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“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call…The Twilight Zone.”
Mr. Mulder’s fate is, in fact, sealed long before he ever enters the depot that night. Peculiar and curious as a boy, it seems that perhaps something of him was made from some scrap of fabric of dimensions beyond his own. A part of a whole destined always to find its way back.
The woman is a similarly curious creature. Her eyes as wide and round as her gentle face, the sum of them together a kind of earnestness which endears her to most, and which marks her as a target to the dishonest and conniving rest. She holds within her all the naive wonder of a bright-eyed girl, and little to none of the madness of a woman who’s seen the things she’s seen.
The difference between the woman and Mr. Mulder, however, is that the woman belongs to another place, a dimension of curiosities and horrors that plague and ponder the very essence and meaning of the human existence, a dimension from which she only sometimes strays through to ours, much in the same manner that the rest of us find ourselves occasionally, unwittingly, passing through the bounds of hers.
They are destined to meet tonight. Both of them ticket holders for bus 731 to Washington, neither intended to make their departure.
The woman is Cassandra Spender, age forty-nine, the type not prone to flights of fantasy, in fact, but merely an unassuming victim of the mundane reality of a dimension not her own. Throughout her life she’s regaled lovers and strangers alike with tales of martians and monsters, only to be met with ridicule, and the awful burden it is to carry knowledge of such things alone. The boy who cried wolf, they say, has nothing on Cassandra Spender. Like some incarnation of the god Apollo’s doomed oracle, Ms. Spender will be helpless to prevent the outcome of this bleak November night’s events, but the eyes of history grow weary watching repeated destinies, and they have never seen a Fox Mulder before. Tonight, perhaps, the curse is broken; tonight, perhaps, a lone ear will attune to her prophecy.
Ms. Spender, as of yet unaware, tucks her suitcase under the edge of the bench and approaches the clerk at the desk. “Excuse me, might I bother you for a moment, sir?”
The portly man grunts without a glance away from the magazine in which he’s engrossed. Ms. Spender clears her throat with a nervous crinkle between her brows. “Sir, if I might ask about an update on the arrival of bus-“
“Look, miss, this rain is causing problems all over the roads tonight. Your bus will arrive when it arrives, and no amount of asking for updates is gonna make that happen any sooner,” the man at the desk grumbles, looking now at Ms. Spender’s face with unmasked irritation.
She’s taken aback by his poor manners, of course, but moreso she’s peeved at his addressing her as though she’s been a pest, when in fact she’s waited patiently for an entire half hour past the time printed on her ticket. “Well,” she fumbles for the right words, “I don’t think that’s quite fair, sir.”
The clerk huffs a sigh. “Miss, I swear, you’ll know at the same time I do—we’ll both hear it coming with the way that engine rumbles. Until you hear that sound, you know as well as I do that it’s pouring buckets and the roads out there are something treacherous. I didn’t have an estimate the last time you asked, and I don’t have an estimate now.” He looks over his magazine at her like she’s a pest animal he wishes to shoo away.
Cassandra squares her shoulders. “I understand all that, sir, but what I don’t understand is your implication that I’ve been inundating you with these requests. I’ve waited quite patiently and I don’t appreciate this tone you’ve taken with me.”
“Miss,” the clerk says with an indignant snort, “This the third time you’ve been up here.”
Her heart takes a stutter-step within her chest. “You must be mistaken! This is—” At that moment, her eyes catch onto something over the clerk’s shoulder in the luggage room and she gets a cold, sinking feeling in her stomach. “Say, that suitcase there…it looks just like mine. The handle is broken and everything.”
“Lady, what are you playing at here?” the clerk demands. When she merely looks at him aghast, he says, “That is your suitcase!”
“No…that’s…”
Impossible, Cassandra thinks, though she’s already beginning to understand. This is going to be one of those times—an unlikely and inexplicable time, in which she will be deemed crazy, mad, hysterical, over one very strange and very singular experience. She glances over her shoulder and is struck by the urge to cry. The case she’d so carefully tucked away at the edge of the bench is nowhere to be seen.
She turns back to the immovable clerk, alarmed and pleading. “Oh, but I never checked a bag! Please, you have to believe me! I don’t know why this is happening to me—why this always happens to me!”
The man gives her a flat, weary look in return. “Perhaps you’re just so tired you’ve forgotten.”
Ms. Spender’s eyes take on a distant, glazed over look. “Perhaps I am,” she replies. She moves on shaking legs to the powder room, where she clutches the cold porcelain edges of the sink.
“Are you alright, miss?” comes the gentle voice of the attendant.
Fighting back the sob that wants to tear loose from her throat, her voice is ragged and harsh. “Of course I’m alright! Why do you ask? Is there some reason why I shouldn’t be alright?”
“No, not at all. It’s just that when you were in here before—”
The comment draws her attention sharply to the attendant, her posture stiffening and her head whipping around to appraise the hesitant woman. “What do you mean by that? Before?”
“Well, just that you were in here a few moments ago…”
Panic is barely concealed beneath her sharp gaze. “I’ve never been in here before! Not once! I don’t know what kind of game you people are playing but I want no part in it!”
“There’s…there’s no game, miss.” The attendant’s eyes are timid and wet with pity. “Please, try not to get so worked up. Everything will be alright.”
“Of course it will!” Cassandra snaps. “Nothing was ever wrong in the first place! Except maybe that you all must be drinking yourselves silly on the job!”
Fear—and somewhere deeper down, a denial of what she already knows to be possible—threatens to make her snap. She gives the door a hard push, but before she can make her exit, her eyes catch upon a woman sitting on the bench that she herself had only recently vacated. The strange woman’s shoulders are slender, her dull blonde hair cut to a pointed bob at the nape of her neck. Ms. Spender has the distinct impression of looking at the back of her own head. She stumbles back a step and is met by the worried attendant, who places a hand upon her back and offers her a cold cloth.
Cassandra takes a slow, tremulous step toward the door again and pushes it open far enough to allow a slight peek at the bench. No one is there. She emits a high pitched, nervous laugh that her ears hardly register as her own. “I must simply be exhausted,” she says without conviction. “Yes, I’ll be alright. That’s all this is—simple exhaustion.”
Returning to her seat in a daze, she’s startled by the presence of a newcomer in the station—a young man.
He wears a long black overcoat, its shoulders as wet from the downpour as the brim of the hat on his head. His suit appears to be a size and a half too big, making him look all the younger, like a boy in his father’s clothes.
Accustomed as she is to being dismissed, Cassandra Spender almost doesn’t bother saying anything to him at all, but something about this man—this boy, really—feels safe. Something she can’t pinpoint—perhaps the manifestation of some shared truth between them—and she decides, for the time being, that she’ll let herself try.
“Excuse me?” she approaches.
Still standing, he tilts his face down to her. “Yes?” he answers, his interest genuine.
“I see you’ve just come in and I hoped I might ask—did you happen to see anyone sitting at that bench over there?” She motions generally.
The man glances briefly over her shoulder at the area she’s indicated, his brows furrowing in contemplation, but he’s quick to shake his head. “No, miss, I don’t believe I did. I’m normally a bit more observant but, well, it’s been a long day.”
Cassandra purses her lips in a defeated attempt at a smile. “Right, well. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“No, n-not a bother at all,” he replies, his eyes scanning over her face. “Is everything alright? You seem…disappointed.”
She is, of course. That uncanny sixth sense of hers seemed to hint that finally someone might see the world as she sees it, that she might finally have a co-conspirator with whom to share her truth. She’d thought she might not go through the ordeal alone this time.
“Oh! No, I’m quite alright dear. I’m sorry, I just…I thought I saw someone I knew…” She trails off uneasily. It doesn’t go unnoticed, for Mr. Mulder’s senses are as keen and clever as those of his namesake creature.
Cassandra returns to the dreadful seat she’d occupied before, suppressing a shudder at the image of the look-alike woman in this very spot. Her eyes remain fixed to a chip in the linoleum flooring as she takes steady breaths. Delusions—that’s what they must be! Prone to them all her life, she’s been foolish to think she’d ever be free of them. Brought on by the tired, or the stress of travel, or perhaps even by illness. She doesn’t think she has a fever, but certainly the draft and the weather could have hastened the onset of a cold. Surely, just a delusion.
The approach of a figure in her peripheral disturbs her introspection. Mr. Mulder does not yet know why he feels so compelled to help this strange woman, except that he feels compelled to help the majority of perceived victims and underdogs alike, as has always been the strongest of his weaknesses. “Excuse me, miss?”
Ms. Spender jumps to attention and finds the young man in front of her once more.
“This bag, does it belong to you?”
Her jaw drops. He extends the handle of her suitcase for her to accept, but she’s so taken aback she can do little more than stare.
“Um…” He scratches the back of his neck with his free hand. “There’s nobody else here, so I’d assumed... I suppose it could have been left behind by a passenger earlier in the day—”
“No!” she cries, some weariness settling bone-deep as she’s pulled back and forth between maintained composure and undisguised alarm. “I’m sorry, it’s just a surprise to see that you’ve found it.”
“It was just over there,” he says, motioning to the next row over. When she still makes no move to accept the bag, Mr. Mulder places it on the ground, just to the left of her feet, and settles himself hesitantly another seat’s length left of the bag, leaving a polite gap between them so as not to crowd the already frazzled woman.
“Guess today’s my lucky day,” he offers conversationally, but his keen eyes are watching her carefully. “Bus seems to be running even later than I am.”
Cassandra offers a polite laugh without looking at him, still fixated on the bag he’d set at her feet, something like trepidation written across her face.
He tries again. “It took quite a series of cab rides to make it here. The planes are all grounded owing to this storm.” When it becomes clear she’s not going to engage in his small talk, he asks, “Miss, are you sure you’re alright? Forgive my insistence, but you don’t look well, and if there’s anything I might do to help—”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Cassandra admits. “Strange things have been happening to me all evening here in this depot and for the life of me, I don’t understand it! I mean—I do understand, in a way, but all the same…I’ve never really understood at all.”
“How do you mean?” Mr. Mulder, an occasional denizen of the same world of oddities, has, himself, had his fair share of understanding in a way, but all the same, never really understanding at all.
Ms. Spender shifts to angle herself toward him. “I’ve been seeing things where they’re not…or, not seeing things where they are…or…oh, I don’t know! Even if I could explain it decently, you wouldn’t believe a word of it!”
A slight but crooked smile pulls at the young man’s lips, and his eyes hold a spark of amusement. “You’d be surprised what I’ll believe.” At her continued hesitation, he goes on. “Strange happenings, you said? Well, I’m not so sure about strange, but I do consider myself somewhat of an expert in spooky. My name is Mulder—Fox Mulder. Maybe it’ll help to tell me what’s happened. Maybe I can help explain it.”
Cassandra finally offers him a genuine smile, put at ease by his good humor and gentle demeanor. “I’ve been Cassandra Spender my whole life…though tonight I’m not so sure. I’m going to visit my son—he’s probably about your age. According to the clerk at the ticketing desk, I’ve been up multiple times to ask about the bus, though I can assure you, I asked only once. And the woman in the washroom, she said that I’d been in there already when I most definitely had not! Oh, and my suitcase! There’s an identical one in the luggage room—has the same broken handle and all—and the clerk insists that I checked it, but clearly I’ve done no such thing!”
Concern reads freely on Fox Mulder’s face when she pauses to take a breath, but absent is pity. That, she determines, is why she keeps talking.
“But the most unsettling thing is…well, when I opened the door to exit the powder room…I saw her. She looked just like me.” Cassandra lowers her voice to a hush, though the change in volume does nothing to diminish the intensity of her conviction. “I fear these are delusions. That’s what I’ve been told before. But I have no temperature—no indication of fever. I’m quite tired, but it’s not as though I’ve gone days without sleep…and yet…I’m seeing things that can’t be real.” She pauses for a beat and her expressive features take on a look of confusion. “But then…why did the clerk say he’d seen me before—or the woman in the powder room?” She regards the man before her with wide, pleading eyes. “Could it be something more than my eyes playing tricks?”
“Well,” Mulder starts slowly, carefully, “it’s possible that someone is playing some kind of a joke…o-or that there was another woman here who bears an implausible—but not impossible—resemblance to you. These odd sorts of circumstances manifest far more frequently than you’d think.”
“Yes, I suppose so. Though at this hour, with the depot as empty as it is, I’d think the presence of another woman would be more obvious. And what reason would these people have to pull such a joke on me?”
The rumbling of an engine grows louder as the desk clerk announces the arriving bus, a hint of sardonic annoyance to his tone. Her question goes unanswered as the impending bus provides a distraction. Mr. Mulder reaches for the elusive suitcase and the duo make to stand.
“Allow me,” he insists with a gentlemanly smile.
Suddenly overwhelmed at the realization that she had not been dismissed outright, not shunned or scolded or laughed off, she catches his arm and he half-turns with a questioning look. “I appreciate your kindness, Mr. Mulder…it’s something I receive very little of.”
With a smile and a slight nod of his head, he says, “You deserve more of it.” He holds her gaze meaningfully for a moment before he turns. “We’d better get moving.”
As the unlikely pair approaches the bus, Cassandra goes white as a sheet and emits a shrill gasp. Right there in a seat facing the window is a woman wearing her clothes, her hair, her exact face. The faintest hint of a smile pulls at the double’s mouth with a smug sort of satisfaction. Mr. Mulder, who’d had one foot poised to step onto the bus, stumbles backwards and rushes to her side.
“Miss Spender—Cassandra, what’s happened?” He reaches her just as her head tips back and her body begins to crumple. Over his shoulder, he hollers to the driver to wait.
“Sorry the lady is ill, mister, but I’ve gotta get a move on! You know how behind schedule I am already?” the sour-faced driver asks rhetorically.
“Well then, we’ll take the next one!” Mulder levels him a frustrated glare but there’s little heat in it, as it melts away entirely when he focuses in on his distressed companion once more. He guides her gently to the nearest seat, contemplating whether he should leave her to phone for help or wait to see how quickly she comes to.
The driver calls out again. “Next bus on this route ain’t due ‘til mid-morning. You’ll have to wait here through the night.” Sealing their fate, the doors clank shut and the bus creeps forward again with the squeal of tired brakes and the roar of the engine. Mulder feels the noise resonate in his bones as he moves in a similar manner to the clerk’s desk to call for emergency assistance.
It depends upon one’s point of view, whether it is lucky or unlucky that Ms. Spender begins to rouse as soon as Mr. Mulder returns from the phone. It is lucky that her spell was brought on merely by a flight of fear, as opposed to any malady of the heart or brain, but it is rather unlucky, in a way, that she has time to give voice to her fear prior to the arrival of the help Mr. Mulder had called upon.
Cassandra blinks open her weary eyes. Her demeanor, alarmed, distraught, at odds with the exhausted slump of her body. Mr. Mulder gives her a moment to reorient herself before he tells her she’d fainted. When she finally speaks, it’s little more than a whisper. “Why didn’t you get on the bus?”
He appears incredulous. “I couldn’t very well leave you here unconscious and alone. There will be more buses.” With an air of unaffected humor that he doesn’t quite sell, he adds, “besides, I was already late—I’ve been slowed at every turn today. I’m starting to think this is exactly how this was meant to happen—that I was meant to be here when you needed help.”
Ms. Spender turns to face him with sad, shimmering eyes. “This is what always happens, you know.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I heard this explanation a long time ago, and, given the experiences I’ve had, I can’t imagine much else would be quite so fitting. There’s this…idea. That parallel worlds can exist side by side. That there are planes of existence different from our own. I’ve been, I think. To one…or maybe more than one, I’m not exactly sure how it all works.”
As if to clear a mental fog, Mulder shakes his head and takes off his hat, placing it on the bench to his other side. Of all the questions he wants to ask, and of all the things he knows he should say, all he can manage is, “You’ve…been?”
“Yes,” Cassandra replies, voice quavering. “There’ve been so many instances of time that I’ve lost and can’t remember. Instances of men who spoke in my head without uttering a single word aloud. Of strangely shaped beings that disappeared when I’d look directly at them.”
“That’s quite metaphysical,” Mulder says slowly.
“It’s alright if you don’t believe me. I’ve told you, these things have been happening all my life and no one has ever believed me. Not even my son.”
Mulder frowns at this. “And I’ve told you, you’d be surprised what I’ll believe. You’ve evidently seen something that’s frightened you. Who am I to question what exactly it is that you’ve said you experienced?”
Ms. Spender looks at him like he might be one of her shapeless shadow creatures. “So you…you do believe me?”
“I… I want to. I’d like to understand, I think.” The sound of sirens grows heavy as police approach, but neither of them seem to hear, transfixed as they are by the unveiling of this strange world. “Tell me, the woman you saw tonight…you think she’s from one of these parallel dimensions?”
At that moment, two officers make their entrance into the bus depot scouting for the fainted woman, to whom the paramedics will attend upon their arrival. They find, however, only one woman, and she’s speaking animatedly.
“Of all the things I’ve seen, why shouldn’t I believe there’s another me…a counterpart in one of those other worlds who ended up here by some mistake. There must have been some convergence, something that allowed her to walk right into this very station. I couldn’t begin to describe how or why, but, yes…I’m certain that’s the case. Perhaps she was discontent in her world and decided to take the opportunity she saw in this one. You must understand, not every world is like this one. I’ve seen rather horrid beings. Horrid men doing horrid things. I think that some places breed evil, and that those hungry enough with power will take any opportunity to reach through and wrap their dark fists around the light of something they cannot understand.”
At her companion’s mildly horrified expression, she changes course.
“Oh, neither are they all so wretched, Mr. Mulder. Some are delightfully odd, innocently different. There are wonders too, of course! I believe that some of the convergences carry us across like a ship caught in a current, or left to the mercy of the wind. Sometimes we’re simply directed somewhere we never intended to go, but it isn’t always a bad thing. The woman—the other Cassandra—must have been carried here on a current, and I think…I think she decided to stay the course.”
Cassandra takes a meaningful pause and regards her companion with damp eyes. She says, “I hope she finds peace here.”
Somewhere behind the bench upon which the duo sit, a police officer clears his throat. He aims a piteous look at Mulder while his partner addresses Cassandra. “Miss, we received a call about a woman who’d fainted. Was that you?”
She appears startled. “Oh, yes, but I’m quite alright,” she insists, looking between Mr. Mulder and the two officers, who exchange a look between themselves.
“Miss,” one of them says. He’s tall, with a remarkably squared jaw and a skeptical wrinkle between his brows. “I really think you ought to let us take you to the hospital. Just to get checked out.”
Cassandra rises and gives a nervous laugh, shifting her feet. “I’d really rather not. I’ve already missed one bus, I can’t afford to miss the next one. My son is expecting me.”
“That’s alright,” the second officer says, approaching her with one slow step at a time. “We’ll call him for you.”
Uneasy and sensing a hostile sort of tension starting to color the exchange, Mulder stands too. “I’m the one who placed the call. I apologize for wasting your time, officers, but it does appear now that I overreacted.”
“No apologies necessary,” says the square-faced officer. “You did the right thing.” He turns to regard Cassandra again, taking another step toward her. “Miss, I’m afraid I must insist. It’s important that we make sure you’re well.”
“Oh, I’d really rather not.”
“What if you hit your head?”
“Oh, but I didn’t!”
“Well, just think of it as a simple check-up.”
“I’m well enough, thank you.”
“Miss—”
“Oh for Christsakes!” the second officer interjects as he storms past his partner and grasps Ms. Spender by the wrist. “Lady, no less than five minutes ago you were talking crazy—we heard every bit of it standing just over there! That’s not what I would call well! We’ll have to take you to the hospital for observation.”
Cassandra stumbles backwards, shrieking, “No!”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Mulder makes a move forward to intervene, driven by impulse and the subconscious desire to hear every last story Ms. Spender has to offer, but the second officer claps a strong hand onto his shoulder and gives him a stiff, sympathetic look.
“It was awfully kind of you to sit by and listen to a strange woman’s nonsense like that, keeping her calm until we could get here. I’m sure she’s a sweet lady, but she’s clearly unwell. You’re a good man for being worried, but you just let us handle this. We’ll make sure she gets the medical care she needs.”
Fidgeting to see around the bulky officer, he tries to track the wailing Cassandra with his eyes as the other cop marches her outside to the waiting squad car. The officer in front of him heaves a deep sigh. “Son, surely you know this is what’s best for her…you realize she’s delusional, don’t you? If she doesn’t let a doctor take a look at her she’s liable to scare herself to death just walking around out here.”
Brewing like a storm inside him are feelings of doubt and sadness, anger and guilt that keep him from supplying a casual response. “I–” he falters, which makes the officer chuckle.
“Well, you just be careful out here. Try not to get tangled up in another dimension,” the officer mocks lightly as he turns to follow his partner.
Mulder stays rooted in place, trying desperately to process the whirlwind he’s just experienced. He wonders if it makes him unwell too if he believes Cassandra Spender.
He drops wearily onto the bench and scrubs his face with shaking hands, fighting off the sinking feeling that he’s just made a terrible mistake. The little voice of reason sitting as an angel on his shoulder tells him that he’d done the right thing in the moment, that she’d needed medical attention having fainted as she did. It reassures him that the most likely explanation is the one the officer had provided, that the source of Ms. Spender’s tale is little more than an elaborate delusion. That voice is, however, perplexingly silent as he ponders the veracity of Cassandra’s reactions, the strength of her convictions, seeming instead to defer to the twinge of certainty he feels in the pit of his stomach.
Reaching for his hat, he decides that a walk in the rain will be enough to clear his head. His hand fumbling blindly through open air, he sighs and turns his gaze to help the search, only to find an empty expanse of bench at his side. He looks around more frantically, his attention drawn by some magnetic pull to the slender masculine figure just slipping out the front entrance of the bus depot. Though it’d been only the slightest glance, his blood runs cold at the striking similarity of the other man's overcoat and hat to Mulder’s own. With almost no conscious effort, he breaks into a jog and begins hollering after the man.
As soon as Mulder makes it outside, he’s rendered motionless by the sight awaiting him. Several yards away, the figure had stopped and turned to face the depot, as though waiting for Mulder to follow. For a moment in time, a millisecond frozen into an eternity in the peculiar bubble between this world and the next, the two figures assess each other. A mirror image, sans one hat. But when time ticks forward again, the one tips the hat at the other with a smirk, then turns and continues his journey.
“Hey!” Mulder shouts. “That hat is mine! You owe me an explanation for all this!” He takes off on athlete’s legs, but his double maintains a perfectly synchronized pace in front of him, preventing him from closing any distance at even his fastest sprint.
He slows to a stop and takes a few heaving breaths as the figure rounds a distant street corner and disappears from sight. He’s uncertain how long he remains stuck in that manner—gulping hungrily for air, indifferent to the heavy sheets of rain still crying down from the heavens. Struggling to process his shock, there is but one thought that takes definite shape among the indecipherable jumble of his mind. He wonders where on earth—if on Earth—he might speak to Ms. Spender again.
Eventually, he returns to the bench, thoroughly defeated and chilled to the bone by the cling of his rain-soaked clothes. The quiet crawling of time allows him to doze off in the depot, and when he awakens hours later to the weak winter sun creeping toward its nexus in the sky, he stretches his sore back, hears his stiff joints pop, and shakes his head to clear the fog of dreaming.
But of course, he will soon come to find that the previous night's events, and all those still to follow, are neither remnants of a dream nor figments of imagination. For the year is 1959 and two buses sit idling next to each other in the depot, identical in every respect but one. A young man by the rather unfortunate name of Fox Mulder, age thirty-one, is due to set off on one of these buses for a trip of indeterminate duration and destination, intending to use his burgeoning skill as a writer to bring life to forgotten stories, to glean inspiration for the tales he’s been called upon to spin. What he does not yet know is that he will continue to bear witness to these peculiar and surreal happenings as they seem to follow him, a direct result of his choice not to board the initial bus that night. A mistake in the re-booking of his ticket at his outset means that he will not board the 10:00 bus to Washington as he’d intended. Rather, Fox Mulder will unknowingly find himself presenting his ticket and boarding the second bus, one that is bound for a drastically different terminus, and that requires a passage through the mystifying space and time known only as…The Twilight Zone.