The X-Files

Morris?

Morris, I need to talk to you!

Morris, it's me. Are you in there?

Morris?

Morris, if you're in there, open the damn door!

Morris! Morris, open up!

Morris, I need to talk to you!

Gail Anne is dead. It was my fault.

Morris!

Morris, I need to talk to you.

Come to the door, Morris, please. Answer the door, dammit!

- Oh, no! - (Morris wails)

No.

Oh, God, no! No, God!

God, no.

No,no,no,no,no.

Please, no. Please!

Two apparent abductions in a month, then this one.

My contact says the Richmond PD's hit a brick wall, so I said we'd have a look.

- Who's your contact? - Kelly Ryan.

She was one of my students at the academy.

She's been bumped up to detective...

...and she's nervous about her supervisor finding out the FBI are involved.

- Kelly? - Agent Scully.

- Hi. This is Agent Mulder. - Hi. Thank you for coming.

- You're welcome. - Heard a lot about you.

We'll talk later.

The missing man is Patrick Newirth, aged 52.

He's a top executive with Morley Tobacco, up here for a meeting.

- He arrived by train. - How do you know he's missing?

He set a wake-up call for 6am. The operator tried, but got no answer.

Mm. Scotch. It looks like he barely touched it.

Needless to say, he missed his meeting. After three hours, they sent hotel security up.

The door was locked, security chain fastened. And when they broke in, no Patrick Newirth.

- Windows? - Locked from the inside.

We're six storeys up, no fire escape. No way in or out of this room.

- Agent Scully, what are you lookin' at? - Uh, the heat register.

- You think anyone could squeeze in there? - You never know.

- You guys turn up any forensics evidence? - Uh, just this.

- Scully, look at this. - What is it?

We don't know. The hotel claims it wasn't here before Mr Newirth checked in.

There were similar burn marks at the previous crime scenes.

- Was Patrick Newirth a smoker? - No. His wife says he loathed cigarettes.

- Yet he worked for a tobacco company. - Did you run a test on it?

Yes, sir. Mostly carbon, with some potassium and trace minerals.

- Could be residue from burnt human flesh. - Does this look like an arm to anybody?

- An arm? - What are you thinkin', Mulder?

This burn mark is right where I'd stand to answer the door, right?

- (Scully) Yes. - And I'd only look out the peephole...

- ...if there was something to look at, right? - That makes sense.

- Could you have this bulb dusted for prints? - Of course.

And can you run those against Mr Newirth's? Do you have his prints?

From his toiletries and check-in slip.

Check them against all hotel employees and guests.

- Anything else? - What's the name of the last missing person?

That would be Margaret Wysnecki.

Thanks. This should do it.

Is this your first case, Detective?

- Yes, sir. - Any idea why they gave it to you?

No one else wanted it.

Because of the lack of evidence, this is still a missing persons case...

...not likely to end up on the front pages.

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Can I ask what you think may have happened?

At first blush? Spontaneous human combustion.

You're doing just fine.

- Having a little fun? - What do you mean?

- Spontaneous human combustion? - I have case files of bodies reduced to ash...

...with no attendant burning or melting. Rapid oxidation without heat.

Let's forget that there's no scientific theory to support it.

OK.

Hey, Scully. Can you spare a prophylactic?

What are the odds of that, huh?

Darkness covers a multitude of sins.

Check this out. My newest tool in the fight against crime.

$49.95 at your local hardware store.

Neat trick. For your birthday, I'll buy you a utility belt.

- Look at this, Mulder. - Hm. What do we know about the victim?

Margaret Wysnecki, aged 66.

Widowed, retired from Laramie Tobacco, where she worked for 36 years.

Tobacco? Patrick Newirth worked for Morley Tobacco.

Half of Richmond earns their paycheck making cancer sticks.

- Could be just a coincidence. - Yeah, probably.

The first missing person, Gail Anne Lambert, worked for Polarity Magnetics Inc.

They didn't find any prints. Why should the prints on the bulb mean anything?

I don't know.

Oh, look at this, Scully. Someone forgot to empty the trash.

M Wysnecki, round trip to Hampton Roads, Virginia. Return train dated March 17th.

- The day she disappeared. - Patrick Newirth came by train.

And Gail Anne Lambert...

Uh, no. Nothing here puts her near the train station.

- Maybe that detail was overlooked. - What's the significance?

Maybe these people are being hunted, and the hunter's working the train station.

What about spontaneous human combustion?

Maybe it's not spontaneous. Call your young detective...

...and tell her to get a detail down to the train station.

Suspicious male in the alley behind the station. I'm gonna check him out.

Roger that, 64. I'm on my way.

Sir, could I speak with you?

Hold on! I only wanna ask you a couple of questions!

All right, stop right there. Don't move. Just hold it.

Put your hands in the air, sir.

Stay... away from me.

What do you think you're doin'? Come on outta there.

We just wanna talk to you.

Stay away from me. I don't wanna hurt you.

- Move it. - Hands where we can see them.

Please... I'm warning you.

- I'm a dangerous man. - Keep movin', pal, out where we can see ya.

All right. I want you to lie face down on the ground.

Don't... come any closer.

Get down on the ground, sir. Now!

Please! You don't understand.

- Oh, God! No! - Barney?

Don't! No! Stay away!

Oh, God!

Oh, God! Not again!

No!No!No!No!

- What happened here, Kelly? - I sent two patrolmen down here.

They lost radio contact with them just after midnight.

- All they found was two more scorch marks. - Nothing else?

No. Suddenly this could be a cop-killer case, and I'm indirectly responsible.

- You were just doing your job. - They wanna know why I sent these men.

- If I tell them I've involved you, they'll snap. - Those prints?

I ran it against all the hotel staff and guests...

...then through the national databases. No match.

- Some first case, huh? - Make sure you hang on to this case.

I'm sure something will turn up.

- These ideas of yours. Care to share them? - Not yet.

- You don't have a clue, do you? - He was here, Scully. I was right about that.

- So where does this leave us? - Maybe with enough to identify the killer.

- How? - He was here last night.

He was also probably here on March 17th and March 31st.

The days that the other two people disappeared.

That leaves us with three days of station video tapes to check...

- ...and hopefully find out who this guy is. - That's assuming we're looking for a guy.

Either way, the security camera's our only witness.

It could be any one of these people, Mulder.

Or none of them.

We've gone through the entire week and I'm still not sure how to find him.

That's it for March 22nd on the arrival deck.

- Let's go back to the terminal tape. - Again?

He's gotta be on at least one tape.

Chances are he's not carrying a sign with an arrow on it.

There you go.

See this guy, right here? He's always here.

What's he doing?

- Looking at the floor. - Why's he doin' that?

Probably the same reason he spends his whole afternoon in the train station.

- Can you freeze this and blow it up 200%? - Sure.

OK. Can you reframe and blow it up some more?

See, he's got something on his jacket.

Let's see if I can pull it up.

- Polarity Magnetics. - That's where the first victim worked.

Looks like it's been closed up.

- Yes? - We're Agents Mulder and Scully, FBI.

We're looking for a man who may have worked here.

- When was this taken? - March 22nd. Do you know him?

Sure I know him. Dr Chester Banton.

- He was my business partner. - You mean he's not any more?

I don't know. I would assume not.

This is the first I've seen of him in five weeks.

- I wondered if he wasn't gonna turn up dead. - How's that?

Chester was involved in a terrible accident here.

Polarity Magnetics does, or did, primarily two kinds of research.

Mostly we designed maglev applications - people movers, bullet trains.

But, for Chester, that just paid the bills for the theoretical stuff he was interested in.

- Which was what? - Researching dark matter.

Quantum particles, neutrinos, gluons, mesons, quarks.

- Subatomic particles. - The mysteries of the universe.

- The very building blocks of reality. - Except no one knows if they exist.

Chester was sure they did.

So sure, he bet his life on it.

This is where it happened. Chester was working to isolate a new particle.

- He'd been working on it for a year. - This is a particle accelerator.

One fifth the power of the Texas Supercollider in the space of a Wal-Mart.

- Powered by what? - A couple of billion megawatts.

- Virginia Power loved us. - Exactly what happened here?

The work involved bombarding beta particles with an alpha target...

...negative against positive.

Chester had started the countdown when he realised he'd made a mistake.

Something needed readjusting in the target room.

Except you can't stop the countdown once you've begun.

There was time to safely make the change...

...but I had left the room for a minute when Chester decided to go in.

I didn't realise until it was too late that the door had locked behind him.

Look at this.

As far as I can tell, it burned Chester's shadow right into the wall.

- How did he survive? - All I can figure is...

...the quanta liberated off the target have virtually no mass.

- They slid right through his body. - Like getting an X-ray.

A two-billion-megawatt X-ray.

When I saw on the monitor what was happening...

...that Chester was trapped in here, I panicked.

I cut the power, but it was too late.

I remember looking, and... seeing Chester.

He was perfectly calm...

...almost like he wanted it to happen.

Like he was finally going to experience the dark matter he had theorised...

...in some kind of physical way.