Title:  Gutless (8/16)
Author:  Magdeleine
See Prologue for full headers; all posted chapters can be found at 
http://shannono.simplenet.com/gutless


GUTLESS

Chapter 8

Sometimes, Mulder forgot just how tiny Scully was.  It was easy to lose 
track of her physical stature in the shadow of the mental giant that he 
sparred with every day.  She had an aura of confidence and authority like an 
aura which obscured the size of the woman beneath it, and on a day-to-day 
basis he thought of her height -- if he thought of it at all -- as simply 
Scully-sized.

Then there were the odd days he would blink, and stare, and marvel at how 
little she was.  The curl of strong, slender fingers around a steering 
wheel, or the incongruous sight of tiny hands gripping a seemingly oversized 
semiautomatic.  Such little hands.  Once, when she had fallen asleep on a 
flight to Atlanta, one of those absurdly high-heeled shoes had fallen off; 
he'd leaned over, picked it up, and had been astounded to discover that 
Scully's shoe was small enough for him to hold on the flat of his hand.  
Such little feet.

He was currently watching those feet, marveling at how fast those little 
legs could move.  It was amazing -- sort of like watching a hummingbird.  
Scully was propelling herself down the dimly lit hospital hallway at warp 
speed, apparently putting as much space as she could between herself and 
Fred Schmidt, and leaving Mulder in the dust in the process.

"Scully!" he called after her.  "Wait up!"  

She slowed down and came to a stop, but didn't turn around; she just waited, 
her head slightly bowed, as he jogged down the hall.  He was grinning from 
ear to ear as he caught up with her, trying to find the perfect smart-ass 
remark to celebrate those tiny feet, but when he leaned a hand on the wall 
in front of her, she didn't look up.  That could be a bad sign.

He decided to go ahead with the remark, anyway.

"Training for the two-hundred meter again?" he teased, waiting for her to 
look up, waiting for her eyebrow to slant, waiting for that slight, amused 
purse of her lips ...  Hopefully, she'd be in the mood to play; she'd toss a 
comeback at him, and the mood would lighten before they had to get back to 
the business of pondering four dead people, an unknown culprit, and a crazy 
uncle.

She looked up, glaring at him from beneath lowered eyebrows.  This did not 
look like a receptive mood.  This looked like a mood which could lead to 
Scully socking him in the jaw.

Mulder thought of another funny thing to say, this time about Scully's tiny 
fists.  He opened his mouth, took another look at his partner's dark scowl, 
and decided against the comment.  

"What is it, Mulder?" Scully finally asked, peevishly.

He pointed back down the hall.  "What'd you think of Fred Schmidt?"

"That was a waste of time, Mulder."  She tipped her head up to glower at 
him, her eyes glittering.  "If he had in some way witnessed the crime, I 
could see the point, but --"

"He says he was attacked by a spirit being," Mulder insisted.  "I think it's 
worth investigating."

"He's delusional, Mulder.  He had an erotic dream about his nephew's wife, 
that's all."

Mulder almost laughed out loud.  Despite her obvious opinion of the Fred 
interview, she'd still listened, analyzed, put together clues.  Classic 
Scully.  "Right.  Marty Schmidt.  You caught that, too?"

Scully sighed.  "It was fairly obvious.  Green eyes, dark hair.  He 
fantasized about Marty and felt guilty enough about it to come up with this 
ridiculous story."  Her eyes shifted away, glancing vaguely down the 
hallway, and it occurred to him just how tired she was.

"Do you think he was lying to us?" Mulder asked, taking advantage of her 
inattention and scanning her face for further danger signs.  Her color was 
off.  The skin around her mouth looked too tight.  He felt a twinge of 
unease and guilt, and sighed.

"Lying?  No ..."  Scully's mouth twisted, her gaze still categorizing the 
air molecules in the hallway.  "Not deliberately.  I think that he honestly 
believes he was attacked by some kind of paranormal entity, but ..."  She 
trailed off, rubbing the bridge of her nose wearily.  

There was a memory dancing around in the back of Mulder's brain, peeking at 
him coyly around the disorganized piles of information, just out of reach.  
He snapped his fingers as it came into focus.  "Skinner."

She snapped back to attention, and stared at him as though he'd lost his 
mind.  "Excuse me?"

"We've seen this sort of thing before, Scully."  The memory was coming up in 
Technicolor now, doing a tap dance like Ginger Rogers.  "Come on, Scully," 
he prodded.  "Remember?" 

Scully blinked, her eyes flickering off to her right as she considered it.  
"The prostitute," she said at last, meeting his eyes again.  "And Sharon."

Mulder waited for her to make the connection; the memory had met up with a 
few others and they were doing a kickline in the middle of his brain.  
"Well," he said at last, "you see?"

"See *what*?" Scully asked, her voice going up in pitch.  "Mulder, that case 
has absolutely nothing to do with this."

Terrific.  And here he'd thought she was with him on this.  He sighed, and 
laboriously retraced his mental steps, rewinding the kickline and the tap 
dance and shunting the thing back into plain black and white.  "Skinner had 
a recurring dream in which an old woman would ..." he gestured vaguely, "... 
would straddle his chest and suffocate him."

"Yes..." Scully agreed, as though humoring a small child.

He ignored the tone.  "Fred Schmidt just told us practically the same story, 
Scully."

"But -- but -- that --"  She flailed a hand in the direction of the room 
they had just left, her words deserting her.  "He didn't say anything *like* 
that!  He said --"

"He said," Mulder supplied, feeling rather triumphant, "that he had a dream 
about a woman on his chest who pressed on him until he couldn't breathe."

Scully took a deep breath, making an obvious effort to compose herself.  
"All right, I will admit that it is possible that Fred Schmidt has a sleep 
disorder vaguely similar to the one that Skinner suffered from, but --"

"A succubus, Scully."  

She snorted.  "The only succubus that I know exists is that lousy art film 
William Shatner did in Esperanto."

"That was 'Incubus,' not 'Succubus.'  Come on, you just heard Fred Schmidt 
say it himself."

"Mulder," she said in that warning voice, "what he was describing was 
something called sleep paralysis.  It's a conscious state of involuntary 
immobility occurring just prior to falling asleep, or immediately after it.  
In normal REM sleep the brain sends out a signal immobilizing the entire 
body except for the eye muscles; this is a sort of short-circuited version 
of the process."  

Scully had fallen into that particular recitative style that she always used 
at times like this, her head cocked slightly to the left and her eyes 
unfocused.  Mulder watched her as she spoke, again marveling at her; this 
time not at her tiny size, but at the gigantic stature of her mind.  It was 
always such a glorious experience, listening to her rattle off encyclopedic 
amounts of information, even if he didn't agree with the theory she was 
putting forward.  Arousing, too, but that wasn't something he liked to dwell 
on.

Mulder wondered, briefly, if Scully's memories ever did tap dances.  

"Essentially," she continued, "the brain is awake and completely aware of 
its surroundings, but the body is still deep in REM sleep and therefore out 
of the conscious control of the individual.  Any attempts at deep breathing 
or any other voluntary movements are therefore unsuccessful, and the 
individual perceives this lack of motor control as paralysis, and the lack 
of voluntary breathing as a sensation of pressure on the chest."

Tap dances?  Probably not.  At least, not when she was in a mood like this 
one.  Scully's mind always seemed to be well-organized, like an extensive, 
tidy bank of filing cabinets, all indexed and cross-indexed and available at 
the drop of a hat.  His own mind, on the other hand, often reminded him of 
his bedroom -- well, what was supposed to be his bedroom -- the information 
distributed in random boxes, stacked in haphazard piles, all connecting in 
surprising and unexpected ways.  

Scully's eyes narrowed; she must have thought he wasn't paying attention.  
"I'm listening," he assured her.  "Go on."

"There's not that much to say, Mulder.  The pressure on the victim's chest 
often leads to feelings of intense fear and occasionally to visual and 
auditory hallucinations of some kind of malevolent creature crouching on the 
chest, trying to strangle or smother him."  She paused, reconsidered.  "Or 
her.  Sleep paralysis is an equal-opportunity disorder."

Another scrap of information teased at him, tickling him from behind.  
Words.  A phrase.  Something about women ... women of good something or 
other.  For some bizarre reason the image coming to mind involved a horse 
and cart.  Buggy?  Cab?  Carriage?  Yes, that was it.  Carriage.  "Women of 
good carriage."

"I beg your pardon?" Scully asked.

"It's Shakespeare," he provided, fishing around in his memory for the rest 
of the quote.  "'This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs, that 
presses them, and learns them first to bear ... making them women of --'"

"-- 'of good carriage,'" she finished for him.  "Yes, I think I remember 
reading the quote in someone's overambitious doctoral thesis on the subject.  
I believe it's from Julius Caesar."

"No."  He grinned at her, feeling the balance of power shift back to him 
with a single word.  "Romeo and Juliet."

She blinked.  "Oh."

Swish.  Two points for Fox Mulder.

It was all part of the game they played, the intellectual one-upmanship.  
Almost more fun than basketball, in its way.  They would each find a 
starting position, dredge up as much information as they could remember on 
their respective points of view, and then proceed to play the game, each 
trying to use information to discredit the other's opinion, and to shore up 
their own.  On every case, they would play several rounds of this game; each 
round would find their starting positions just a little closer, a little 
more similar.  At some point enough evidence would be in play to agree on 
the basics, and the game would become a purely philosophical one

In its own way, it beat basketball hollow.  Scully, after all, flatly 
refused to play basketball with him.

"It's an almost universal phenomenon, Scully," he told her, stalling a 
little as he dug up the memory, dusted it off, turned it over in his hands 
to test its weight.  "They did a study about twenty years ago.  Almost every 
culture has a myth or legend associated with the 'hag' experience, with 
almost the exact same characteristics described in stories from Korea to 
Ireland to the West Indies."

"Cultural sources," Scully shrugged.  "Such experiences can be induced by 
the simple knowledge of the traditional stories, coupled with the stimulus 
of an episode of sleep paralysis --"

"Scully," he interrupted, "when they did this study, half the people who'd 
had a 'hag' experience had no prior knowledge of any of those traditions.  
They're common even in present-day industrialized countries where there is 
no such commonly accepted cultural mythos."  

She gave him *that* look, the one that meant that she had caught him 
contradicting himself again.  "I find that hard to believe, considering 
we've spent hours discussing how the UFO phenomenon has replaced myths and 
folklore in the explanation of unusual events in today's modern culture."

"You're misquoting me, Scully; I was the one who said that the UFO 
phenomenon was the basis of most of the myths of --"  He shook his head 
abruptly, realizing that she had baited him off the track of his original 
argument.  "Never mind."

Two points, Dana Scully.

Scully made a small, almost amused sound in the back of her throat.  "At any 
rate, Mulder, I think we can safely assume that Fred Schmidt's nocturnal 
attacker was merely a hallucinatory product of sleep paralysis."

"I don't think so."  He leaned a little closer to her.  "Scully, I think 
this might be the key to everything that's happening around here."

She stared at him.  There!  A perfect shot from half-court, nothin' but net.  
He leaned back slightly, satisfied.  It never took Scully very long to 
recover from one of his sudden pronouncements, but the stunned expression on 
her face in those precious seconds was better than iced tea and sunflower 
seeds.  

Her mouth had dropped open a few centimeters; as he watched, she recovered 
and snapped it shut again.  "Mulder," she said in her I'm-the-only-sensible-
one-here voice, "whether Fred Schmidt was attacked by a spirit being, as he 
believes, or had an episode of sleep paralysis, the point is that it has 
nothing to do with the murders.  This is a dead end."

"What if," he said, carefully picking his way through the topical minefield, 
"what if the entity that attacked Uncle Fred is actually the murderer that 
we've been looking for?"

"What are you saying, that this was an actual person instead of a product of 
his imagination?"

He stalled.  "Not a person, no."  

"What, then?  A succubus?"

Mulder wished that someday he'd remember to do a little research before he 
got into these arguments.  The game had shifted back into Scully's hands; 
she was poking holes in his wall of defense right and left and it was time 
for a full time-out.  "Look," he said abruptly, "at the moment I'd really 
like to know more about Fred's medical condition.  Is there any way you 
could get a look at his charts, find out the diagnosis, any medications he's 
on?"

To her credit, Scully followed him over the conversational speed bump, 
scarcely missing a beat.  "Yes ..." she conceded grudgingly.  For some 
reason, her mouth twisted into a frown.  "We can ask at the -- at the 
nurses' station."

"Ahh," he grinned, happy to get an easy answer for once.  "What was that 
nurse's name again?  Lois?"

Scully gave him a very dark look that he did not understand in the least, 
ducked under his arm, and stalked off down the hallway.

<X><X><X><X>

"Oh," Lois said as Mulder and Scully approached the nurses' station, "you're 
back."

It wasn't the enthusiastic response Mulder had been hoping for.  He hadn't 
expected her to get up and do cartwheels, but she could at least act a 
little more friendly.  As it was, it sounded as though the young nurse would 
rather have dead fish dumped on her desk than deal with a certain pair of 
FBI agents.

Mulder gamely put on his warmest grin, hoping to thaw the ice a little bit.  
After all, it never hurt to make nice with the locals.  Just had to turn on 
the ol' Mulder charm a bit.  "Hello, Lois," he said suavely.

To his surprise, the nurse's thin excuse for a smile faltered, and 
completely disappeared.  Shit, maybe he'd gotten her name wrong.  It *was* 
Lois, wasn't it?  Or was it Louise?  Or Lola?  Maybe that was what Scully 
had been reacting to, earlier.  She would have warned him, though, wouldn't 
she?

He casually let his gaze slip down to the name tag on the lapel of the 
nurse's uniform.  Lois.  He read it again, just to make sure.  Still Lois.  
So he'd had it right.  What was wrong here?  The ol' Mulder charm must be 
losing its effectiveness.

Mulder ventured a glance at Scully, hoping that she would salvage the 
situation.  Scully scowled at him, her face like a thundercloud, lightning 
in her eyes.

What in the hell was going on?  He turned back to the young nurse behind the 
desk.  She looked at him as though she'd somehow heard about how he usually 
treated hospital staff.  He felt the sudden urge to explain that he had the 
greatest respect for the medical profession, it was just that he'd been on a 
short fuse every time he'd been in a hospital lately, and if the doctors 
would have just pulled their heads out of their asses and told him what he 
wanted to know instead of wasting time telling him to calm down, everybody 
would have been a lot happier.

Instead, he put on his most neutral expression and made a great show out of 
studying the countertop.

God, he hated hospitals.

Scully leaned over the counter, touching the edge of it lightly, as though 
for balance.  "We need to see Fred Schmidt's medical chart."  She gave the 
nurse a quick flash of teeth -- not quite a smile; it seemed more like 
Scully was baring a sharp pair of fangs -- and added, "Please."

Lois's eyes flickered to the telephone, apparently considering a quick call 
to her supervisor; she chewed briefly on her bottom lip and seemed to come 
to some kind of decision.  She swiveled her chair around, plucked a chart 
off of a wire carousel, and spun back to the front.  "All right," she said, 
depositing the chart on the counter in front of Scully with a lightweight 
metallic clatter.  "There you are.  Just don't walk off with it."

Scully picked up the chart with the tips of her fingers, exuding the 
ingrained dignity of a queen, and aimed a delicately arched eyebrow at Lois.  
The young nurse had the grace to look embarrassed.

Mulder hung in the background, hands deep in his pockets, shifting his 
weight from one foot to another.  Hospitals.  Shit.  The urge to get the 
hell out of this place was so strong that it made the backs of his knees 
ache.  Deep breathing was called for, but Mulder could practically feel that 
hospital smell pricking at his skin already, and he absolutely refused to 
breathe in any more of that odor than he had to.

He felt queasy.  Psychosomatic symptoms.  Some people went into a hospital 
sick and come out well; others went in well and came out feeling sick.  Some 
kind of irony there.  How long did it take to read a goddamn chart, anyway?

"Hope he's got good insurance," he said suddenly, surprising the hell out of 
himself.  He hadn't really meant to say anything; the words had simply 
fallen out of his mouth without warning.  He smiled belatedly at the nurse, 
feeling like an ass.  "From his job, I mean.  For this."

Lois stared at him like a cornered animal.  Oh, fabulous.  As though things 
weren't screwed up enough already, now he was *scaring* her.  Jesus.  Wasn't 
he doing this right?  Had he somehow plugged in his small-talk generator 
backwards this morning?  Had he blown some kind of fuse in his brain?

Scully was staring at him, too.  He could feel it on the side of his face 
like the heat of the sun on a winter afternoon, sharp and precisely defined.  
She'd been staring at him a lot today.  Had he missed a spot shaving?  He 
fought the urge to run a hand over his face.  He'd have to check it out, the 
next time he was near a mirror.

"If he even has a job, that is."  Jesus, was that still his voice?  He 
couldn't believe it.  Find the off-switch, pull the plug before this gets 
any worse.

"I think --"  Lois, surprisingly enough, was actually responding to his 
question.  "I think he does temp work, down in Tehtonka."  

"Really," Mulder said inanely.  "I, uh, I didn't know that there was a temp 
agency in town."  What the hell were you supposed to say about that?  "... 
They get much business?"

She shrugged.  "I don't know, I guess so.  My cousin Amber works in the main 
office, and she's there all the time.  I couldn't even get her to go to the 
movies last Friday 'cause she was working late.  I guess Taymor works her 
half to death."

Mulder's jaw came unhinged.  "Excuse me?"

There was a loud clatter as Scully practically dropped the chart onto the 
counter.  Her eyes were wide and very blue.  "Did you say *Taymor*?"

"Yes ..."  Lois looked from one to the other, shrinking back warily.

"As in ..."  Scully seemed almost reluctant to say it.  "... *Jim* Taymor?"

The nurse's left hand was creeping toward the phone.  "Yes," she said in 
that special humor-the-crazy-people voice.  "Why..."  She licked dry lips.  
"... why do you ask?"

Ideas were exploding like fireworks in Mulder's brain.  He turned and stared 
at Scully.  Scully stared back.  Barely thinking, he grabbed her wrist and 
headed for the door at full speed, pulling his startled partner after him 
like a water-skier.

"Thanks," he yelled over his shoulder.  "You've been a lot of help."

<X><X><X><X>

"Will you let go?" Scully yelped, halfway into the unpaved parking lot.  She 
could almost always keep up with Mulder, but when he was hauling her along 
like this, she could barely keep her feet under her.  She tried to wrench 
out of his grip, but she couldn't get enough leverage, not when she was 
skidding along like a stubborn puppy on a leash.  "Dammit, Mulder --!"  

Her self-defense reflexes were screaming at her to rip off his leg at the 
knee and beat him over the head with it, but she fought off the idea.  Time 
for Plan B.  She grabbed his wrist with her other hand and hit the brakes, 
her suede pumps grinding into the gravel and bringing up a cloud of pale 
dust.  Yet another pair of shoes that would never be the same again, but the 
sacrifice was effective.  Mulder slowed, and stopped, and looked at her 
blankly.  

"Mulder," she growled, "have I mentioned that I'm old enough to cross the 
street by myself?"

"What?"  He blinked, but his eyes didn't focus properly; he seemed to be 
fixed on his own thoughts, only aware of her in a peripheral way.

Scully was all too aware that she was, for all intents and purposes, holding 
hands with Mulder in the middle of a deserted parking lot.  Well, not 
exactly holding hands, but close enough.  His long fingers were still looped 
around her left wrist; her right hand was gripping the side of his wrist, 
right where she could feel the muscles in his forearm shift under his shirt 
cuff.  She was too close to him again, too aware of his strength and of the 
heat he gave off, and much too aware of the spot where his radial pulse 
drummed away under her fingertips.

If she bent her head just a little, she could put her mouth to that spot, 
feel that pulse against her lips, steal a little taste of his skin ...  The 
very thought was so explicitly detailed, so solid, that she almost drowned 
in it.

No.  Not now.

She pried his fingers off of her, pulled away, and deliberately put several 
feet of space between them.  He was looking at her, focusing on her at last, 
but she avoided eye contact; instead, she studied her wrist, rubbing it as 
if to restore circulation.  

"Are you all right?" he asked, a note of real concern creeping into his 
voice.

"I'm fine."  And she was, really she was.  As long as he didn't touch her 
again, she'd be just peachy.  "What's going on, Mulder?"

He was still looking at her; she could feel it, like a brand on her skin.  
"Do you remember the file on the other victims, Scully?  Employment, jobs?"

Of course she remembered the file.  She'd practically memorized the damn 
thing on the plane.  "They were ... they didn't *have* jobs, Mulder.  One 
was an occasional substitute teacher and the other was fired from his last 
job two months ago."

He raised his hand, and she thought of the pulse in his wrist, and shivered.  
He held up a single finger.  "Marjorie Bailey worked for Jim Taymor."  A 
second finger.  "Fred Schmidt got jobs through Jim Taymor's agency."

"Fred Schmidt," Scully said patiently, "is not a victim."

"We can argue about that later, Scully.  Whether or not he has anything to 
do with this, I have a hunch that Joshua Schmidt went with his uncle to that 
agency, maybe even worked for them himself."  Before she could protest, he 
held up a third finger.  "Lola Gruber.  She can't possibly have made that 
much money from substitute teaching in a small town.  What do you want to 
bet that she went to Taymor's place looking for other employment?"  A fourth 
finger.  "Greg Marks.  No job, living with his sister, art supplies to buy.  
How long do you think he was willing to wait until work came in?"

She considered it.  Granted, it was the first time that a name had come up 
twice in the investigation, but it was hard to believe that the local police 
could have missed a connection like that, especially in such a small town.  
"Mulder, I don't think --"

"It's a hunch," he insisted.  "Come on, Scully, what've we got to lose?"

She glared at him wordlessly.  A slow grin spread over his face like jam on 
warm bread, sweet and insufferable.  She was going to give in.  She knew it, 
he knew it, but the hell if he was going to see her surrender.

Scully pivoted neatly and stormed off toward the rental car.

"Hey!" Mulder called.  "You might want these."

She turned, barely in time to notice the car keys flying at her.  She 
snatched them out of the air, one-handed, and kept walking.

"Nice catch, Scully."

"Just get your ass in the car, Mulder," she snapped.  "It'd be a real pity 
if I accidentally left you behind and had to interview Jim Taymor all by 
myself."

<X><X><X><X>

End of Chapter 8  (8/16)

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