Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire.

“Okay, that’s a good pun.” Agent John Doggett chuckled at the sun-faded sign over the storefront, then knocked back the rest of his gas station coffee and stepped out of the rental sedan into the empty parking lot. “Christ, it’s hot in San Jose in June. I don’t know why I didn’t think it would be.”

“Because you’re an East Coast boy,” Monica Reyes replied with a small smile at her partner. She’d grown up in Mexico City, after all. This heat was nothing.

In her hands, Monica held a manila folder the two FBI agents had been handed by Assistant Director Walter Skinner. Their boss hadn’t said a single word about the contents of the folder, but he had worn an expression that let them know not even to ask. Back in their basement office at the J. Edgar Hoover building of the FBI in Washington D.C., the agents assigned to The X-Files, the division that investigated the strange and unexplained, had read about the owner of a furniture store named Clark, his therapist Dr. Mary Kline, and two young people (Kathrine Taylor and Bobby Franklin) who had all gone missing twelve years prior. The San Jose and California State Police had come up with nothing. The only fact anyone could agree on was that the last physical location where any of them had existed was the furniture store Agents Doggett and Reyes now stood before.

Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire.

Monica took in the dated and deserted storefront in the dead strip mall, the image of a pirate, the odd pun of a business name. As she considered it, Monica felt….something. Something weird in her gut said this place was more than it seemed. And Monica Reyes always trusted her gut.

“A furniture store,” Doggett said with a hint of annoyance. He pulled at the neck of his blue collared shirt. This was official business after all, and he’d come dressed for it in a blue suit and tie.

“A furniture store.” Monica said with curiosity. Immediately, she rolled her eyes at her partner as he gave her that look. The look he got when she was curious about something he thought was nothing. That was them; the believer and the skeptic. It was not lost on Monica that, with the disappearance of the Fox Mulder, the previous agent in charge of the X-Files, she was now the spooky one assigned to The X-Files. From Spooky Mulder to Spooky Monica. She’d heard the nickname whispered in the halls of the FBI building more times than she could count.

A silver key was taped inside the manila folder, and Monica ripped it out. “Care to poke around and see if we can find any sign of four people who vanished twelve years ago?”

“I’ll say it again. Not sure why this is an X-File,” Doggett muttered. Monica slipped her wallet and flashlight into the pockets of her long black jacket and left the manila folder in the car, which Doggett locked while he kept talking. “More likely the guy killed all of them and just did a real smart job hiding the bodies before he offed himself.”

Monica tilted her head at him as they walked toward the door. “Skinner wouldn’t have bothered sending us across the country for that.”

“He’s got pressures we can’t even imagine,” Doggett shrugged. “Could be personal for some higher-up. Could be the family isn’t letting up.”

“Or it could genuinely be an X-File. Not a trace of any of them was ever found? Not one?” No matter what the case, there was almost always something.

“Some killers get away with it,” Doggett said with a cold edge.

They let the discussion drift away in the light breeze. The doors and windows of the store were covered in metal bars, and some parts had been boarded up with plywood which was now covered in graffiti and Missing posters. Monica studied what remained of Kat Taylor and Bobby Franklin’s young faces in the posters ravaged by weather and time. Four people were missing. There were people left behind who had loved them. Those people wanted answers. Deserved them.

Monica unlocked the door and they entered a great big empty room with six pillars that had once been a large furniture showroom just like any other. It might have been looted in the years since the disappearances. The few pieces of furniture that remained had all been broken. Everything from that moment on would go in a report. Monica held up her wrist to show Doggett the clockface of her delicate silver watch. “It’s 10:24am.”

Doggett noted his digital watch. “Yep.”

Seeing no immediately available light switches, they propped the door open and turned on their flashlights to do a routine sweep of the space. Doggett took one side of the room and Monica the other. Monica walked the right side of the room, methodically going up and down with her beam of light, but other than a couple unmade beds and trash bags she assumed were from squatters, it was fruitless. The room smelled a little damp but nothing interesting. No obvious smells of decay. A rather sad poster of a tropical beach had been stuck on one wall by the employee desk, as if to cover up even a bit of the plain-painted walls.

Monica imagined Clark and Kat at the desk, waiting for customers who weren’t coming. The store was struggling financially prior to the disappearances. In a short period of time, Clark, Kat, Bobby Franklin, and Dr. Mary Kline all just disappeared. Because 1990 was a time before any larger surveillance or widespread internet access, the few leads (mainly a quick conversation Bobby had when he had checked out a video camera from his community college film department, Dr. Kline’s notes about Clark, and the discovery of her car in the parking lot) had led law enforcement to this store. This…boring, empty, vaguely echo-y sad store. And then after years and years of no new leads, the case went cold.

Maybe Doggett was right. Maybe this was nothing more than a pointless trip to San Jose.

Yet, she remembered Skinner’s face when he’d given her the folder. There’d been a look in his eyes. Skinner had a whole team of agents under him who could have handled if it was just an ordinary cold case. There had to be a reason he had come to them. Had to be.

“Yeah, there’s nothing here,” Doggett said when they reunited at the back of the room. “Let’s find the electrical box. Where the hell are the light switches?”

“Maybe there’s more downstairs.” Monica smirked as he followed her flashlight beam up to a hanging sign that declared MORE DOWNSTAIRS in big red and yellow letters.

“You think?” Doggett teased her with a big sweep of his arm toward the stairs. “No, please. After you. Ladies first.”

The bottom of the stairs landed in the center of another large room. It had probably also been a showroom, but it was largely empty now. Monica’s beam of light landed on an electrical box, which Doggett went straight for and flipped switches until the neon overhead lights came on.

“I wonder who’s still paying the electric bill,” Monica said as they turned off their flashlights.

“The owner of the strip mall maybe. Would you look at that?” At the bottom of the rows of switches were two red switches set at a weird angle. Doggett flipped them a few times to see if anything happened. It had no effect. “Geez, that’s shitty electrical work. Maybe this is all about code violations."

Sure, the switches were odd, but everything else felt off as well. Despite the size of the room, the walls felt horribly close. Apart from a metal patio table and two chairs, a smeared dry erase board, and the outline of a door on one wall made out of blue painters tape, it was too empty. Abandoned. There was a stuffiness in the air, and Monica had the thought that the nothingness hung over the space like a fog hiding.

Whatever is here doesn’t want to be found. Monica studied the blue outline of a door. Someone had made it. “That’s weird.”

Doggett flipped the edge of the tape. “Maybe Clark was going to paint something?”

“In this one particular spot in the bottom level of a furniture store?”

Her partner shrugged. “The hell do I know about art.”

He was so frustratingly normal sometimes.

Monica moved closer to the door while Doggett circled the rest of the room. Yeah, she felt it. Stronger now. The unexplainable, indescribable thing she felt when something was strange. Because something about those inches around the door felt stranger than anything she had ever felt before. Monica set a hand against the painted wall and sucked in a breath as her fingers did not find a solid wall but instead moved farther forward and disappeared from her sight.

It wasn’t wet or cold. It didn’t feel like anything, and she pulled back quickly. She wiggled her fingers. Her hand was fine.

So she did it again. Again, it was fine despite how strange it felt to see her hand disappear.

Doggett was only a few yards away. She could have gotten his attention and showed him. She could have held onto one of his hands as a lifeline. But everything except the wall faded from her mind as something she didn’t understand compelled her forward.

Monica stepped through the wall.