“I get it.” Mulder’s mother had never been the same after his younger sister, Samantha, disappeared almost five and a half years ago. Every night she would put on her apron and prepare one of her specialties—meat loaf or a casserole—in an attempt to make it feel as if their family wasn’t falling apart. She would sit at the kitchen table and read a magazine or clip coupons while she waited for the oven timer to go off. After the third time he found his mom staring into space, while the oven timer buzzed and a casserole burned to a crisp in the oven ten feet away from her, Mulder learned to listen for the buzzer.
One night, he made the mistake of taking a shower before it went off. By the time he made it to the kitchen, the alarm was blaring and a veil of black smoke had filled the kitchen. His mom sat in the midst of it all, her cheeks smudged with tears.
Mulder swallowed hard and pushed away the memory. “Are we going inside or what?”
“I guess.” Gimble took out his keys and unlocked the five dead bolts on the door.
Mulder followed him inside, but he stopped cold just past the front hallway. It opened up into what Mulder assumed was supposed to be the living room, but he wasn’t sure because every square inch of the space—except for a sofa, a recliner, and a small patch of shag carpet in the center—was covered with junk.
No wonder Gimble hadn’t invited him over before. Most people would’ve taken off the moment they walked in, but Mulder found his friend’s house oddly fascinating.
“The Major saves everything.” Gimble walked over to the television set and picked up a two-way radio sitting on top. He pressed the button on the side and spoke into it. “It’s me. I’m home.”
Static crackled through the speaker, followed by a man’s gravelly voice. “This is a secure line. Code words?”
Gimble rolled his eyes. “Agent of Chaos.”
The radio crackled again. “Meet me at the extraction point at sixteen hundred.”
“He means four o’clock,” Gimble explained to Mulder before signing off. “Got it. I’m out.” He returned the two-way radio to its original location on top of the TV set, his shoulders sagging. “Sorry. If I don’t ‘report in’ when I get home, the Major will think I’m an intruder.”
“That could be interesting.” Mulder grinned to let Gimble know that he wasn’t judging.
Gimble perked up. “You don’t want to be the guinea pig in that experiment. Trust me.”
Mulder thought the whole code word thing was sort of cool, like everything else in the room. But dropping by after school wasn’t the same as living here. He took a closer look around.
In addition to books, a row of bookshelves held small cardboard boxes with masking tape labels, numbered VHS tapes, two shortwave radios, some kind of handheld transceiver or CB, a sextant, bowls of rocks, and boxes of cream-filled snack cakes. Mulder picked up a gray rock the size of his fist and tossed it in his hand like a baseball. Nothing special about it, as far as he could tell.
He moved on to the books, scanning the titles in some of the stacks: The Encyclopedia of Unexplained Phenomena, Breaking the Crop Circle Code, Evolution and the Human Brain, The Truth About Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination, Secrets of the Solar System, and Applied Astrophysics. There were a few titles he recognized—like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984, and The Martian Chronicles—and at least half a dozen paperback copies of a book Mulder had never heard of called Stormbringer. Judging by the long-haired albino warrior on the cover, it was a fantasy novel.
The room was jam-packed, but Mulder realized the Major had created his own organizational system. Newspapers and magazines were stacked against the walls according to publication and year, and the towers of books beside them were sorted by category, like physics, space exploration, natural disasters, American presidents, and … aliens?
But the Major’s taste in reading material wasn’t nearly as interesting as the wallpaper job he’d given the room. Newspaper clippings and photos of what resembled crop circles and UFOs obscured most of the blue paint, and a huge map covered the far wall, with pieces of yellow string crisscrossing between the colored pushpins.
“What is all this?” Mulder stared at the walls, transfixed.
“The Major is always tracking something—natural disasters, meteors, unusual weather patterns, shortwave radio transmissions. You name it.” Gimble’s cheeks turned red and he looked away. “Let’s head to my room before he comes up from the basement. That’s where he keeps his files.”
“What kind of files?” After seeing the walls, Mulder was curious.
“Who knows? Maybe he’s saving the ‘secret messages’ he decodes from the backs of our cereal boxes.” Gimble kept his tone light as he led Mulder through the kitchen to a back staircase. He sounded worn out and kind of embarrassed, so Mulder pretended not to notice a bicycle lock wrapped around the refrigerator door handles.
Gimble’s bedroom was at the top of the steps.
“This is it,” his friend said proudly as he opened the door.
When Mulder walked in, his first thought was how much Gimble’s bedroom reminded him of Phoebe’s. Books overflowed the shelves, and a miniature model of the Enterprise hung above a small desk. Handwritten lists and charts were taped on a wall next to a Star Wars movie poster that still had fold marks on it.