The Wall That Sherlock Hit, a x-files fanfic

Title: The Wall That Sherlock Hit

Author: Amyhit

Rating: PG. I've never written an X-files fiction with a rating below an R before. Ha, I win.

Spoilers: This fic will completely spoil you for the first episode. Actually, it won't even do that.

Disclaimer: I'm staging a coup to take ownership of 1013 at this very moment.

Synopsis: It's all happening again, resurgence of these old fears.

I know about woodcutters, how they chop light into a sky's black belly.

The neighbor killed cats. He took them in and named them things like 'Tolstoy' or 'Copernicus' and his name was Mr. Elmore. They all lived together in the house beside your parents' with the maple tree in the yard that you and your brothers were allowed to climb every summer. Mr. Elmore always knew the sound of the cats moving around in upstairs rooms.

One day when you were drinking your apple juice in the kitchen there was a loud crash overhead and Mr. Elmore said, "Oh, there he goes – Sherlock's tipped the lamp again," as though it were nothing. He even fed them each from their own saucers—"Mary loved that china set, rest her soul,"—and put grenadine in little Abraham's splash of milk. "It's the only way he'll drink it," said Mr. Elmore when you wanted to know how come. "Isn't that right Abe, you little persnicket."

His cats mostly hissed at you, ducked when your hand came down towards them. Mr. Elmore roughed them about the neck. They looked small when his hands were on them, and they sure loved him a lot.

After a while you'd finish your apple juice and then it would be time to go. Anyway, if you didn't get home fast Bill and Charlie were going to eat all of mom's cookies without you so you'd be out the screen door pretty quick and across the autumn grass. "Give my regards to your father," Mr. Elmore would say, "and get him to tell you about the time the crew got it in their heads to smuggle a Christmas tree into the barracks. You'll like that one." You nodded as sincerely as you could but your dad didn't talk about work.

Another time Mr. Elmore was feeding Gabriel when you came in. You were cold from raking and looking forward to getting your juice and your quarters. "Ice!" he proclaimed, taking one of your hands from where you were warming them against the side of the fridge. "If I give you juice it'll freeze you clear through and then who will I have to rake for me?" So you stood by as he began to heat you some cider.

While you waited Gabriel brushed figure eights around your legs frantically. You looked down at your feet, hearing the element tick and smelling cinnamon and feeling somehow sorry for him, the skinny little beast, awkward with hunger. "Mr. Elmore," you queried, not wanting to interrupt if he was about to say something, "I don't think he – your cat I mean, I don't think he knows where you put his food." You pointed at the dish Mr. Elmore had been doling out when you'd come clomping in. You tried to urge Gabriel towards it with your heavy boot but the cat wouldn't see. The food sat untouched and Gabriel remained ravenous.

"Is he blind?" you asked Mr. Elmore, "or um, hyp- h- hyposmic?" You'd read about that. Mr. Elmore was watching the two of you in amusement.

"Who, Gabe? God no, he's spry as a Spaniel."

"Then why won't he – "

"Ah," said Mr. Elmore, tipping his head in a didactic manner for you to observe. He stooped and moved the dish, just over to where you could see its perennial presence had begun to scuff the linoleum. With one hand he scooped Gabriel over to him and the hungry cat began to eat. Mr. Elmore showed you Tolstoy's dish over by the pantry door and Lincoln's big green bowl under the counter island.

"They know," he said. "Smart beasts that they are – won't eat 'till I've set the dishes out right. Everything in its place, see. They've all learned it." The bright of the kitchen window was glinting in his eyes, but you looked down at your mug instead, still feeling cold.

"Did you teach them that," you wanted to know once your drink was mostly drank, "or do they just know?" He told you it was like the dog that would drool when it heard a bell. Then he paid you your quarters and that evening when you grabbed your coat to leave he took your hand again and shook it firm, like this was really business. Like you were your father.

That evening was quiet. The air was still with cold and smelling like maple bark and family dinners up and down the street. You ran all the way home. After dinner when everyone was having desert you snuck away into your father's study and tucked a book called 'Ethology: The study of animals and science' into the back waistband of your jeans where your father wouldn't see. All through the taste of your pie you thought about dogs and bells and Mr. Elmore shaking your hand as though you and he had traversed the oceans together and proven your mettle.

It was a surprise the next day when there was snow. Not a lot, just a fine bitter lace of it that made the last leaves curl, as though they were keeping the secrets of the seasons. It seemed that the last of the maple leaves had finally fallen on Mr. Elmore's lawn and you got up early, wanting to feel the arch weather in your bones and in the wooden handle of the rake—the rapacious air. When you got down stairs even your mother wasn't up yet, making her strong, strong coffee and flitting away at your father's lunch until the house woke. Your father though, had slept the night in his armchair like sometimes happened when he drank or fought with your mom or worked too much and tired himself out. Usually one led to another anyway and then there was always the armchair. Somehow even it looked dignified when he slept in it, stern expression maintained throughout the night. You went out the back door to keep from waking him and stood on the porch, seeing your breath. You felt odd and almost male with your messy hair tied up and your hands jammed in your pockets the way you'd seen Charlie teaching Bill to stand—"You gotta do like that 'Dean' guy all the girls are so nuts about."

It was still gray-dark so that when you hoisted yourself up by the fence boards to look around there was nobody awake to see you hop over like you weren't supposed to do. You landed softly in Mr. Elmore's back yard and made quickly for the side of the house where he kept the rake. Everything was louder in the cold and you were pretty careful to stay quiet. You were level with the side window when you heard it the first time: the sun was just rising, flaring sailor's-warning red against the glass. There was a cry from inside Mr. Elmore's house, then the sound of furniture moving against a hard wood floor. Then another cry and a very loud thump. Afterwards silence.

You wanted to think maybe the cats were fighting, or else Mr. Elmore had just left the TV on. Standing ducked outside his window you pressed yourself against the ivy, which had crept over that wall for decades before you'd ever moved in next door. There was a mewling beginning inside that you couldn't have heard from a single further step away. It didn't sound human. None of it did. And then the sun finally broke the window's surface and sank into the dark house as pale as a shore submitting to the raucous waves. You'll never know if you would have had the daring to look inside and see what the sound had been but for the fact that you were already looking and you'd already seen:

Mr. Elmore had Sherlock by the neck. He was holding the big cat up away from himself and Sherlock was loose and heavy as a sack. Neither of the two was moving but for the feet, which limped in the air making tiny gestures. Mr. Elmore's right hand made similar unbidden gestures too, where it hung at his side. He must have forgotten to close the blinds.

This time you were watching when he swung the cat against the wall once more, and though the impact was out of your sight you felt as though you'd hit a wall too. Your hands were gripped full of ivy, green and thick and living against the wall that Sherlock hit.

He must have forgotten to close the blinds.

And it's odd because when you made it to the street and dared to look back Mr. Elmore was standing in the wide front window, just wearing his robe and his bleary, woken smile—just opening the front curtains to see the sun rise the way you liked your father to do on these clear school-day mornings.

He saw you. You know he did.

Your father was still asleep in the living room when you let yourself in. The hallway smelled salty and damp like wet canvas and boots; it smelled the way the book smelled, tucked inside your pillowcase like a looter's bounty. You stood under the transom in the hall for a bit, itching your wrist under your wool sweater, thinking.

Then Bill woke up and came tearing down the stairs with one sock on and an apple in his mouth and said, "Hey brat, have you seen my soccer cleats?" You found him his cleats but made him take you with him to the school early. Someone, sort of a friend, found you hiding in the reference section of the library at lunchtime and gave you Jello when you wouldn't tell him what the hell was wrong with you.

It's odd too, because when you remember it now all you remember of that whole day is how surprised you were that it had snowed and that a couple of the pretty girls said you looked like a boy because you hadn't even brushed your hair that morning. This struck you as hilarious and you laughed and laughed. Then you went home and your mother watched you eat a cookie while lecturing you on sticking to your commitments. 'Mr. Elmore was paying you good money,' she said, 'and if it snowed again then you'd really be sorry you hadn't raked those leaves sooner.' It took you an hour, moving quickly through his yard, darting like something that felt it should be underground—a bulb or a mouse. Finally, you remember that when you came to the door to say you were done, Mr. Elmore handed you a steaming mug of cider and you just stood there on the step, shivering, knowing he killed his cats and hating yourself for almost wanting to drink it anyway. He shook your hand. You let him shake your hand. You felt small and transparent as your white breath—not at all like your father and not like James Dean either.

You're twenty-eight when you meet Mulder, who is apparently 'spooky' and you'd best watch yourself around him if you value your reputation. Or for that matter, your chastity. The first thing you ever hear him say is that he's unwanted. The second is that you are. He's six feet of female eyelashes, roguish body language and academia. He smells like old newspaper archives. It's not a week between the morning you're sitting in Blevins' office with a cigarette smoking man and the morning on which you're back, in the same office with the same bad hair cut, acting as though nothing's changed. The man and his cigarette pass you in the hall on your way out. It's odd, the man's dark face—adumbrate even. That and a feeling it's all happening again, resurgence of these old fears like a Mobius Strip gone wrong.

You lie awake night after night during that first case on the X-files, getting accustomed to motel life and dreaming half awake. It's warm in Oregon, even warm enough for crickets but you startle every time you hear Mulder moving around in the next room. You take too many hot showers and shiver right through them. Your dreams are of ivy.

Your bedroom window had faced the wall you'd heard Sherlock hit. It had been grown over so long you'd forgotten there was even a wall beneath the shadowy vines. When you were young and it rained at night you could hear the rain hitting the leaves and you wanted to sneak outside in your nightgown and your bare feet to put your face into the wet plant and just breathe. After that autumn when all the leaves were raked you kept your curtains closed. When Bill graduated and moved out, it was the first thing you did to switch rooms. His room smelled like sweat and pot and you'd heard his girlfriend have an orgasm on the bed in there once, but in his room you could sleep through the night.

Mr. Elmore had shown you how his cats wouldn't eat unless their dish was exactly right. That they would starve if he wanted them to and maybe they did, some of them. Did he teach them, you had asked, or did they just know?

You think it's so strange: smoke unfurling in an empty doorway and lamplight on Mulder's glasses before you could see his eyes. You're older now. You understand it better—

There's always a lesson. No one ever just knows.

Author's Notes: I came across a haunting little poem by Janice K. Keefer called 'My name is Red, and I can tell you a thing or two about wolves'. In this piece the writer subtly suggests a present day-esque scenario of a young girl who has been warned away from 'wolves' by her mother. As the poem progresses the reader comes to realize, however, that this fairy tale is not being told in the manner to which we are accustomed. Rather that the girl is escaping nightly from the 'woodcutter' who has taken up an abusive male presence in her home. She is now finding safety and comfort in the 'jaws' of the wolf she was warned against. It is a downright creepy little poem and it inspired this fic.