building. Without knowing how, she found herself on the other side of the door numbered 42, silently moving through the detritus of Mulder's life. Scully's fingertips brushed the edges of a bookcase as she vaguely noted the authors within -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, Shakespeare, Douglas Adams, Robert Browning, Connie Willis . . . unlike the others, his science fiction books looked as if they had not been disturbed for some time. The effects of a life grown stranger than fiction. She rotated in the middle of his living room, backlit by the blueish glow of his muted television set. Where is he?
Scully drifted through the rooms; passed through a few walls. Halted when something tickled the back of her neck. A breeze? When she turned she saw nothing, but felt the slight touch of cool air on her face this time. Stepped forwards to follow it.
She did not feel the pile of the rug against her feet as she moved back towards the way she had entered his rooms. But now the door was gone, in its place a wide-open window with curtains blowing into the room in response to the push of the wind. And she, nightgown fluttering, moved towards the window, feeling a detached elation at having finally discovered it.
Upon climbing through the window, Scully found herself standing outside, bare feet flat on the ground. The surrounding woods looked like those near the motel, she thought, and began walking along the dirt path. A strange anticipation began to quicken the blood in her veins, and Scully found herself gradually walking more swiftly until the point at which she found herself skimming along the pathway in an easy run.
And then she found herself in the middle of a clearing. She stopped. Turned around; checked to see if anyone had followed her. When she returned her gaze to the clearing, he was standing there in front of her, holding something in his arms.
"Mulder," she said as he moved a few steps forwards slowly and stopped. A smile began to transform her mouth. His eyes were shining.
Since the first time I stood there with you, watching lights dance in the sky, I knew I was really in for something, but how could I expect to find-
He was one step away. One step would bring her there. The night air was heady in her lungs as she reached out her arms and shifted her weight, moving one foot forwards-
and as the baby in her partner's arms turned its tiny face to look at her, Scully realized that there was nothing beneath her feet-
and she found herself dropping like a stone into a widening abyss as Mulder and the child faded away into the night.
When she woke she woke sitting upright in bed, sheets tangled around her legs and damp chest heaving. Scully's gaze darted around the darkened motel room; she heard her own rasping breaths echo off the walls. Mulder was asleep on his side, facing her. Seeing this, her breathing evened out for a moment until the feeling of falling returned in her chest and she realized what she needed to do. She found herself scrambling out of bed, kicking the clinging sheets away.
When he woke he woke to the sound of the motel fire alarms shrieking and Scully running back in from the hallway through the open motel room door, her white nightgown glowing like a beacon under the red emergency lights. As he sat up, fighting his way back to lucidity, she flung his coat at him and screamed:
"Take what you need to, we're getting out of here!"
"What!"
(Maybe this was a dream, he thought -- this was too weird to be anything but-)
"I said we have to leave! Now!" yelled Scully over the wail of the hallway fire alarms as she grabbed her coat off a chair and snatched her laptop off the bureau. They heard people begin to move through the motel hallways, filing towards the exits in confused accordance with fire evacuation laws.
He was out of bed, stumbling over his own feet and hitting his knee on the bed frame. "Is there a fire?"
"No," she answered tersely, and spun around to face him.
"What-"
She launched herself at Mulder, trying to convey with her urgent body what she could not with words. As her feet left the floor, his arms automatically closed around her body, crushing his coat between them, and his mouth began to respond to hers as a look of wonderment stole across his face in the darkness. Just as things were starting to get really promising from his still-sleepy body's point of view, she broke away from him, turned back to grab him by the hand, and hauled him out of the room.
The other motel residents were gone from the hallway; Mulder could see the last of them filing down the stairs. He ran after Scully as she dashed down to the other end of the hallway, checking to make sure that everyone was gone from their rooms. Upon finding that everyone else had indeed evacuated, Mulder and Scully ran down the nearest flight of stairs and escaped out into the night.
Everyone else was standing a few feet back from the building, staring at it in half-conscious confusion -- which was no good, thought the desperate Scully.
"Everybody get back!" she yelled, waving her arms and trying to herd the others further away from the motel.
"What's going on?" demanded an older man, possibly the motel owner, as he shoved his way to the front of the crowd. "Did you have something to do with-"
Without really understanding why, Mulder intuitively responded to Scully's distress, pulling his ID from the coat slung over his shoulder and asking the crowd, as calmly as he could under the circumstances, to please move towards the trees edging the forest on the other side of the parking lot. Upon hearing "FBI," a nearly palpable wave of surprise and fear rippled through the motel residents, and they began to move as one through the darkness towards the tree line.
It was slightly cooler outside the motel than in, even though it was becoming more and more apparent by the minute that there was no fire inside. Once at the fringe of the woods, the others moved away from Mulder and Scully, staring alternately at the darkened motel and at the agents. Scully stood rigidly, round eyes staring out in front of her like a deer caught in car headlights. In contrast, Mulder's eyes stayed unwaveringly on his partner as he tried to decipher what had just happened.
The crowd of civilians was just beginning to shift on its collective feet and think about going inside again, defying whatever the two obviously delusional government agents had been yelling about, when they felt it -- a rippling in the ground. Muttered conversations came to an abrupt halt as the ground twisted. After a second, the movement stopped. Scully's head jerked up to face Mulder, eyes still wide.
"Did you-" she started.
"Yeah, I-"
And then it happened again -- stronger this time. People moved further back into the trees as the earth began to shudder and rumble. Mulder and Scully hit the ground.
Barely visible at first in the darkness, a crack opened up near the highway turnoff to the motel. It evenly split the road to the motel in half as it progressed, widening as it moved inexorably onwards. For one silent moment, the crack stopped right in front of the neon sign--and then it appeared on the other side of the motel, and the ground in between moved apart to accommodate it. With a deep sound like thunder, a chasm opened up underneath the bulk of Billy's Shangri-La #2.
And then the motel fell in.
And then the open ground slammed shut again behind it.
And then it was quiet.