Mulder was having a bad night. Once the rush of starting a new
investigation wore off, the miserable familiarity of his
surroundings began to weigh on him. The power outage denied him
even the dubious pleasure of watching late-night TV as he lay in
bed. In darkness and silence, he was prey to his memories. The
last time he'd been on this island was when he'd inadvertently
set Roche loose. The time before that was the night his father
was murdered. His soul yearned for Scully and for his mother
with a dual intensity that would have warmed the twisted heart
of Sigmund Freud.
It still surprised him that losing his mother was a heavier blow
than learning his sister was dead. It was the way his mother
died, really.
Teena Mulder had gone to the grave organized -- he'd give
her that much. She'd contacted a lawyer to help her get the right
papers signed and the disposition of her estate all planned out.
The nurse who'd come to the house during her final days even knew
what clothes she wanted to be laid out in. The one conspicuous
lapse was her failure to inform her son that she intended to kill
herself -- or even that she was sick. He was angry at her --
in truth he was furious, and that was what was killing him. She
had no right to shut him out of the end of her life, as she'd
shut him out of so many things she wanted to keep secret. She
hadn't even trusted him to pick where she'd be buried. Maybe she
expected that he wouldn't show up at her funeral, since he had
missed his father's.
Scully insisted that his mother had been trying not to burden
him, that the over-planned suicide wasn't the rejection it
seemed. Maybe she was right. Still, he doubted he could have
been hurt more if his mother had actually tried to kill him
instead.
This morbid train of thought was disturbed by someone banging on
his door. "What?" he called out.
"Fox?" it was Leigh. "Fox, we've lost power due to the storm.
Your partner says that she can hear someone lost out there, and
she's going to help. She said you'd know what to do . . ."
Mulder got up and walked to the door in his T-shirt and boxer
shorts. He opened the door and found Leigh there, holding a
flashlight and looking small and owlish in her bathrobe.
"She didn't go out there by herself, did she?" Mulder asked.
"I think so. I don't know. She seemed to be in a hurry," Leigh
said.
"Do you know which direction she went in?" Mulder asked. He did
not like the idea of Scully wandering the countryside in this
storm. The up-island terrain was difficult enough under the best
of circumstances.
Leigh shook her head. "She just took her flashlight and left.
She didn't look dressed properly for the weather," she said.
Mulder swore. "Thanks for telling me. See if you can get Joey
on the phone and ask him to send some people who actually know
their way around the woods out here," he said.
"All right. What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to go find my partner before--" he stopped himself
from mentioning the state of poor Kristie's remains after she'd
fallen over the cliff. "I'm just going to find her."
*****
Scully struggled down a steep wooded hill about a mile from Nye
House. The heavy clay soil was little more than half-frozen mud,
and her feet were continually sliding. After considering the
odds of a predator being loose in the woods, she carried her gun
in her right hand. She'd put away her flashlight to free her
other hand for holding onto saplings and branches as she walked.
At first she'd heard the child's cries on every strong gust of
wind from the south, but as she traveled the voice seemed to grow
more distant. Now she was unsure if she were following a human
voice at all. The wind keening in the bare branches could sound
human to someone who wanted to hear signs of life badly enough.
She made maddeningly slow progress down the hill as she picked
her way from tree to tree. It occurred to her that she might be
better off if she sat on her butt and slid.
Unexpectedly, she got her wish. A rock rolled under her shoe,
then the muddy earth beneath her feet began to give way. She
grabbed the closest tree -- a dead pine sapling. The trunk
cracked off and fell with her.
Sliding and tumbling amid a hail of earth and stones, Scully
shielded her head with her left arm as best she could. Branches
scratched her and mud-clotted leaves struck her face as she tried
desperately to keep the barrel of her gun pointed away from her
body. The weapon was ready to fire, a bullet lying in the
chamber.
Her other worry was a great tree trunk, directly in her path.
She scrabbled at the soil for a root, a stone, anything, but
could get no purchase. When she hit the trunk a flash of sparks
dazzled her eyes, and her breath was driven out of her. Dimly,
she was aware of the little dead pine landing on her back. For a
moment she swum in darkness.
She lay dazed in the icy mud, feeling a dull pain in her ribs
with every breath. Several seconds passed before she became
aware that her hand was touching something warm and damp. Scully
struggled to look up. Among the pine's branches were eyes, too
close together to be human, shining yellow in the faint,
directionless glow of the sleety night. The creature whined.
She realized she lay beside a wet animal -- a large dog, its ears
laid back and its belly pressed to the ground in terror. She
felt its muscles tense at her movement. Suddenly the dog turned
and bolted, showering her with wet leaves. Shaken, she watched
it tear away up the slope in the direction she had come.
Some irrational inner voice whispered that she'd come to a bad
place, an uncanny place. Scully firmly pushed that thought out
of her mind. Not even Mulder thought there were ghosts here.
There might be violent people and treacherous footing in these
woods, but the place itself was ordinary.
She could just imagine what Mulder would say if he were here.
//You practically killed yourself and all you have to show for
it is a traumatized dog. Terrific.// She rolled painfully
to her knees, then with an effort she stood up and combed the
filth out of her hair with her fingers.
Scully pulled her flashlight from her pocket and hunted for her
gun, which the impact had jerked from her hand. Before long
she saw the glint of metal in the flashlight's beam. She
picked up her mud-covered SIG near the foot of the hill, and
did what she could to clean the dirt out of its barrel. Her
stiff, shaking fingers were not suited to the job.
She was peripherally aware of plastic tape flapping and rattling
on the nearby trees. In her near-exhausted state the noise
didn't seem important, but eventually the rustling sound
triggered associations -- the tinny static of two-way radios, the
staccato lightning of flashbulbs. She shone her light at the
trees. Their trunks were bound with yellow crime scene tape.
This was where Kristie Herron had died. Scully had not expected
to be this close to the cliffs. How close had she come to the
edge without noticing? She hesitated, considered waiting for
Mulder to catch up before continuing. Even if the woods hadn't
been physically dangerous, she would still have to consider the
possible damage to evidence if she blundered around in the
cordoned-off area. She had just about made up her mind to wait
when she caught the sound of ragged sobbing, carried on the wind.
This time she was sure her ears were not deceiving her. The
noise was human.
"I'm Agent Scully with the FBI. I'm here to help. Where are
you?" she called. Her side ached with the effort of shouting.
She got a response -- a word with long, drawn-out vowels, she
thought it was "Mama." The accent was on the second syllable,
giving the cry an oddly foreign sound. Did the child speak
English? Mulder had mentioned the Vineyard's Portuguese
population. It didn't matter. The caller's grief and despair
were plain. No mother, much less one who had lost her only
child, could hear such a sound and be still.
"Keep talking, sweetheart, I'm coming," Scully said. She ducked
under the crime scene tape and passed into the shadows of the
trees. She kept speaking as she walked, trying to encourage
the child to make some sound, any sound. Privately she prayed
that her fall had done nothing to jam the workings of the SIG.
She couldn't shake the feeling that the dog beneath the tree had
been frightened by something else before she nearly ran over it.
Thinking back, she realized that its eyes had not been on her at
all. It had been staring past her, at something in these woods
at the bottom of the hill.
*****
Mulder strode across the frozen field, his Mag Lite casting a
powerful beam ahead of him. Scully's trail was fairly easy to
follow. The line of broken grass stalks and depressions in the
sleet-covered ground led straight toward the South Road Burying
Ground, and beyond that the cliffs. Every so often he'd hunt up
three rocks and place them in an arrow indicating the direction
he'd gone in. Joey, who'd once played a long-suffering Tonto to
Mulder's Lone Ranger, would be able to follow those signs.
Mulder couldn't figure out what had possessed his partner to do
something this foolish. A traveler lost in the woods? Why didn't
she call 911? Why didn't she walk up the goddamn stairs where a
dozen peace officers were sleeping, one of whom had spent the
first 12 years of his life running around these very woods? If
Scully had not been the least supernaturally-inclined woman ever
born, he would have suspected her Irish sailor's blood of
succumbing to the glamour of the Lorelei -- spirits that haunted
cliffs by the sea and lured men to their destruction.
This had to be about Emily. Leigh had said she thought Scully
mentioned something about a child. She'd acted out of character
at the Herrons' house, going out of her way to talk about her
personal loss. At the time Mulder had been touched by her
openness. He should have recognized that something powerful had
to be going on beneath the surface for Scully to do something
like that. This was somehow about Emily and God and this being
Easter and about sleeping with Mulder and him not being the solid
Catholic guy she'd always envisioned herself with.
He increased his brisk walk to a jog as he neared the woods. He
didn't need to fool around analyzing her trail; it was as
straight as a beeline. She was headed for the place where
Kristie had been murdered. He supposed that was logical in a
certain way, if Scully was worried that someone else was in
danger from the same predator.
Yet the long-time paranormal investigator in him was uneasy that
her track was as straight as a line on a surveyor's map. There
was a packed-dirt bicycle path that went roughly in the direction
she wanted to go, but she had walked straight across it without
swerving. //Don't let this be another Skyland Mountain . . .//
Mulder thought.
Memories returned unbidden. He recalled sitting across a Stratego
board from his sister, bickering about what to watch on TV. A light
came through the window, casting long shadows behind the game
pieces. Samantha looked up, puzzled . . .
He shook his head, refusing to be drawn *there* of all places,
but some part of his mind wouldn't let the image go. Mulder
plead with it:
//That was a long time ago.//
//Your neighbors all thought Chilmark was too insignificant for
paranormal events to occur there, too.//
//This is different! There's nothing *in* the South Road Burying
Ground.//
//Before November 27, 1973, there was nothing in your living
room, either.//
Mulder broke into a run.
*****
Scully pressed through a dense area of the forest. The rain had
not washed away all the snow here, and she found herself walking
up to her ankles in powder-fine flakes, like the snow of
midwinter. The wind had died and she could hear the child's
crying very clearly. It only spoke one word, "Mama," again and
again. There was such grief and longing in its voice that she
feared she would find the mother lying dead in the snow, perhaps
murdered by the same person who killed Kristie Herron.
"Keep talking, honey," Scully said, though the child gave no sign
that it heard. The two of them had simply been reciting their
respective litanies as she picked her way closer and closer.
When she at last forced her way through a vine-filled thicket,
she stood at the edge of a clearing. Moonlight dazzled her eyes.
It was as if the storm had never been -- a full moon shone among
sailing clouds and turned the snow into glittering diamonds.
She stared a moment, disoriented. Three or four rustic buildings
stood away to her right, and in the shadow of the largest one a
figure huddled, small and pale against a big, dark stain in the
snow.
She ran closer and realized that there was not one child but two.
One was a long-haired girl about three years old. The other was
a young baby, wrapped in a bloodied cloth and held clutched to
the older child's chest. It was clear the infant wouldn't live.
Its throat had been slashed nearly through, but its eyes remained
open and there was a continual wet wheezing sound as it tried to
draw breath. A wound like that on a living body could only be
seconds old. Scully fired once into the air, to draw the
attention of rescuers and to run off who or whatever had just
done *that.*
"You're all right. I'm a doctor. The other officers will be
here any moment," Scully said, loud enough that anyone hiding
nearby should be able to hear. Could she carry both children and
still be able to use her gun? She'd have to.
The girl's gray eyes had the fixed stare of shock and her clothes
were soaked in blood. Whether it was hers or the dying baby's
Scully didn't know, and there was no time to examine her. Scully
reached to scoop the children up but something checked her hand,
too fast to have meaning for her. She felt a burning sensation
followed by cold wetness on her fingers and looked down. Her
hand was bleeding.
Slowly it dawned on her that the child was holding a long, thin
knife. "It's all right," she said, her mind too dazed to make
anything of this except the girl believed she was defending
herself. Scully grabbed for the little elbow in what should have
been an easy disarm, but instead the knife laid open the skin of
her palm. There was no time for this -- the baby was dying and
the killer was still close. "I have to get you out of here,"
Scully said, her desperation rising.
"No," the child said softly. "Stay."
The strange plea made her hesitate, and she was struck by the
loneliness in the child's pale little face. It was familiar,
like an image from a half-remembered nightmare, and it echoed in
the broken places of her soul.
*****
After what seemed like an eternity of thrashing around in the
briars, Mulder reached the South Road Burying Ground. The tiny
cemetery consisted of seven headstones, listing like drunkards,
and two rocks. The enormous willow he remembered was still there.
Scully was not.
He was beginning to feel the stirrings of panic when a shot rang
out from deeper in the woods. Mulder wasn't enough of a firearms
expert to identify the sound of a firing SIG, but when he heard
the eerie whistle of the bullet he knew the weapon was no low-
powered hunting rifle. "Scully!" he called out. He struggled
through the underbrush in the direction he'd heard the gun fire,
trying to stay within the cover of large trees. The last thing
he needed was to get his head blown off.
His flashlight beam illuminated little and made everything around
it seem darker. At this point the only reason to keep it on was
the hope it might draw Scully to him. Of course, it might draw
other things as well. No longer carefully tracking, he was
moving as fast as he could through the undergrowth.
The weaving flashlight beam began illuminating orange flags stuck
in the soil -- evidence markers. This was the spot Kristie had
met her attacker. A moment later the light revealed a bloodied
shoe. Over the shoe was a leg. Mulder stopped short and angled
the beam up. There stood Scully, her face gray as a corpse's,
watching blood run down her hands.
Mulder had the feeling he was looking at a dead woman. He asked
softly, "What happened to you?"
She looked up, and he saw her pupils were dilated even in the
bright beam of light. Her brows drew together as if she were
trying to place him. "She was just here," she said.
"Who was just here?" Mulder asked.
"A little girl," she said. She began looking at the ground
around her. "There was snow . . ." She turned away from him and
began to wander off among the evidence markers. That alone was
enough to convince him something was terribly wrong. Scully had
never fouled a crime scene in her life.
"What is it?" he asked. "What did you see?"
"There was a house . . . there were little children. They were
wounded, and I wanted to help, but I couldn't. She wanted me to
stay with her . . ."
"You're hurt. You need to get out of here," he said. He put his
hand on her arm to draw her toward him. She resisted at first,
then turned and curled against his chest. He took her hands in
his own and balled them into fists, pressing the cuts on her
palms closed. Her fingers were as cold as death despite the hot
blood that ran between them.
*****
Hours later Mulder sat by Scully's bedside in the ER of the tiny
hospital in Edgartown. Scully slept, and every so often an
orderly would arrive to spread a freshly-warmed blanket over her.
She'd been unwilling or unable to explain how she became injured out
in the dark woods. All he knew was that she'd found wounded
children somewhere southeast of the graveyard and was reluctant
to leave the scene, blood loss and hypothermia be damned. She'd
only consented to come away after Joe Luce and another officer
arrived, and she'd kept her gaze toward the graveyard even as
Mulder led her toward the road.
He reached out and touched her fingertips, the only part of her
left hand that wasn't bandaged, and was relieved to feel that her
skin was warm now.
"What did you see out there?" he asked softly. Deeply asleep,
his partner did not reply.
He heard the sound of approaching footsteps. This person was
wearing hard-soled shoes, not the orthopedic footwear of the
hospital staff. "Fox?" came a voice.
"Joey," Mulder said. He stood up and opened the curtain that
walled off Scully's bed. The first thing that impressed him
about Joe Luce was how much he looked like the little kid he
had known. The big dark eyes were still there, and so was the
hair that refused to take any kind of decent part. The
stuff still sat on Joe's head like twists of brown winter grass.
Afterward Mulder's mind filled in the unfamiliar. Manhood had
squared Joe's jaw and broadened his shoulders, and he wore a
Chilmark Police Chief's uniform, just as his uncle had. It was
fitting, somehow.
Joe had clearly just come from outside. Half-melted sleet
pellets rested on his shoulders and in his hair, and cold
radiated from his clothes.
"How's your partner?" Joe asked.
"She'll be all right," Mulder said. "What did you find?"
Joe shook his head. "We didn't find any kids, Fox. Some of the
guys from Crime Scene Services came out with their dogs, and we
still came up with nothing. That shot you heard -- you think it
was from her gun?"
"I can look," Mulder said. He walked over to the chair where
Scully's things had been neatly folded. He drew her service
weapon out of its holster and examined it. There were powder
streaks around the barrel -- something Scully never would have
tolerated for longer than it took her to get to her cleaning
supplies. "It was hers," he said. Guessing Joe's next
question, Mulder said, "Scully's not trigger-happy, and she
doesn't imagine things."
Joe held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. "I'm not
suggesting that," he said. "I'm just trying to figure out what
happened. You sure she said there were buildings?"
"Yeah -- houses or little shacks," Mulder said.
"That's what's bothering me, because there aren't any buildings
out where you found her. I know, because I've been combing those
woods for days," Joe said.
"There's the Gelbemanns' place," Mulder said, without great
conviction. The house was several hundred yards to the east of
where he found Scully.
"It's hard to see how she could have come from there," Joe said.
"She'd have had to cross the creek, and there's no bridge. We
did check on the Gelbemanns just to be safe, but they never heard
or saw anything. There sure were no pools of blood around their
house. Did Agent Scully say anything else to you? Did she give
you a landmark . . . anything at all?" Joe asked.
Mulder gazed over at his sleeping partner and motioned for Joe to
follow him into the hall. He stopped at a spot that seemed far
enough from the triage area to be discreet. "Scully told me the
buildings showed up against the snow in the moonlight," Mulder
said.
Joe looked surprised and slightly embarrassed. Mulder could see
this news shifted his attitude toward the whole situation. Sleet
could pass for snow, but there had certainly been no moonlight
out in the storm. "I don't know what she saw out there, Joey.
But if you knew her, you'd know that she wouldn't just imagine
something like this," Mulder said.
"I believe you," Joe said.
"If you did you'd still be out there," Mulder said.
"Fox, the CSS guys are willing to switch off in teams until
someone can do a flyover at dawn. I'm on call if they need me.
There's not a lot more we can do," Joe insisted.
"How do you think she cut her hands? On a twig?" Mulder asked.
"It's being taken care of," Joe said. "Look, can I get you a
cup of coffee or something?"
"I've got some," Mulder said, gesturing toward the Styrofoam cup
of now-cold coffee sitting on the table by Scully's bed.
"Where's Irv?"
"Irv?" Joe asked, looking surprised.
"The little shit that got us into this in the first place.
Scully said he seemed too interested in this case from the
beginning," Mulder said.
"I'm not sure if he's working tonight. This is his secondary
job -- he and Emma still run that photography store during the
day," Joe said.
"You're kidding. They couldn't stand each other," Mulder said.
"They still can't. Actually they're divorced, but they live
together. It's his photo business but he's running it out of her
house. I guess they figured putting up with each other was
easier than dividing up the stuff," Joe said.
"If he's here I want to see him," Mulder said. He went to the
nurses' station and convinced the woman behind the desk to page
Irv, and then Irv's supervisor. As Mulder stood waiting for a
response to the pages, he listened to Joe answer a staticky call
over his two-way radio. The reporting officer told him that the
dogs had found no other trails besides Mulder and Scully's.
"I thought you were off-duty," Mulder said, forestalling any
comments Joe might make.
"Never," Joe said, as he replaced the receiver on its shoulder
strap. "I'm a full 25% of Chilmark's finest."
"Just like your uncle," Mulder said.
"I'm not my uncle," Joe said.
The phone behind the nurses' desk trilled softly. The desk
attendant took it and said, "I see. Thank you." When she hung
up she said, "That was the transporter's room. Irv Stuckey isn't
scheduled to work tonight."
"Thanks," Mulder said, and turned to go back to Scully's bedside.
Joe caught his elbow.
"Hey, Fox, c'mon. If I don't get some coffee I'm going to keel
over," Joe said.
Mulder repressed the urge to shrug Joe's hand off. "Isn't Sue
expecting you?" he asked.
"No," Joe said. The bleakness in his voice made Mulder pause.
For the first time he realized his former friend might have
other reasons for not wanting to return home.
"I'm sorry," Mulder said.
Joe shrugged and looked away. "These things happen. Three out of
the four people on the Chilmark force are divorced now. Our
job's not exactly 'NYPD Blue,' but the hours . . . you know. The
sad thing is that now that I have court-regulated visitation, I
think I see my daughter more often."
Joey's words did a lot to dissolve the resentment Mulder had been
feeling toward him. Mulder had felt in a one-down position due to
his own personal failures, and in his mind Joe's confession
brought them to the same level. "Coffee'd be great," Mulder said.
He allowed himself a last look at Scully, still sleeping and safe
for the moment, before walking past the nurses' station and out
into the hall.
The hospital corridor was all gleaming white surfaces. "The
place looks better. It used to be such a dump," Mulder said. He
remembered cracked floor tiles and walls painted sickly pea-green
to the height of a child's eye-level.
"They've done a lot with it. They had to -- the Island
population outgrew it. Every bed was filled all the time. No --
wrong way," Joe stopped Mulder as he turned a corner. "The
cafeteria's this way now." He pointed in the opposite
direction.
"Right," Mulder said, and followed him. It was odd to feel like
a newcomer here.
The cafeteria was deserted except for a listless-looking family
in one corner and a couple of maintenance guys hunkered over
their soda cans. Neither Mulder nor Joe spoke as they bought
overpriced cups of oily-looking coffee and walked back out into
the dining area. To Mulder's surprise, Joe headed straight for
the glass doors that led outside. Mulder followed him out onto a
concrete slab with a few snow-covered tables on it. This was the
coldest part of the night, and the damp sleet had finally
crystallized into tight little flakes that settled on their heads
and shoulders. Mulder blew steam off his coffee and gazed into
the woods that began at the bottom of the hill.
For a while the only sound Mulder heard was the wind in the trees
and his own breathing. There was a waiting quality to their
silence, but it wasn't awkward. Among people who have known each
other more than 30 years, silence is also a form of
communication.
At last Joe said, "I'm sorry about what I said back when we were
in high school. About blaming you for what happened to your
sister."
Mulder shrugged as if the incident no longer bothered him. "I
guess I shouldn't have slugged you in the head."
"No, I deserved it," Joe said. He rubbed the eye socket that had
taken the long-ago punch and said, "Nothing up there worth
saving, anyway."
"You were just repeating what you'd heard," Mulder said.
"The town's not against you, Fox. It never was," Joe said.
"It was against my parents, then," Mulder said.
"No, it's just . . . it was so weird how it happened. My uncle
said it gave him a funny feeling. He wondered how a stranger in
a town of 600 people would go unnoticed. Your house wasn't even
visible from the road. How'd some guy know there would be two
kids home alone?" Joe asked.
"They'd been watching us a long time," Mulder said. Though Joe
stood just out of his field of vision, Mulder sensed his startled
movement.
"You know what happened?" Joe asked.
"Yes," Mulder said. The word came out very quietly, and at first
Mulder wasn't sure Joe had heard.
"It was bad?" Joe asked. Mulder heard the slight break in his
voice. Samantha had been his friend, too.
Mulder let his eyes fall shut against the memory of that dingy
house on an abandoned military base. Better to think about
afterward, when he saw the lost children shining in the
starlight. "She's better off now. She's safe. They can't hurt
her anymore," he said.
"Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ," Joe asked. His job might not be NYPD
Blue, but he was a cop. He'd know there were child abductors and
then there were child abductors.
"It's all over now. It was over a long time ago," Mulder said.
He spoke as if to soothe, but whether he was comforting himself
or Joey he didn't know.
"I'm sorry, Fox. I'm so sorry," Joe said.
"You knew, didn't you? You always knew she wasn't coming home,"
Mulder asked.
"No. I mean, when the weeks and months go by and there's
nothing, not even a ransom note, you get a real bad feeling. But
no, I didn't know," Joe said.
"After a while you wouldn't look me in the eye when I talked
about her. And you knew my family was involved. I think you
must be a hell of a cop, Joe," Mulder said.
"What do you mean, your family?" Joe asked. Mulder looked over
at him and felt gratified that Joe appeared truly shocked.
"It had to do with my father, with his work. He knew they were
going to take her, and my mother at least suspected. I think my
dad tried to fight them at first, but something changed his mind.
Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing. I don't know,"
Mulder said.
"That's why your dad was murdered? Because of his work?" Joe
asked.
"Yeah. He wanted to tell me something, get it off his
conscience, but they wouldn't let him. My mother wanted to tell
me something too, and I lost her in February," Mulder said.
Joe set down his coffee on a snowy tabletop and put his hand to
his head. "What are you telling me, Fox? This is terrorists?
Ex-KGB? What?"
"You don't really want to know," Mulder said. He hadn't meant to
give so much away.
"Aliens," Joe said. "You used to talk about aliens."
"I still do," Mulder said. "And I'm one of the few who wasn't
silenced real quick."
After a few moments Joe asked, "Fox . . . do you think what's out
there, what your partner met in the woods, is related to what
happened to your family?"
Mulder released a long breath that steamed in the cold. "No.
No, I don't think so. I'm starting to think it may be
paranormal, though."
Joe gave his a strange look as he asked, "You mean there's a
real headless lady wandering around by the cliffs?"
Mulder remembered wide-eyed, credulous Joey, the kid with a Cub
Scout scarf around his neck and no front teeth. He repressed a
childish urge to mess with him. "Scully didn't see any headless
ladies," he said.
"So this is what you do, right? You investigate this kind of
thing. How do you stop something paranormal from killing
people?" Joe asked.
"That depends on what it is," Mulder said. "It helps a lot if it
has wrists you can handcuff. Our record with spectral phenomena
hasn't been that good."
"Terrific," Joey said, turning away again. "I'm actually praying
there's a homicidal maniac loose in the woods."
"Would you really believe me if I said there was something out
there? Something not human?" Mulder asked.
"You? I might. Yeah, I just might," Joe said.
"How come?" Mulder asked.
Joe seemed to consider this. "You always were a fucking freak,"
he said.
"Thank you," said Mulder, with no trace of sarcasm. After a
moment's hesitation he rested his hand on Joe's shoulder.
Joe clapped his hand over Mulder's and said, "Go on back to your
partner."
"Sure," Mulder said. He turned and opened the glass door,
leaving Joey to his thoughts and the night.
*****
investigation wore off, the miserable familiarity of his
surroundings began to weigh on him. The power outage denied him
even the dubious pleasure of watching late-night TV as he lay in
bed. In darkness and silence, he was prey to his memories. The
last time he'd been on this island was when he'd inadvertently
set Roche loose. The time before that was the night his father
was murdered. His soul yearned for Scully and for his mother
with a dual intensity that would have warmed the twisted heart
of Sigmund Freud.
It still surprised him that losing his mother was a heavier blow
than learning his sister was dead. It was the way his mother
died, really.
Teena Mulder had gone to the grave organized -- he'd give
her that much. She'd contacted a lawyer to help her get the right
papers signed and the disposition of her estate all planned out.
The nurse who'd come to the house during her final days even knew
what clothes she wanted to be laid out in. The one conspicuous
lapse was her failure to inform her son that she intended to kill
herself -- or even that she was sick. He was angry at her --
in truth he was furious, and that was what was killing him. She
had no right to shut him out of the end of her life, as she'd
shut him out of so many things she wanted to keep secret. She
hadn't even trusted him to pick where she'd be buried. Maybe she
expected that he wouldn't show up at her funeral, since he had
missed his father's.
Scully insisted that his mother had been trying not to burden
him, that the over-planned suicide wasn't the rejection it
seemed. Maybe she was right. Still, he doubted he could have
been hurt more if his mother had actually tried to kill him
instead.
This morbid train of thought was disturbed by someone banging on
his door. "What?" he called out.
"Fox?" it was Leigh. "Fox, we've lost power due to the storm.
Your partner says that she can hear someone lost out there, and
she's going to help. She said you'd know what to do . . ."
Mulder got up and walked to the door in his T-shirt and boxer
shorts. He opened the door and found Leigh there, holding a
flashlight and looking small and owlish in her bathrobe.
"She didn't go out there by herself, did she?" Mulder asked.
"I think so. I don't know. She seemed to be in a hurry," Leigh
said.
"Do you know which direction she went in?" Mulder asked. He did
not like the idea of Scully wandering the countryside in this
storm. The up-island terrain was difficult enough under the best
of circumstances.
Leigh shook her head. "She just took her flashlight and left.
She didn't look dressed properly for the weather," she said.
Mulder swore. "Thanks for telling me. See if you can get Joey
on the phone and ask him to send some people who actually know
their way around the woods out here," he said.
"All right. What are you going to do?" she asked.
"I'm going to go find my partner before--" he stopped himself
from mentioning the state of poor Kristie's remains after she'd
fallen over the cliff. "I'm just going to find her."
*****
Scully struggled down a steep wooded hill about a mile from Nye
House. The heavy clay soil was little more than half-frozen mud,
and her feet were continually sliding. After considering the
odds of a predator being loose in the woods, she carried her gun
in her right hand. She'd put away her flashlight to free her
other hand for holding onto saplings and branches as she walked.
At first she'd heard the child's cries on every strong gust of
wind from the south, but as she traveled the voice seemed to grow
more distant. Now she was unsure if she were following a human
voice at all. The wind keening in the bare branches could sound
human to someone who wanted to hear signs of life badly enough.
She made maddeningly slow progress down the hill as she picked
her way from tree to tree. It occurred to her that she might be
better off if she sat on her butt and slid.
Unexpectedly, she got her wish. A rock rolled under her shoe,
then the muddy earth beneath her feet began to give way. She
grabbed the closest tree -- a dead pine sapling. The trunk
cracked off and fell with her.
Sliding and tumbling amid a hail of earth and stones, Scully
shielded her head with her left arm as best she could. Branches
scratched her and mud-clotted leaves struck her face as she tried
desperately to keep the barrel of her gun pointed away from her
body. The weapon was ready to fire, a bullet lying in the
chamber.
Her other worry was a great tree trunk, directly in her path.
She scrabbled at the soil for a root, a stone, anything, but
could get no purchase. When she hit the trunk a flash of sparks
dazzled her eyes, and her breath was driven out of her. Dimly,
she was aware of the little dead pine landing on her back. For a
moment she swum in darkness.
She lay dazed in the icy mud, feeling a dull pain in her ribs
with every breath. Several seconds passed before she became
aware that her hand was touching something warm and damp. Scully
struggled to look up. Among the pine's branches were eyes, too
close together to be human, shining yellow in the faint,
directionless glow of the sleety night. The creature whined.
She realized she lay beside a wet animal -- a large dog, its ears
laid back and its belly pressed to the ground in terror. She
felt its muscles tense at her movement. Suddenly the dog turned
and bolted, showering her with wet leaves. Shaken, she watched
it tear away up the slope in the direction she had come.
Some irrational inner voice whispered that she'd come to a bad
place, an uncanny place. Scully firmly pushed that thought out
of her mind. Not even Mulder thought there were ghosts here.
There might be violent people and treacherous footing in these
woods, but the place itself was ordinary.
She could just imagine what Mulder would say if he were here.
//You practically killed yourself and all you have to show for
it is a traumatized dog. Terrific.// She rolled painfully
to her knees, then with an effort she stood up and combed the
filth out of her hair with her fingers.
Scully pulled her flashlight from her pocket and hunted for her
gun, which the impact had jerked from her hand. Before long
she saw the glint of metal in the flashlight's beam. She
picked up her mud-covered SIG near the foot of the hill, and
did what she could to clean the dirt out of its barrel. Her
stiff, shaking fingers were not suited to the job.
She was peripherally aware of plastic tape flapping and rattling
on the nearby trees. In her near-exhausted state the noise
didn't seem important, but eventually the rustling sound
triggered associations -- the tinny static of two-way radios, the
staccato lightning of flashbulbs. She shone her light at the
trees. Their trunks were bound with yellow crime scene tape.
This was where Kristie Herron had died. Scully had not expected
to be this close to the cliffs. How close had she come to the
edge without noticing? She hesitated, considered waiting for
Mulder to catch up before continuing. Even if the woods hadn't
been physically dangerous, she would still have to consider the
possible damage to evidence if she blundered around in the
cordoned-off area. She had just about made up her mind to wait
when she caught the sound of ragged sobbing, carried on the wind.
This time she was sure her ears were not deceiving her. The
noise was human.
"I'm Agent Scully with the FBI. I'm here to help. Where are
you?" she called. Her side ached with the effort of shouting.
She got a response -- a word with long, drawn-out vowels, she
thought it was "Mama." The accent was on the second syllable,
giving the cry an oddly foreign sound. Did the child speak
English? Mulder had mentioned the Vineyard's Portuguese
population. It didn't matter. The caller's grief and despair
were plain. No mother, much less one who had lost her only
child, could hear such a sound and be still.
"Keep talking, sweetheart, I'm coming," Scully said. She ducked
under the crime scene tape and passed into the shadows of the
trees. She kept speaking as she walked, trying to encourage
the child to make some sound, any sound. Privately she prayed
that her fall had done nothing to jam the workings of the SIG.
She couldn't shake the feeling that the dog beneath the tree had
been frightened by something else before she nearly ran over it.
Thinking back, she realized that its eyes had not been on her at
all. It had been staring past her, at something in these woods
at the bottom of the hill.
*****
Mulder strode across the frozen field, his Mag Lite casting a
powerful beam ahead of him. Scully's trail was fairly easy to
follow. The line of broken grass stalks and depressions in the
sleet-covered ground led straight toward the South Road Burying
Ground, and beyond that the cliffs. Every so often he'd hunt up
three rocks and place them in an arrow indicating the direction
he'd gone in. Joey, who'd once played a long-suffering Tonto to
Mulder's Lone Ranger, would be able to follow those signs.
Mulder couldn't figure out what had possessed his partner to do
something this foolish. A traveler lost in the woods? Why didn't
she call 911? Why didn't she walk up the goddamn stairs where a
dozen peace officers were sleeping, one of whom had spent the
first 12 years of his life running around these very woods? If
Scully had not been the least supernaturally-inclined woman ever
born, he would have suspected her Irish sailor's blood of
succumbing to the glamour of the Lorelei -- spirits that haunted
cliffs by the sea and lured men to their destruction.
This had to be about Emily. Leigh had said she thought Scully
mentioned something about a child. She'd acted out of character
at the Herrons' house, going out of her way to talk about her
personal loss. At the time Mulder had been touched by her
openness. He should have recognized that something powerful had
to be going on beneath the surface for Scully to do something
like that. This was somehow about Emily and God and this being
Easter and about sleeping with Mulder and him not being the solid
Catholic guy she'd always envisioned herself with.
He increased his brisk walk to a jog as he neared the woods. He
didn't need to fool around analyzing her trail; it was as
straight as a beeline. She was headed for the place where
Kristie had been murdered. He supposed that was logical in a
certain way, if Scully was worried that someone else was in
danger from the same predator.
Yet the long-time paranormal investigator in him was uneasy that
her track was as straight as a line on a surveyor's map. There
was a packed-dirt bicycle path that went roughly in the direction
she wanted to go, but she had walked straight across it without
swerving. //Don't let this be another Skyland Mountain . . .//
Mulder thought.
Memories returned unbidden. He recalled sitting across a Stratego
board from his sister, bickering about what to watch on TV. A light
came through the window, casting long shadows behind the game
pieces. Samantha looked up, puzzled . . .
He shook his head, refusing to be drawn *there* of all places,
but some part of his mind wouldn't let the image go. Mulder
plead with it:
//That was a long time ago.//
//Your neighbors all thought Chilmark was too insignificant for
paranormal events to occur there, too.//
//This is different! There's nothing *in* the South Road Burying
Ground.//
//Before November 27, 1973, there was nothing in your living
room, either.//
Mulder broke into a run.
*****
Scully pressed through a dense area of the forest. The rain had
not washed away all the snow here, and she found herself walking
up to her ankles in powder-fine flakes, like the snow of
midwinter. The wind had died and she could hear the child's
crying very clearly. It only spoke one word, "Mama," again and
again. There was such grief and longing in its voice that she
feared she would find the mother lying dead in the snow, perhaps
murdered by the same person who killed Kristie Herron.
"Keep talking, honey," Scully said, though the child gave no sign
that it heard. The two of them had simply been reciting their
respective litanies as she picked her way closer and closer.
When she at last forced her way through a vine-filled thicket,
she stood at the edge of a clearing. Moonlight dazzled her eyes.
It was as if the storm had never been -- a full moon shone among
sailing clouds and turned the snow into glittering diamonds.
She stared a moment, disoriented. Three or four rustic buildings
stood away to her right, and in the shadow of the largest one a
figure huddled, small and pale against a big, dark stain in the
snow.
She ran closer and realized that there was not one child but two.
One was a long-haired girl about three years old. The other was
a young baby, wrapped in a bloodied cloth and held clutched to
the older child's chest. It was clear the infant wouldn't live.
Its throat had been slashed nearly through, but its eyes remained
open and there was a continual wet wheezing sound as it tried to
draw breath. A wound like that on a living body could only be
seconds old. Scully fired once into the air, to draw the
attention of rescuers and to run off who or whatever had just
done *that.*
"You're all right. I'm a doctor. The other officers will be
here any moment," Scully said, loud enough that anyone hiding
nearby should be able to hear. Could she carry both children and
still be able to use her gun? She'd have to.
The girl's gray eyes had the fixed stare of shock and her clothes
were soaked in blood. Whether it was hers or the dying baby's
Scully didn't know, and there was no time to examine her. Scully
reached to scoop the children up but something checked her hand,
too fast to have meaning for her. She felt a burning sensation
followed by cold wetness on her fingers and looked down. Her
hand was bleeding.
Slowly it dawned on her that the child was holding a long, thin
knife. "It's all right," she said, her mind too dazed to make
anything of this except the girl believed she was defending
herself. Scully grabbed for the little elbow in what should have
been an easy disarm, but instead the knife laid open the skin of
her palm. There was no time for this -- the baby was dying and
the killer was still close. "I have to get you out of here,"
Scully said, her desperation rising.
"No," the child said softly. "Stay."
The strange plea made her hesitate, and she was struck by the
loneliness in the child's pale little face. It was familiar,
like an image from a half-remembered nightmare, and it echoed in
the broken places of her soul.
*****
After what seemed like an eternity of thrashing around in the
briars, Mulder reached the South Road Burying Ground. The tiny
cemetery consisted of seven headstones, listing like drunkards,
and two rocks. The enormous willow he remembered was still there.
Scully was not.
He was beginning to feel the stirrings of panic when a shot rang
out from deeper in the woods. Mulder wasn't enough of a firearms
expert to identify the sound of a firing SIG, but when he heard
the eerie whistle of the bullet he knew the weapon was no low-
powered hunting rifle. "Scully!" he called out. He struggled
through the underbrush in the direction he'd heard the gun fire,
trying to stay within the cover of large trees. The last thing
he needed was to get his head blown off.
His flashlight beam illuminated little and made everything around
it seem darker. At this point the only reason to keep it on was
the hope it might draw Scully to him. Of course, it might draw
other things as well. No longer carefully tracking, he was
moving as fast as he could through the undergrowth.
The weaving flashlight beam began illuminating orange flags stuck
in the soil -- evidence markers. This was the spot Kristie had
met her attacker. A moment later the light revealed a bloodied
shoe. Over the shoe was a leg. Mulder stopped short and angled
the beam up. There stood Scully, her face gray as a corpse's,
watching blood run down her hands.
Mulder had the feeling he was looking at a dead woman. He asked
softly, "What happened to you?"
She looked up, and he saw her pupils were dilated even in the
bright beam of light. Her brows drew together as if she were
trying to place him. "She was just here," she said.
"Who was just here?" Mulder asked.
"A little girl," she said. She began looking at the ground
around her. "There was snow . . ." She turned away from him and
began to wander off among the evidence markers. That alone was
enough to convince him something was terribly wrong. Scully had
never fouled a crime scene in her life.
"What is it?" he asked. "What did you see?"
"There was a house . . . there were little children. They were
wounded, and I wanted to help, but I couldn't. She wanted me to
stay with her . . ."
"You're hurt. You need to get out of here," he said. He put his
hand on her arm to draw her toward him. She resisted at first,
then turned and curled against his chest. He took her hands in
his own and balled them into fists, pressing the cuts on her
palms closed. Her fingers were as cold as death despite the hot
blood that ran between them.
*****
Hours later Mulder sat by Scully's bedside in the ER of the tiny
hospital in Edgartown. Scully slept, and every so often an
orderly would arrive to spread a freshly-warmed blanket over her.
She'd been unwilling or unable to explain how she became injured out
in the dark woods. All he knew was that she'd found wounded
children somewhere southeast of the graveyard and was reluctant
to leave the scene, blood loss and hypothermia be damned. She'd
only consented to come away after Joe Luce and another officer
arrived, and she'd kept her gaze toward the graveyard even as
Mulder led her toward the road.
He reached out and touched her fingertips, the only part of her
left hand that wasn't bandaged, and was relieved to feel that her
skin was warm now.
"What did you see out there?" he asked softly. Deeply asleep,
his partner did not reply.
He heard the sound of approaching footsteps. This person was
wearing hard-soled shoes, not the orthopedic footwear of the
hospital staff. "Fox?" came a voice.
"Joey," Mulder said. He stood up and opened the curtain that
walled off Scully's bed. The first thing that impressed him
about Joe Luce was how much he looked like the little kid he
had known. The big dark eyes were still there, and so was the
hair that refused to take any kind of decent part. The
stuff still sat on Joe's head like twists of brown winter grass.
Afterward Mulder's mind filled in the unfamiliar. Manhood had
squared Joe's jaw and broadened his shoulders, and he wore a
Chilmark Police Chief's uniform, just as his uncle had. It was
fitting, somehow.
Joe had clearly just come from outside. Half-melted sleet
pellets rested on his shoulders and in his hair, and cold
radiated from his clothes.
"How's your partner?" Joe asked.
"She'll be all right," Mulder said. "What did you find?"
Joe shook his head. "We didn't find any kids, Fox. Some of the
guys from Crime Scene Services came out with their dogs, and we
still came up with nothing. That shot you heard -- you think it
was from her gun?"
"I can look," Mulder said. He walked over to the chair where
Scully's things had been neatly folded. He drew her service
weapon out of its holster and examined it. There were powder
streaks around the barrel -- something Scully never would have
tolerated for longer than it took her to get to her cleaning
supplies. "It was hers," he said. Guessing Joe's next
question, Mulder said, "Scully's not trigger-happy, and she
doesn't imagine things."
Joe held his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. "I'm not
suggesting that," he said. "I'm just trying to figure out what
happened. You sure she said there were buildings?"
"Yeah -- houses or little shacks," Mulder said.
"That's what's bothering me, because there aren't any buildings
out where you found her. I know, because I've been combing those
woods for days," Joe said.
"There's the Gelbemanns' place," Mulder said, without great
conviction. The house was several hundred yards to the east of
where he found Scully.
"It's hard to see how she could have come from there," Joe said.
"She'd have had to cross the creek, and there's no bridge. We
did check on the Gelbemanns just to be safe, but they never heard
or saw anything. There sure were no pools of blood around their
house. Did Agent Scully say anything else to you? Did she give
you a landmark . . . anything at all?" Joe asked.
Mulder gazed over at his sleeping partner and motioned for Joe to
follow him into the hall. He stopped at a spot that seemed far
enough from the triage area to be discreet. "Scully told me the
buildings showed up against the snow in the moonlight," Mulder
said.
Joe looked surprised and slightly embarrassed. Mulder could see
this news shifted his attitude toward the whole situation. Sleet
could pass for snow, but there had certainly been no moonlight
out in the storm. "I don't know what she saw out there, Joey.
But if you knew her, you'd know that she wouldn't just imagine
something like this," Mulder said.
"I believe you," Joe said.
"If you did you'd still be out there," Mulder said.
"Fox, the CSS guys are willing to switch off in teams until
someone can do a flyover at dawn. I'm on call if they need me.
There's not a lot more we can do," Joe insisted.
"How do you think she cut her hands? On a twig?" Mulder asked.
"It's being taken care of," Joe said. "Look, can I get you a
cup of coffee or something?"
"I've got some," Mulder said, gesturing toward the Styrofoam cup
of now-cold coffee sitting on the table by Scully's bed.
"Where's Irv?"
"Irv?" Joe asked, looking surprised.
"The little shit that got us into this in the first place.
Scully said he seemed too interested in this case from the
beginning," Mulder said.
"I'm not sure if he's working tonight. This is his secondary
job -- he and Emma still run that photography store during the
day," Joe said.
"You're kidding. They couldn't stand each other," Mulder said.
"They still can't. Actually they're divorced, but they live
together. It's his photo business but he's running it out of her
house. I guess they figured putting up with each other was
easier than dividing up the stuff," Joe said.
"If he's here I want to see him," Mulder said. He went to the
nurses' station and convinced the woman behind the desk to page
Irv, and then Irv's supervisor. As Mulder stood waiting for a
response to the pages, he listened to Joe answer a staticky call
over his two-way radio. The reporting officer told him that the
dogs had found no other trails besides Mulder and Scully's.
"I thought you were off-duty," Mulder said, forestalling any
comments Joe might make.
"Never," Joe said, as he replaced the receiver on its shoulder
strap. "I'm a full 25% of Chilmark's finest."
"Just like your uncle," Mulder said.
"I'm not my uncle," Joe said.
The phone behind the nurses' desk trilled softly. The desk
attendant took it and said, "I see. Thank you." When she hung
up she said, "That was the transporter's room. Irv Stuckey isn't
scheduled to work tonight."
"Thanks," Mulder said, and turned to go back to Scully's bedside.
Joe caught his elbow.
"Hey, Fox, c'mon. If I don't get some coffee I'm going to keel
over," Joe said.
Mulder repressed the urge to shrug Joe's hand off. "Isn't Sue
expecting you?" he asked.
"No," Joe said. The bleakness in his voice made Mulder pause.
For the first time he realized his former friend might have
other reasons for not wanting to return home.
"I'm sorry," Mulder said.
Joe shrugged and looked away. "These things happen. Three out of
the four people on the Chilmark force are divorced now. Our
job's not exactly 'NYPD Blue,' but the hours . . . you know. The
sad thing is that now that I have court-regulated visitation, I
think I see my daughter more often."
Joey's words did a lot to dissolve the resentment Mulder had been
feeling toward him. Mulder had felt in a one-down position due to
his own personal failures, and in his mind Joe's confession
brought them to the same level. "Coffee'd be great," Mulder said.
He allowed himself a last look at Scully, still sleeping and safe
for the moment, before walking past the nurses' station and out
into the hall.
The hospital corridor was all gleaming white surfaces. "The
place looks better. It used to be such a dump," Mulder said. He
remembered cracked floor tiles and walls painted sickly pea-green
to the height of a child's eye-level.
"They've done a lot with it. They had to -- the Island
population outgrew it. Every bed was filled all the time. No --
wrong way," Joe stopped Mulder as he turned a corner. "The
cafeteria's this way now." He pointed in the opposite
direction.
"Right," Mulder said, and followed him. It was odd to feel like
a newcomer here.
The cafeteria was deserted except for a listless-looking family
in one corner and a couple of maintenance guys hunkered over
their soda cans. Neither Mulder nor Joe spoke as they bought
overpriced cups of oily-looking coffee and walked back out into
the dining area. To Mulder's surprise, Joe headed straight for
the glass doors that led outside. Mulder followed him out onto a
concrete slab with a few snow-covered tables on it. This was the
coldest part of the night, and the damp sleet had finally
crystallized into tight little flakes that settled on their heads
and shoulders. Mulder blew steam off his coffee and gazed into
the woods that began at the bottom of the hill.
For a while the only sound Mulder heard was the wind in the trees
and his own breathing. There was a waiting quality to their
silence, but it wasn't awkward. Among people who have known each
other more than 30 years, silence is also a form of
communication.
At last Joe said, "I'm sorry about what I said back when we were
in high school. About blaming you for what happened to your
sister."
Mulder shrugged as if the incident no longer bothered him. "I
guess I shouldn't have slugged you in the head."
"No, I deserved it," Joe said. He rubbed the eye socket that had
taken the long-ago punch and said, "Nothing up there worth
saving, anyway."
"You were just repeating what you'd heard," Mulder said.
"The town's not against you, Fox. It never was," Joe said.
"It was against my parents, then," Mulder said.
"No, it's just . . . it was so weird how it happened. My uncle
said it gave him a funny feeling. He wondered how a stranger in
a town of 600 people would go unnoticed. Your house wasn't even
visible from the road. How'd some guy know there would be two
kids home alone?" Joe asked.
"They'd been watching us a long time," Mulder said. Though Joe
stood just out of his field of vision, Mulder sensed his startled
movement.
"You know what happened?" Joe asked.
"Yes," Mulder said. The word came out very quietly, and at first
Mulder wasn't sure Joe had heard.
"It was bad?" Joe asked. Mulder heard the slight break in his
voice. Samantha had been his friend, too.
Mulder let his eyes fall shut against the memory of that dingy
house on an abandoned military base. Better to think about
afterward, when he saw the lost children shining in the
starlight. "She's better off now. She's safe. They can't hurt
her anymore," he said.
"Oh, Jesus. Oh, Christ," Joe asked. His job might not be NYPD
Blue, but he was a cop. He'd know there were child abductors and
then there were child abductors.
"It's all over now. It was over a long time ago," Mulder said.
He spoke as if to soothe, but whether he was comforting himself
or Joey he didn't know.
"I'm sorry, Fox. I'm so sorry," Joe said.
"You knew, didn't you? You always knew she wasn't coming home,"
Mulder asked.
"No. I mean, when the weeks and months go by and there's
nothing, not even a ransom note, you get a real bad feeling. But
no, I didn't know," Joe said.
"After a while you wouldn't look me in the eye when I talked
about her. And you knew my family was involved. I think you
must be a hell of a cop, Joe," Mulder said.
"What do you mean, your family?" Joe asked. Mulder looked over
at him and felt gratified that Joe appeared truly shocked.
"It had to do with my father, with his work. He knew they were
going to take her, and my mother at least suspected. I think my
dad tried to fight them at first, but something changed his mind.
Maybe he thought he was doing the right thing. I don't know,"
Mulder said.
"That's why your dad was murdered? Because of his work?" Joe
asked.
"Yeah. He wanted to tell me something, get it off his
conscience, but they wouldn't let him. My mother wanted to tell
me something too, and I lost her in February," Mulder said.
Joe set down his coffee on a snowy tabletop and put his hand to
his head. "What are you telling me, Fox? This is terrorists?
Ex-KGB? What?"
"You don't really want to know," Mulder said. He hadn't meant to
give so much away.
"Aliens," Joe said. "You used to talk about aliens."
"I still do," Mulder said. "And I'm one of the few who wasn't
silenced real quick."
After a few moments Joe asked, "Fox . . . do you think what's out
there, what your partner met in the woods, is related to what
happened to your family?"
Mulder released a long breath that steamed in the cold. "No.
No, I don't think so. I'm starting to think it may be
paranormal, though."
Joe gave his a strange look as he asked, "You mean there's a
real headless lady wandering around by the cliffs?"
Mulder remembered wide-eyed, credulous Joey, the kid with a Cub
Scout scarf around his neck and no front teeth. He repressed a
childish urge to mess with him. "Scully didn't see any headless
ladies," he said.
"So this is what you do, right? You investigate this kind of
thing. How do you stop something paranormal from killing
people?" Joe asked.
"That depends on what it is," Mulder said. "It helps a lot if it
has wrists you can handcuff. Our record with spectral phenomena
hasn't been that good."
"Terrific," Joey said, turning away again. "I'm actually praying
there's a homicidal maniac loose in the woods."
"Would you really believe me if I said there was something out
there? Something not human?" Mulder asked.
"You? I might. Yeah, I just might," Joe said.
"How come?" Mulder asked.
Joe seemed to consider this. "You always were a fucking freak,"
he said.
"Thank you," said Mulder, with no trace of sarcasm. After a
moment's hesitation he rested his hand on Joe's shoulder.
Joe clapped his hand over Mulder's and said, "Go on back to your
partner."
"Sure," Mulder said. He turned and opened the glass door,
leaving Joey to his thoughts and the night.
*****