The Truth and Other Mysteries
Katherine had been in her first year at the Academy when she first heard the rumor of the monster under the Duane building.
It dwelled in the basement, hidden amongst cabinets upon cabinets of old files. It feasted ravenously on mysteries the FBI had never solved, gorging itself on the unknown. It was long. Thin. Starving. Desperate for information, and to pass that information on. While most human beings had a face, the monster had only one long grotesque mouth that spanned from ear to ear – and if it caught you in its lair, it would trap you in a barrage of information, rants and ravings about things that barely sounded like language. You should never speak the monster’s name – if it heard you, it might come running. It was best to refer to it by title alone. The Walking Mouth. Lest it find you and trap you in its insanity.
“But if you really want to know its name…” Ogden had whispered haggardly into the dark. “I’ll tell you.”
He checked over his shoulder, swallowed, checked again, and leaned forward.
After a beat of silence, his serious expression dropped, and he burst into a fit of laughter. The group of young Academy students had all found this remarkably funny at the time. Ogden was one of the younger instructors, but he was still at least thirty, and he took a strange amount of enjoyment in entertaining the young twenty-somethings after hours at the Academy. Katherine had always found him mean, and a little slimy, so she’d paid the silly story no mind at the time. Whoever this David Jacobs was, she was sure he wasn’t worthy of such a spiteful joke.
But then Katherine got older. She graduated, took a position teaching at the Academy between her role as an intelligence analyst. A class taught by Katherine Plumber was something covetable. An analysis report signed by Katherine Plumber was even more so. She’d hoped the FBI would be a place where she could establish herself, and it seemed her hopes were rewarded. But the further she got, the name David Jacobs never seemed too far away.
He's brilliant. Everyone can agree on that. His profiles were so thorough that he had once predicted a suspect’s stutter, and his work on the relationship between serial killers and the occult had led to the direct capture of several. The other thing everyone can agree on – including Katherine – is that he’s weird. Where the name David Jacobs was once synonymous with a prodigal young agent with a bright future ahead of him, it now described a paranoid recluse whose sole obsession was that of the unsolved. Not your regular cold cases, mind you – no, Jacobs was chasing something bigger, and he’d let anyone who’d listen know about it.
“E.T.,” Bill Hearst had whispered to her over lunch, in a spooky sing-song, “extra-terrestrials.”
The ‘Walking Mouth’ nickname and the tasteful ghost-story attached to it wasn’t exclusive to Ogden and his fans. It was one of those in-jokes where it didn’t really matter who started it, because everyone had already been thinking it. The way Ogden and Bill and every other agent told it, it seemed that on the rare occasions that one of Jacobs’ connections pulled him out of his dingy basement office to consult on a case, he’d find a way to connect an average spree killer to aliens, or vampires, or cryptids, oh my! Granted, he got results. He always found the guy, and he’d always be thanked for it, but he’d never be pleased about it. To Jacobs, the case was always closed too soon. He’d pester and wheedle his superiors about unfollowed leads that went nowhere, irrelevant details, flimsy connections to cases dating back fifty years or more. And one fateful day, when he delved back into his dingy basement office, someone must have turned around one fateful day and said, ‘geez, real Walking Mouth that one, huh?’.
Katherine had always refuted the nickname. Fine, Jacobs was a kook, but at least he was good at what he did. He put the bad guys away, and wasn’t that the job? At least he had beliefs – heaven knew she’d met enough agents without them. Still, when her Division Chief told her she was going to be assigned to him, to David Jacobs, the UFO hunter, she couldn’t help her flustered splutter of, ‘The Walking Mouth?’.
“Ah," Bunsen purses his lips at the nickname, but doesn't bother correcting her. "So you know him."
