Rated M/C (Mike and Carrie story)
PG-13 (for mild language)

Days of Our Lives and its characters belong to Corday Productions and NBC - and in a similar vein 1013 Productions owns the X Files and its characters. No infringement is intended - this work is for enjoyment, not profit. Any resemblance of this story to persons living or dead, or works of fiction/non-fiction published or unpublished is purely coincidental. This story may not be printed except for personal use.  Please print it in its entirety, including the header and the copyright information.   Praise and thoughtful criticism may be emailed to me at:  rghidara@enteract.com.
 

"The Salem Files"
 

FBI Headquarters
Washington, D.C.
10:13 pm

 Salem, Illinois is a nice enough town, and I should know because we drove around in circles through it for at least half an hour this morning. My name is Special Agent Dana Scully - FBI agent, medical doctor and perpetually lost rental car passenger.  Oh yes, and I should now add, expert on Salem, Illinois.  In many ways it resembled the countless scores of small, midwestern towns I've been in since I began with the FBI - light industry, white collar business and stores, a few Legion posts, two or three churches, a cute little lake and a respectable enough airport. The town seemed small enough to be friendly, yet not so small that every single citizen knows every other citizen's business. That had been my hope, but as it turned out, every citizen we'd met did know everyone else's business. And what business! I still don't know how they kept it all straight. At least it wasn't like that one town of cannibals - what was the name? The one with the chicken packing plant - or at least I *hope* it was chicken...well, anyway - if this case had turned out the way that one did - my partner, Special Agent Fox "Spooky" Mulder would have been the first to go. I swear sometimes he could get us lost driving in a paper bag.
 
 Glancing sideways toward my partner as he drove past the late autumn colored trees that lined Salem's residential areas, I couldn't help but admit he was unusually quiet. I can't tell you how that creeped me out. In the past, the old Mulder, the Mulder I knew from before the events of the past year, would have cracked some joke about "Salem" - maybe inquired about the number of black cat familiars in town, or hummed a few bars of Frank Sinatra's "Witchcraft." But he hadn't. I guess the trauma of my cancer and remission, Mulder's reunion with his missing sister and his loss of belief in the outward presence of UFOs and aliens among us - goes deeper than I first thought. Ah well - I felt certain our case would give us both a fresh start. For one thing, it was certainly nice to get out of D.C. for a while.

 We found a parking space on the street fairly close to the address we'd been looking for, the home of a local television reporter, Jennifer Horton - now reported kidnapped. It was a nice house, very Frank Lloyd Wright/Prairie style. I closed my car door and began to walk slowly up the front walk of the house, noting as I did a good number of police officers mulling about, some walking back and forth between the house and the one next door. Interesting.

 "Scully, I don't know about this." The tenor voice of my tall, lanky partner stirred me out of reverie.

 "Mulder, what do you mean?" I looked up at him with my patented 'mildly puzzled expression'. I couldn't wait to hear what he finally had to say.

 Hands stuffed into the pockets of his standard issue, federal employee trench coat, Mulder glanced around to see if anyone was in ear-shot and said in a low tone, "This case..." His voice trailed off, but I caught his meaning through that silent communication thing we have between us. He had doubts about our presence on this case.

 "I thought you'd be happy Assistant Director Skinner widened our x-file case load," I replied, "After all those years under the agenda of...Them, it feels good to know we're doing legitimate work with no strings attached." And I genuinely meant it. To think we've wasted all this time, being used to perpetuate a false belief in aliens! All to cover up that damn secret agenda of those bastards who gave me cancer! Ah, it gets me too upset to think about it any further, and I am digressing from my story.

 Mulder offered no reply to my little pep-rally speech other than a raised, skeptical eyebrow.

 I shook my head a little at my partner's perpetual weirdness and walked up to the closed front door of the house and rang the bell.

 "Are you sure the local contact, Carver - was it? said to meet here, at the crime scene?" Mulder leaned down and spoke in my ear, a habit he's developed over the years, making me feel like we're the only 2 people on the planet. After all this time, I still can't get over the intimacy of the gesture when he does it.
 
 I turned around to face him, half turned-on and half annoyed by his gesture, and only added, "He thought it best to view the crime scene first and interview the family." With that, I turned back around to face the door, and what met me there took my breath away.

 Now, it's hardly a secret around FBI circles that half the women (and a few men, for that matter) that we work with find Fox Mulder attractive. Even I have to admit, in my more pensive moments, that Mulder is certainly easy on the eyes, with his brown hair tumbling down over his high forehead and his hazel eyes. He can be drop-dead handsome when he wants to be, even if he's a little odd. But for all his good looks, Mulder couldn't compare to the man who stood before me at that door in Salem. He was roughly my age, slightly shorter than Mulder, with perfectly golden blond hair. Very Aryan. And his eyes, oh - in all the time I've been in the Bureau, or practiced medicine, I've never come across such incredibly sexy blue eyes. A woman could easily, nay - *willingly* drown in them.
 
 I felt myself go a little weak in the knees, and I knew I was staring, but I couldn't help it. It was very unlike me. I started to pull out my badge from my coat pocket, but before either of us could open our mouths to speak, we were interrupted by this ...woman and her baby. I say woman, but to be honest - seeing her made me, for the first time, wonder if Mulder and his alien theories weren't right. She seemed too bizarre to be of this planet.

  "Will you look at all them cop cars around here, and everything - I don't think I've seen so many since I watched that movie with that hunky Mel Gibson."
  My blonde Apollo at the door seemed a bit overwhelmed, but before he could interrupt, the eye-glassed woman continued.
 "I am soooooo sorry about your sister! Dr. Marlena Evans told me and said she was coming over here. I told her I bet that mean, mean, mean Kristan and her vampire daddy were behind it."

  Thankfully, through the whole bizarre tirade (had she really said "vampire"?) the woman kept her attention focused on the man at the door. But our good luck didn't last long. Turning to look at us, my badge still in hand, she said, "And oh - will you look at this, all the way from Washington, D.C. - big, fancy G-men. This must be purty, purty bad. Well, me and Little Elvis are gonna go inside and say hello to Dr. Marlena Evans."

 I had to admit, in all my days, I had never seen  a woman like that before. She was gangly and tall, with the worst overbite known to medical science. Her baby, a boy I guessed by his name, seemed normal enough, but I pitied him if he faced a childhood with that woman. Before any of us could recover our wits, the fluttery woman went into the house, leaving her baby buggy outside near the door. Next to me, I heard Mulder quip up with a note of interest, "Little Elvis?" I foresaw him later eagerly talking to the woman, and quickly pushed the scary thought from my mind. Just as long as I didn't have to be there when he did it. Taking a long, cleansing breath, I tried addressing the handsome man again.

 "Ah, let's try this again. I'm Special Agent Scully and this is Special Agent Mulder - FBI. Is this the home of Jennifer Horton?" I managed to get a full dose of his baby blues before I broke eye contact and put my badge away.
 
 "Yes, it is. I'm Dr. Mike Horton, her brother. Please come in." He smiled the most fantastic, gentle smile and for the briefest of seconds, I wondered if he would want to compare bedside manners with me. But, there was work to do, and Mulder to supervise. Putting my best agent face on, I smiled back professionally and went in the door, followed by Mulder.
 
 What we found when we entered the house we had not expected either. More often than not, Mulder and I are called into homicide crime scenes - with or without bodies, but always flocked with scores of police and forensics experts. And always taped off to the public. The Horton house looked like the beginnings of a Tupperware party - beautiful people in dressy casual clothes milled about the living room, some sitting on the sofa, others standing and talking. Several cops were present, but none appeared to have the air of a Commander. From behind me, I heard Mulder ask Dr. Horton,
 
 "Is Commander Carver here?" From the look on his face, I could tell Mulder thought this arrangement a bit odd too, unless our previous information about the kidnapping had been incorrect. Maybe it hadn't occurred here in the house?

 Dr. Horton seemed, under the circumstance, very calm and collected. "He just stepped out for a moment to take a call about the escape from prison of my brother in law. I'm sure he'll be back soon." He said it so casually, and coming from such an obviously intelligent man, I almost laughed out loud. Almost. But instead, I bit my tongue and murmured our thanks. From then on, things about this case became weirder and weirder, and coming from us - that was something.

 To begin with - the mother of the missing woman, another Dr. Horton, was a basket case, the worst I had ever seen. And to think, they let this woman practice as a psychiatrist!? Interviewing her proved to be nearly impossible, especially in her more manic moments. When she did calm down reasonably, all I could get from her was some bizarre story about a man named Stefano whom she equated with the devil himself, and his daemon seed Peter, who had once been Jennifer's husband. Now, I was getting somewhere - abductions at the hands of former spouses were not unheard of and entirely plausible. Before I could go further, she bolted from the sofa, screeching toward a tall blonde woman with long hair who had just entered the house. The longer I stared, the more I was convinced this woman resembled the alien woman we had met on the porch, who I now knew as Susan. Twins?
 From the sound of Laura's shrieking, this second twin was certainly not welcome. At that point, I really didn't care. I had lost my interview subject to another fit of Greek-tragedy sobbing, and my partner to Susan. Every once in a while, I caught snatches of their conversation. So far, I had counted four references to Satan, three of possession, one of Dr. Marlena Evans, and after that - I stopped counting. I didn't want to know.

 Throughout the day, Dr. Horton proved to be a well spring of calm in the storm. He was as deliciously intelligent as I first thought - clear and precise when I questioned him and remarkably funny when we chatted about medicine. He was kind and gentle, thoughtful enough to bring us coffee and fascinated enough with me to want to hang around and converse. Either that, or the room's other occupants held about as much interest for him as a root canal. In a way, I couldn't blame him if that were the case. These people were a little unusual, to say the least. Mike interrupted my thoughts with a comment of his own.
 
 "I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you and Agent Mulder seem to have a very unusual partnership." For a moment, I froze, fearing he had caught sight of our very unusual platonic intimacy. For four years now we had bantered, bickered and buddied our way though case after case - getting closer and closer, to the point that I recently caught Mulder almost say, in response to my comment about "my life" - "but it's my life too." At times, I almost didn't know where his life ended and mine began - and his cheek kissing when I was dying didn't help matters either. I held my breath and waited for Mike to explain.

 "Your partner seems fascinated by the vagaries of the human mind," he paused and nodded over to where Mulder was *still* talking to Susan, "and you, the medical doctor, are firmly grounded in the physical plane. Well, autopsies do tend to constantly rub one's face in harsh material reality, don't they?" He smiled that charming smile again, and I wanted to melt. "You're not exactly what I expected of the FBI."
 
 I looked down at my olive-green pant suit, very professional and plain in a modern sort of way, the compact notepad in my hand and the belt-holster of my gun peeking out from the dark folds of my suit jacket. I gave Mike a look as if to say, don't I look the part? I smiled gently at my own joke and added, "Yes, I know what you mean. Mulder has never fit into the Bureau's mainstream, and I guess it's contagious, because now I don't either."

 Watching his face as I replied, certainly not a chore by any means, I noticed him suddenly light up like a beacon. It was a very subtle shift in facial expression, but enough for a trained investigator to see. For a moment, I thought - or maybe I wished,
it was for me. Then, from the far end of the house, I saw a blonde woman in a red suit enter and look about. Mike's attention, though he consciously didn't mean it, was gone - focused as completely as it was on the young woman. Ah, ha - his wife, although I didn't notice a ring on the good doctor's finger. But the love in his eyes was as plain as day - it had to be.

 Mike stood and called out above the din of the living room to the blonde. "Carrie!" She walked over to us in the blink of an eye, all quiet, understated elegance and poise, and before Mike could introduce me, she enveloped him in a full, complete hug. They stood there for what seemed liked hours, drawing strength from one another in the comfort of an embrace. Mike came to first when they parted and looked over to where I still sat. "Carrie Reed, Agent Dana Scully."

 I stood and extended my hand, registering the name difference. Maybe a fiancé? I noticed as we shook she wore rings on her left hand, and I quickly got the picture, one I didn't want to go to. I hastily made an excuse about wanting to talk to Mulder and made my exit, noting as I did how strange this investigation had become. We hadn't left the house all afternoon - questioning had taken forever. We hadn't seen Commander Carver once, and I was getting very lax in my professional duties - I never smile or shake hands in crime scenes - it just isn't very FBI like.

 I found Mulder in the dining room of the house, taking notes like a good agent. Then I remembered his photographic memory and a moment later discovered his true activity, doodling on his notepad.

 "Working hard?" I dripped sarcasm, and Mulder looked up and smiled wryly, his first acknowledgment of my comment.
 "It's been a hard and very odd afternoon, G woman. I'm taking a creative break."
 "So I see." I slipped back into our familiar banter mode. It was a safety blanket in this very disconcerting town. "Want to compare notes?"
 "Ooo - okay, but you go first." Mulder had a way of making every comment seem like a request for something illicit.
 
 Rolling my eyes for the hundredth time that day, I opened my notepad and began. "Well, the general consensus goes something like this - Jennifer was last seen over 24 hours ago, getting ready for bed. Her where abouts the following morning was questioned until Laura found a note saying the woman had gone off to look for leads in her first husband's criminal case. A neighbor, Travis, is now wanted for the abduction, believed to be in the employ of Jennifer's second husband, Peter Blake, supposedly deceased. A man named Stafano DiMera, Peter's father, was questioned concerning the case - no discernable leads. And Jennifer's mother requires a straight-jacket, if you want my expert medical opinion." I looked up at Mulder to see him grinning, amused at my little tale, comments and all.

 "I'm glad to see your recent brush with death gave you a new found sense of sarcasm, Scully. I always did love that about you best." I raised an eyebrow at him, and he got the hint. "Right. So. Apparently, Jennifer's first husband, Jack Deveraux (didn't we once know a Senator Deveraux?) was tried and convicted of the murder of Peter Blake, and as we heard, within the last few hours escaped from prison. Laura Horton spent the better part of the eighties in a mental institution, suffering from a traumatic catatonic state, brought on by an affair of her former husband."

 "This Stefano," Mulder continued, "is assumed to be the cause of every malady that effects the town, including last year's drought, yesterday's stock market drop and the recent outbreak of food poisoning in the chowder at the Brady Pub, a local dining establishment. His connection in this is still unclear to me, other than his association by marriage to the victim - although," Mulder paused and I braced myself for the worst. "Susan told me he is so obsessed with Dr. Marlena Evans, he once allowed her to become possessed in an attempt to win her heart. Evans former and current lover, John Black, was serving in his role of a priest at the time and saved her soul, and the town - which I understand he does on an annual basis. Stefano is also connected by marriage to Commander Carver, through his wife. And, I wouldn't suspect, to practically half the town, if we traced blood lines."

  Mulder continued on, matter of factly revealing the most bizarre information, for another 35 minutes. I stopped listened shortly after the tale of Mike Horton's first wife's death. The people in this town lead soap opera lives, and didn't even know it - but at least they didn't inbreed, eat each other or suffer from flukemen in their sewers. And we hadn't heard of a single tale of alien abduction all day. On the whole, I was pleased.

 The case wrapped up rather mundanely- at least for us. Around 3pm, we received a call from A.D. Skinner saying we were being recalled from the case and sent back to Washington. When asked why, all he said was, 'I take orders as you do, Agent Scully.' So much for that. I knew he was somehow still connected to Them, despite Mulder's protestations to the contrary. 10 minutes later, Agent Genica DiGuiseppi and Agent Bob Paris pulled up, from the office in Chicago. It was good to see Genica again, after that case of church arsons last year. Her partner I didn't know, but he seemed nice enough. After a smile and a long handshake from Mike, we left - pleased in a way to leave Salem and its dirty laundry behind. My last view of the house came from the rear view mirror - where I saw Agent Paris talking to two dark haired Italian men - one that matched the description of DiMera, and the other I could swear I'd seen in Washington. Mulder flipped on the rental car radio and we cruised out of town to the sounds of Frank Sinatra... "It's witchcraft, that koo-koo witchcraft, and although I know it's strictly taboo..."

********

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