Chapter Text
If you asked any of young Joshua Tredgett’s classmates what their favourite superheroes were they’d regale you with tales of how Batman chased the Joker down the alleyways of Gotham with nothing but his Batarang, or how the Hulk stopped a missile strike with his bare hands, and you’d probably be pulled up by little Susan Evett who’d adamantly remark that it was Wonderwoman who was the best superhero- and a whole lot stronger than Batman or the Hulk and you just weren’t mentioning her because she was a girl- and then you’d have a whole classroom argument on your hands and you’d regret you ever asked. You might notice, through the flying fistfuls of hair and second-grader spittle, young Joshua sitting quietly in a corner leafing through a comic book. If you asked what he was reading, he’d shyly tell you all about his favourite comic superhero, who really wasn’t like Batman or Wonderwoman at all, because the marvellous thing about him was that he was a dog. Krypto the Superdog, Joshua would be more than happy to tell you, was the pet of Superman and he could do all the incredible things his alien owner could do and more.
“Just like my dog! She’s a German Shepard and her name is Juniper. Junie’s amazing. Sometimes I think she can see through walls just like Krypto. And I think she can fly too, but she just doesn’t show me or dad. Because then people would probably take her away, for science. But I swear it’s true!”
If you were anything like any one of Joshua’s teachers you’d observe the distance he sat from his classmates and the way his hands never seemed to stop buzzing about his face like he was constantly swatting flies. You’d ask around in the staff room if he had, if you’d be so bold, a history. A note in a file somewhere. You’d get a lot of knowing looks. There were many notes in many files, but you had to cut a kid like him a break. He was such a sweet kid and he’d been through so much this past year, what with his mother walking out and the way his father was. In hushed yet excited tones, because in a sleepy little town like this going over old gossip was the height of social activity, you’d learn the soap opera drama of it all, how his mother had up and left and become a missing person seven months ago. Presumed dead by some, certainly law enforcement at this point, but the running theory mentioned an old flame from California and a not-so-secret alcohol problem and a very, very turbulent relationship with her husband and well, with her son being the way he was, it’d be very hard on a young mother. And young she was- only 26 when she’d gone and done it, whatever it happened to be. And that, you’d be told, was the tragic story of young Joshua Tredgett, who’d become such a shell of himself that he’d only talk to you about the dogs in his storybooks. But, again, such a sweet kid. You practically weep for him.
Joshua Tredgett knelt under the fronds of the willow tree in his backyard, hands shaking as he turned the glossy new pages of the latest edition of Superman Illustrated. The comic was so new it still smelt headily of the plastic wrap it had come encased in at the newsagents stand. With one pudgy finger he traced the dialogue bubbles on the page, reading them aloud to his companion, a thick-furred German Shepard with a lolling pink tongue and kindly eyes: his beloved Juniper. His other hand drew little curls up from the fur at her neck, softly and idly stroking her as he told her all about how Krypto was helping Superman defeat the new villain of the week, a nefarious bastard by the name of The Tonic Leopard. Joshua liked it out here in his backyard beneath this willow tree with his comics. He felt hidden in a place that only Juniper and Superman knew about, and that was just perfect.
“What’s wrong, Junie? Junie-girl?” The dog whined and sat up, her ears pricking forward like she’d just seen a squirrel. But Joshua had thought that kind of thing- chasing squirrels and mailmen- were only things dogs did on TV, because Juniper never went running off like that. She was a good girl and she never ran off. She didn’t even bark, which was why dad had allowed him to keep her in the first place. The dog whined, her little coal black eyes narrowing like she’d seen something off in the horizon, but all Joshua could see were the encompassing fronds of the tree dancing in the soft afternoon breeze.
“Junie?”
Junipers hackles raised and a low, worried growl emanated from her throat. Suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety, Joshua dug his fingers into her neck- gentle but firm- “calm down, Junie, please, what is it?”- he begged. Juniper barked twice, sharp and shrill, and all of a sudden kicked away from him, crashing through the willow fronds and tearing off across the yard like a bat out of hell.
“Junie! Please! Come back!” Joshua wailed, battling with the greenery whisking around his face and tangling in his lips and hair as he leapt after his dog, comic book facedown and forgotten on the grass. By the time he’d torn an entangling frond from around his waist and shoved the leaves away from his neck Juniper was nowhere to be seen. With eyes quickly welling with tears he scanned the expanse of his garden but there was no dog, no telltale gold and black flash of fur. Just the wooden slats of the fence and the empty chicken coop and a pile of mulch.
“Dad? Dad? Have you seen where Junie went? Have you seen Juniper? Dad? Did she run into the house?” Joshua was almost tripping over his own feet as he stumbled in the back door, letting it slam as he rushed into the lounge room. If today was like any other day, his dad would be on the couch with a beer and the lights off and baseball on the set. Today was not like any other day. The lounge was deserted. Chest tightening at the absence of both his dog and his father, beginning to dread that he’d somehow been warped to Htrae: the upside down and all-wrong version of Earth created by the villain Bizarro in the Superman comics: he skidded into the hallway and came up short at the haunting sight of his fathers silhouette stood in front of the main door frame at the end of the hall, visibly rigid with tension.
“Dad?” He said, softly. Perhaps he was in a mood. He could get angry sometimes, when the baseball wasn’t going well or his job shorted him on the payslip again. His dad was a good man. He didn’t hurt him, like his teachers always asked about. But he got real quiet and then went around smashing plates and putting dents in the fence late at night.
“Son? Joshua. Come here.”
The sun was setting and his face was black against the orange of the open door: Joshua could not see his fathers expression. His tone of voice gave him no confidence but there was no situation in which Joshua would disobey his father, so with knees that felt like jello he hesitantly went to join his father at the door.
Joshua often wondered if he would ever forget his mothers face. It had been a whole year, after all. Sometimes he thought he was forgetting her voice as he lay in bed trying to conjure it, trying to coax old memories into life. He had a picture of her on his desk in a little frame, and he would sometimes kneel in front of it and try to imagine her pulling different expressions than the serene smile the photo presented. He would think of jokes in his head and try to imagine how that face would change, what it would look like if she laughed at them. Somehow it always felt like he was getting it wrong, just a little. It frustrated and saddened him that the pictures of his mother that his brain could make felt so inadequate but that it was all he had to live with.
And now Joshua realised just how wrong he’d been. Standing on his doorstep in a flannel coat and tracksuit pants was the real thing, the woman from the picture. His mother. With a stark-white gappy toothed smile as bright and wide as the tail of trailing comet, there stood his mother, grinning up at him in a way that was surreally so different than he’d imagined.
Son and mother and father stood there in the door of that little home in Oregon, finding not a word to say to each other. Finally the mother held out both her arms and father and son practically fell onto her, became totally enveloped in her arms, their black silhouette shapes converging into one shadowy mass that laughed and sobbed and swayed back and forth.
“My loves” the mother said sweetly, in the raspy slow tone of a kind-hearted small-town chainsmoker, “my loves, all this time I was away from you, I was a dog.”
“Hey, you missed the exit. Again.” Scully had a headache that felt like a woodpecker at her frontal lobe and a nagging pain in her lower back that made her feel like she was leaning on barbed wire. She’d been perched in the passenger seat of this shitty rental car for the better part of the last five hours and she was very, very over it.
“Ope, sorry. My bad. I’ll take the next one, promise.”
“Mulder, we’re going to be stuck on this highway until hell freezes over. My back hurts.”
“Sorry, Scully. Promise. We’ll be there soon.”
Scully suppressed a groan and leant her head against the serrated edge of the seatbelt. She and Mulder were going to a conference. A lovely little conference in a police station in coastal Oregon that had nothing whatsoever to do with aliens or Bigfoot or ‘phenomena’ of any sort. Scully had almost leapt out of her seat when A.D Skinner had pressed the informational packet into her hands because a meeting in a seaside town- however dreary- was the perfect thing to do on the FBI’s dime. Maybe Mulder would even join her for a casual dinner and drinks afterwards or something normal and pleasant like that.
Five hours into the journey and Scully not only had totally canned the dinner idea, she reckoned the next foodstuff she saw was going straight into her partners face.
“Mulder, oh my god. You’re driving past it. You’re driving past the next exit. Mulder-“
A horrifying thought dawned on Scully.
“Mulder, are you doing this on purpose?”
Mulder didn’t reply. He stared out the window at the unfolding highway like a man who knew he was driving to his death. The steering wheel was in a vice grip.
“Mulder! Talk to me!”
Mulder downturned his face into a comically exaggerated frown. He still wouldn’t meet her eyes.
“Scully, I may have organised other plans.”
“What other plans? Mulder, don’t tell me you saw a sea monster in one of those magazines. Don’t tell me you heard about a little green man. Don’t do that to me, Mulder. Not right now.”
‘No lake monster. No little grey men. You still get your blissful weekend away by the coast, Scully, mark my words.”
Scully felt like grabbing the wheel and driving the car right off the side of the cliff they were driving along. It would be a swift and fiery death that would suit the both of them.
“There’s something you might want to read in the cooler.”
Who keeps a magazine in a godforsaken cooler? Scully reached around to the back seat, where the cooler-bag she’d stacked water bottles and sandwiches sat. That was how optimistic she’d been about this conference. She’d made them both sandwiches. With turkey slices and crisp iceberg lettuce leaves and tomato. She’d had visions in her head of road trips of her youth, squabbling with her siblings and turkey sandwiches and an easy listening station on the radio as they drove by the beach. Mulder was more baseball commentary than easy listening and more greasy gas station fries than turkey sandwiches. The baseball had prattled on and Mulder had prattled on and Scully felt like she had to be getting her period soon with the way her entire body felt like it was affixed with cheap masking tape one second from crumbling apart, slight cramps eating away at her resolve to stay alive. The sea breeze coming through the window that Mulder insisted on having open was making her hair feel like it was full of ants and grit and Mulders insane monologues about everything they passed (doesn’t that rock formation look like a bit like Skinners face? No, really, look. C’mon Scully, you’re not looking!) felt like razor blades dragging across her cerebrum.
She hadn’t noticed it when she’d filled the bag because she’d just assumed he’d rolled spare maps up in there or something, but the coiled magazine at the bottom of the cooler-bag was, just as she’d feared, a glossy magazine with all the familiar tells of tabloid drivel, the kind of thing gas stations sold to elderly women (and esteemed FBI profiler Fox Mulder) or to dentist offices looking to make their waiting rooms a little bit less drab.
“Check the cover.”
Emblazoned across the front cover was a headshot of a woman. Blonde, she- Scully hated to be like that, but it had to be said- she looked like a very specific kind of woman. Her image conjured up concurrent images of trailer parks and cigarette butts. There was some kind of fuzzy graphic of a dog next to her. In bold words the headline read “GOD’S GIFT AT WORK- I LIVED AS A DOG FOR SEVEN MONTHS?” In a smaller font under that eyegrabber, it was promised that you could learn how her husband and son reacted to this “transformative miracle that opened my third eye.”
Scully groaned. Her headache was getting worse, and at this point, let it. She could imagine worse than an aneurism.
“Mulder, tell me this isn’t about the dog woman.”
“It might be about the dog woman. Scully, what do you know about animal transformation mythos?”
“What do I know about-“
“People transforming into animals is a prevalent part of a myriad of developed cultures worldwide, all throughout history. Native Americans, ancient Egyptians, celtic myths, indigenous Australians- and then you have Japanese kitsune, you know- selkies, werewolves- you get my point.”
Scully wondered if pretending to be violently carsick so he’d have to pull over would be worth it.
“You think there’s truth to this crap?”
“I think it’s better than a conference with a bunch of stuffy cops, Scully.” Mulder smiled.
“Mulder, I can tell you shapeshifting is not in the Bible. And if you’d read the article any further than ogling miss dog-woman on the cover, you’d understand that this is a classic case of small town God-fearing delusion. It’s beneath us, Mulder. We have better things to do.”
Mulder took his eyes off the road for just a second to stare at her. His expression was unreadable, but Scully couldn’t help but feel oddly chilled.
“Trailer-park dog-woman is beneath us, Scully. Alright. Well, did you read the whole article?”
Scully didn’t answer. Of course she hadn’t, she’d only been holding the stupid magazine for two minutes.
“Her husband’s a recovering alcoholic. Her son’s disabled. They were on the verge of selling their house. She had gambling debts, she was being stalked by an old boyfriend from California. There was a police case there for a bit.”
“Hmm?”
“And she says that she had a dream. And in the dream, she turned into a dog. A guard dog, in the dream her husband took the form of a policeman and she took the form of his guard dog. A German Shepard.”
“Where are you going with this, Mulder? Please.”
“I’m saying I think that not only do we have a case of animal transformation here- shapeshifting, if you will- but we have a case of dream transference. This woman’s dream affected her in the real world. If you’ll bear with me here Scully, I’d like to think that this woman had a dream that turned her into this dog. And I think it has something to do with her, who she is as a person. Her life’s circumstances are so specific and dreary that I just think there’s something there. I think there’s a reason she shapeshifted into a dog. I’d like to speak with her.”
Women who had dreams that turned them into dogs. Yeah, Scully thought, A.D Skinner would be a big fan of that one on the case report. She could basically see his glowing face when he’d hand her and Mulder little gold plaques to sit on their desks at the top floor of the Hoover building after their multi-million dollar promotions.
“Mulder, can you just do one thing for me? Please? If I say I’ll go along with this?”
“What’s that, Scully?”
“Pull into this gas station and get me a coffee. And some ibuprofen. Oh, and uh, chips, while you’re at it. Plain. Thankyou, Mulder.”
“Your wish is my command.”
The tension in the car somewhat eased (although Scully, as unwilling to think about animal similes any more than she had to right now, felt a bit like she’d just rolled over and exposed her stomach in a show of submission like some kind of lame greyhound) Mulder pulled into the gas station and shuffled through his jacket pockets for his wallet.
“So” he said, finally unlocking the car door and half stepping out “we’re on the same page? We’ll sort out a motel for tonight and head over to dog-woman’s house in the morning.”
Scully was suddenly overcome with a wave of tiredness. Arguing with Mulder had amped her up and then dropped her all the way back down.
“Chips first, Mulder. Then we’ll talk dog woman.”
“Thanks, Scully.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Scully knew she should get out, stretch her legs, use the bathroom. And she would, but for now she just unbuckled her seatbelt and shifted away from the door, turning around and slowly leaning back so her head ended up where she’d sat and her legs hung over the drivers side seat. Crossing her hands over her stomach she had a morbid sensation of what it would feel like to lie in your own grave. At least in a sense that pertained to her professional career, she sure felt like she was digging it.