As Mulder scraped his shoes off on Nye House's coconut fiber mat,
all he wanted to do was take a shower and go to sleep beside
Scully, preferably after making gentle, tender love. No Stupid
Spice Channel Tricks tonight. In fact, he might be willing to
settle for watching old movies on TV and falling asleep with his
head in her lap.
When he opened the door he found a few State Troopers standing
near the front desk, talking in lowered voices. Their
conversation stopped the moment he entered the room. Mulder
ignored them and walked down the hall marked, "Employees Only
Beyond This Point." Tammy Williams' old room was the first one
on the left.
There was no answer at his knock, and when he opened the door, he
saw that Scully's coat was gone, but her cell phone lay beneath a
chair. A closer inspection revealed that she'd left her purse
but taken her gun. "Your partner's gone out," one of the
officers called. Mulder didn't like the strange emphasis the man
put on "out."
He had a pretty good idea where she'd gone. //Scully, don't do
this to me.// In the last 24 hours, he'd slept less and cried
more than was good for his sanity. The last thing he needed was
to be chasing her over the empty hills with who-knew-what loose
in the woods.
The men in the front room gave him curious looks as he wearily
headed back out the way he came. As he'd feared, his car was
parked in the gravel lot, its hood cold. A line of footprints in
the snow led from the Inn's front door toward the field behind
Nye House. They were wavy-soled orthopedic sneaker prints --
Scully's autopsy shoes.
Mulder walked across the frozen field thinking -- what? That
when he found her, he'd grab her by the shoulders and shake her
until her teeth rattled? He'd send her to her room with no TV?
Sure. She'd shoot him first.
Mulder's anger slowly drained away as he hiked across the frozen
field, leaving nothing but cold fear in its place. Scully was
practically all he had, and he was afraid he wouldn't survive
losing her.
He found her crouching in front of the old Cartwright tombstone
in the South Road Burying Ground, her head bent, whispering to
herself. He was able to catch the sibilants in "Jesus" and
"sinner."
"Hi," he said.
She jumped a little at the sound of his voice. Scully brushed
her cheeks with her fingertips before she turned to face him.
"Hi."
He walked over and crouched down next to her. Gesturing at the
tombstone, he said, "Ezra doesn't say much, but he's all right."
She dug in her pockets, presumably for a Kleenex. "I just needed
some time alone."
Mulder nodded, but didn't take the hint to go away. He didn't
think she needed to be alone out here, with her own and Kristie's
blood spattering the trees not fifty yards away. When her search
for a tissue was unsuccessful, he gave her his clean
handkerchief. The one he'd dried his own tears with was in his
back pocket. "I used to come out here when I was a kid. Joey
and I had a tree fort over in that willow." He pointed to a
massive gray willow tree, now more dead than alive, which still
had the remains of boards and some raveling ropes fastened to it.
"Must've been nice," she said. She blew her nose and folded the
handkerchief neatly. Mulder knew Scully's childhood had spanned
seven states, and that if she and her siblings had built forts,
she no longer knew where.
"We had a good time," Mulder said. He didn't bother asking how
she was doing, since he knew the answer would only be "Fine." He
rubbed her back with his hand.
"Mulder?"
"Mmm-hm?"
"Did you ever poison a cat?"
He looked over at her, saw the earnestness in her mascara-smudged
eyes. "What?"
"I talked to Irv Stuckey today, and he said I should ask you
about the time you poisoned the cat. He said that was what sent
Sheriff Luce 'sniffing' after you."
"Irv said . . . ? Irv's an asshole," Mulder said. After a
moment he stood and walked a few steps away, fighting a powerful
desire to go out to Menemsha and wring Irv's neck. "I never
killed anybody's cat." He'd meant the statement to be a firm
denial, but to his dismay he sounded hurt and resentful, like an
eleven-year-old wrongfully accused.
He heard the snow crunch beneath her feet as she stood and came
over to him. Scully threaded her arm through his and rested her
head against his bicep. "What happened?"
He looked over at the broken tombstones, like jagged teeth
sticking out of the ground. This was not a story he much liked
telling. "Ah . . . hell. I was rotten kid. I knew I'd be in
trouble if I hit my sister, so I mentally abused her instead.
Sometimes when I got mad at her I said I'd do things . . .
to her dolls or to her cat. Never poison -- it was Baroque
things, 'The Pit and the Pendulum' stuff. It made her scream.
I guess that's what I wanted." He felt Scully's body tense
against him, and he looked over, asking a wordless question.
She shook her head against his arm. "It's nothing. It's just I
had a rabbit once. I called him Peter. As in Cottontail. A
stupid name, but I was six. My brother kept threatening to skin
and cook him."
Mulder nodded, avoiding her eyes. "Maybe your brother feels kind
of bad about it now."
"Maybe."
"Kids say things, you know?"
"Yes."
"My sister's cat turned up dead at the bottom of the basement
stairs one day."
Scully ran her bandaged hand up and down his forearm. "That
must've been awful."
"The cat had blood running out of her mouth. She was an indoor
cat and this was in March -- nothing outside to chew on,
poisonous or not. Samantha ran upstairs crying and told our mom
the stuff I'd been saying. Mom just lost it. She took my dad's
belt to me -- the worst whipping I ever got from her. Didn't
matter that I said I hadn't done anything. I think she wanted to
believe that I poisoned the cat, because it was better than the
alternative."
For a moment, the chilly afternoon was so quiet. There were no
car noises this far out, not even the distant roar of airplane
engines. The only sounds were the wind and the calls of the
birds. Scully kept rubbing his arm. "Someone came in and did
it," she said.
"Yeah." The word was almost a sigh. "This was early in the year
we lost my sister. I think my father was fighting the Syndicate
at the time, so they sent him a little message. 'Hand over one of
your kids for our Project, or next time it'll be more than just
the cat.'"
"That's horrible."
"I couldn't convince my mom I hadn't done it. Before long I even
had my sister believing me, which is saying something. I guess
your sister always knows if you're lying or not."
Scully's sharp intake of breath was somewhere between a laugh and
a gasp of pain. He figured her bruised ribs were hurting her.
"Melissa and I sounded exactly the same way when we lied. I
always knew."
"Well, Samantha knew. She was--" He decided not to describe
that scene, himself lying across his bed, in more pain than he'd
known existed, begging his mother for mercy while she blistered
his behind and told him he'd done something very, very wicked.
Samantha had stood on the other side of the bedroom door and
shouted, "Don't you hit my brother!"
"Anyway . . . she knew," Mulder said.
He felt Scully shifting position as she looked up at him, but he
kept his own gaze on a stand of black trees in the middle
distance. Almost three decades later, he was still ashamed. Not
so much because he'd been punished, but because his own mother
thought him capable of doing such a thing. Knowing what he did
now about the sort of children who tortured animals, the
accusation was actually worse.
"Did your mom ever believe you?" Scully asked.
"Eventually. It helped that my dad believed me, or at least he
believed my sister. Or maybe he knew something we didn't. I
don't know." One of the braver things he'd done as a child was
to stand in his pajamas in the middle of the living room, risking
another spanking by simply being out of his room, and insist to
his father that he hadn't killed the family cat. Bill Mulder had
looked a little gray around the lips as he'd stood in his damp
raincoat, confronted by the whole family yelling at him. He'd
turned Fox around and sent him back upstairs with a surprisingly
gentle nudge. //"Go on up, son. I'll talk to you later."//
"Cats do sometimes just die, you know," Scully said.
"You'd think that would have occurred to someone. It sure didn't
seem to occur to my parents, at least not as the most likely
possibility. There was something wrong, Scully. Something they
weren't going to tell me about. They actually had the cat
autopsied. I mean, how weird is that?"
"When it's an animal, the procedure's usually called a necropsy,
but it's not so unusual," Scully said.
"There was blood inside of her. Or something. My parents
weren't very forthcoming with information. The vet said she'd
definitely eaten something poisonous, but he couldn't say what."
"No. Isolating a toxin is hard enough now, and with the methods
they had back in the early 70's it would have been worse.
Probably even the FBI lab couldn't have identified the poison
precisely. If whatever the cat ingested had cleared her stomach,
there was really no way for the vet to know."
Scully's tone was kinder than her clinical words implied. He
turned toward her and rested his cheek against the smooth curve
of her bangs. "Once my mom was sure I hadn't killed the cat, she
wouldn't let my sister and I eat anywhere. We had to come home
from school for lunch. She'd taste our food before she gave it
to us, that sort of thing. I think this may have been when the
neighbors first realized that something was really wrong with us.
It was about that time when Joey's uncle started telling Mrs.
Luce that maybe her kids shouldn't play with us anymore. I
actually think he kind of liked me when I was little, it's just
he could sense something really bad was coming down and didn't
want his family involved. I guess I can't blame him."
"As a law officer, it was his job to help you," Scully said.
"You wouldn't turn away from a family in a desperate situation
like that, would you?"
"No." Mulder mouthed the word more than he spoke it. "But I
don't have kids to protect, you know? If it was between a
neighbor family and my own niece and nephew . . . I don't know.
Anyway, people remembered what happened to the cat when my sister
went missing. I was the only other person home when it happened,
and they figured I was already a pet-poisoning junior psycho."
"You weren't," she said firmly. "I hope your mother apologized
to you."
"She did, in her way." She'd cupped his face in her hands, a
gesture somewhere between a caress and a restraint to keep him
from looking away. //"Fox, if you didn't do this thing, I'm
sorry."// She'd scanned his eyes, probably both hoping and
fearing to find innocence.
//"I didn't, Mom. I swear I didn't."// He'd been crying as he
said it, afraid this would only make him seem guiltier. *"If*
you didn't," she'd said.
"Did she comfort you?"
He nodded, rubbing his cheek against Scully's hair. "She let me
curl up in her lap while we watched some stupid nature show."
Actually he'd lain with his head and shoulders in his mother's
lap while his drawn-up knees sweated against the plastic-covered
couch.
Scully sometimes held him like this, because their size
differential and the conventions of the sexes prevented him from
sitting in her lap. As a child, the reason had been quite
different. Fox had a seam of blisters where his buttocks met his
thighs, and another cluster on his left hip, where the belt had
snapped around. Sitting in anyone's lap was quite beyond him.
His mother had stroked his hair while they watched a bear stalk
an otter community in too-vivid 70's Technicolor. Samantha would
normally have seized the chance to bump her big brother aside so
she could assert her baby-of-the-family right to snuggle with
Mom, but she climbed into their father's lap instead. She'd
understood that Fox and his mother needed a chance to make up
with one another. Bill read a newspaper around the little girl.
Hurting, sleepy from crying even though his bedtime was an hour
away, Fox turned toward his mother and twisted the ends of her
long, dark hair in his fingers. The nature show announcer boomed
behind him: //"Olivia nips and claws her kits away from the
bear's snapping teeth."//
The conversation Fox hadn't had with his mother that night
remained one of the most powerful moments in their relationship.
She'd rubbed his back through the terrycloth of his bathrobe and
hadn't said: I'm so sorry I hurt you. I would have forgiven you
even if you had poisoned the cat. I'm desperate to protect you
and I don't know how.
He'd looked up into her green eyes, big as a child's in her
pretty face, and hadn't said: I forgive you because I know that
you're scared. Actually, I'd forgive you anything.
"What're you thinking about?" Scully asked. She slipped her hand
beneath the folds of his coat and rested it in the small of his
back, two of her fingers pressing against the waistband of his
trousers. She'd been taking tease lessons from him, wicked
thing.
"Nothing. A long time ago," he said. Better to turn the
conversation back to her. "What're you thinking about?"
"Nothing. The last days. Religion."
The hand almost over his ass said otherwise. He wondered if he
were a magnet for people who sent mixed messages. Between his
relatives, lovers, ex-lovers, co-workers, and shadowy informants,
the mind games got a little excessive.
"That tombstone says, 'Resurgam,' or, 'I will rise again,'" she
said, pointing the toe of her sneaker at one of the broken
headstones. Actually only part of the "s" and the "urgam" were
left.
Mulder, who tended to look at all things on the Vineyard with the
eyes of childhood, had always had a vague assumption that
"Surgam" was some kind of family name. The Oxford grad in him
was disgusted.
Feeling a little too vulnerable to confess his ignorance, he
said, "That guy's pretty confident for someone with a big rock
over his head."
"It's ironic, isn't it? The first headstones were weights to
keep the dead from walking, and now we carve messages about the
Resurrection into them."
//I love you, I hate you, come here, go away . . . story of my
life.// "Those rocks right there are probably headstones too,"
Mulder said, pointing at two granite mounds beneath soft caps of
snow.
"Wow. They didn't even rate a slate slab. I can see the TV
special right now: 'It's your headstone, Charlie Brown.' 'I got
a rock.'"
Mulder had a twisted mental image of the Grim Reaper handing out
all the good tombstones before Charlie Brown got to the front of
the line. "You're sick," he told her. "I knew I liked something
about you." He kissed the top of her head. "This used to be a
family graveyard. Those rocks are probably covering poor
relatives, servants, kids, maybe."
She made a small, disgusted noise in her throat.
"The 18th century didn't have the same ideas about kids that we
do."
"I know."
Mulder considered asking her whether she wanted to talk about
what she'd seen last night, but there was something closed and
self-protective about her. At every chance she could, she'd
turned their conversation back to him.
"C'mere. I want to show you something," he said. He took her
hand and led her toward the ruined foundations that lay a little
to the east of the graveyard, not far from where he'd found her
last night. The structure had fallen down so long ago that a
maple with a trunk the diameter of a woman's forearm grew inside
what had once been solid walls. At the moment, snow covered even
the crumbling fieldstone wall base, but the building's outlines
were hinted at by straight, contiguous gaps in the weeds and
other vegetation. The effect was a little eerie, as if the
memory of the house had so impressed itself upon nature that even
the grasses still respected boundaries that had long since ceased
to exist.
Mulder kicked at the approximate location of the wall base until
the tip of his shoe struck rock. He bent and cleared the half-
frozen mud and clotted leaves away until he exposed a low, flat
chunk of Massachusetts brownstone.
"There," he said with satisfaction. "This was a house, a
farmhouse from back before the Revolutionary War. It belonged to
the family buried back over there. Actually, the cemetery used
to be named after them before people forgot who they were and
South Road became the major landmark. On really old maps it's
called the 'Brown-Cartwright Grave Yard.' If you're curious
about it, you can visit the Dukes County Historical Society.
Lots of the little old ladies around here are grave-hunters.
You'd be surprised."
Scully looked around wide-eyed, as if the place frightened her.
"What happened to the people who lived here?" she asked.
"I think the house burned in about 1790-something. I'm not sure
about the family, but I can tell you there are still plenty of
Browns and Cartwrights on the Vineyard," Mulder said. He dug in
the cold dirt along the wall line until his fingertips touched
something hard and rough. When he tugged it out and brushed the
mud off, he found it was a jumble of rusted metal. "Sometimes
you find spoons out here, or old nails, or -- here's a nail here.
You can tell it's original to the house because the head is just
a kind of hammered-down section. It looks like a miniature
railroad spike." He plucked the little chunk of twisted iron
from the mass and held it out to Scully. "See how the sharp end
just kind of withers away? That's because it was burned.
Occasionally you find lumps of melted glass out here, too."
She stretched her fingertips toward the object but then pulled
away, as if it were still hot. She looked up at him and asked,
"Where did Irv's story come from? I mean the South Road Ghost
story."
He sprinkled the twists of rusted iron back onto the ground and
wiped his fingers on the hem of his coat.
"The truth?" he asked. "There's a book in the county library
called 'Haunted Martha's Vineyard.' Every Island child I knew
checked that book out at some time or another, usually around
Halloween. That's where I got it from. That's probably where
Irv got it from. As far as I know, there's no other record that
the South Road Ghost ever existed."
"So what did I see, Mulder? There were little children dying --
they were there and then not there. You think I made the whole
thing up?" Scully asked.
"No. I don't think you made it up. I think you saw something,
probably even something paranormal. All I'm saying is that this
being may not be what it first appears. I'll be honest -- I'm
suspicious of a good story, where everything is explained and
everything makes sense. Real life just isn't like that. So when
someone tells me that this awful mom kills her kids and then
she's doomed to walk the night inflicting vengeance on wayward
women, it's a just little too neat. It sounds like somebody's
idea of poetic justice, exactly the kind of thing that people
would invent.
"Scully, if there is something out here . . . calling you, it may
be choosing to present itself as part of a good story. I mean,
what attracts us more than the idea that the world makes sense?
Because if we can understand the world, we can control it, and
then we never have to get hurt again. Right?"
She looked away toward some point on the horizon. "You don't
understand," she said.
"Then explain it to me." She didn't reply. "Explain it so I can
help you," he urged.
"Mulder," her voice was infinitely weary, as if she'd crossed a
great distance to speak with him. "This is just one of those
things that isn't about you."
"If it's about you, it's about me."
That was clearly the wrong thing to say. Scully actually seemed
to flinch.
"Don't shut me out," he pleaded. He felt about eleven years old,
tormented unjustly, and yet desperate to be comforted by his
tormentor. Why did he most need the people he loved right after
they'd hurt him?
"It's okay," she said. Her eyes remained distant but she held
out her hand. He took it in both of his own. "It's okay.
Things haven't changed between us. This isn't about you. It's
about me."
"You realize that's the second-biggest lie in the world after
'the check is in the mail?'"
She pulled him close and held him. "I'm not going anywhere."
"If I lost you, I just -- I wouldn't deal with it well." He
hugged her so tightly he could feel the bones of her shoulder
blades pressing his forearm.
He felt more than heard her gasp of pain. "Mulder, don't."
Too late, he remembered her bruised ribcage and released her.
She pulled back from him. Twilight came to the woods first, and
in the dimness her pupils were very wide. The shadows made her
eyes seem infinitely deep, like black water locked beneath black
ice. What lay in that darkness was apparently not for him to
know. She placed two cool fingertips over his lips. "Just
don't."
He looked away first. "Sure."
She slipped her arm through his. "Come on. It's cold, let's go
back."
He walked with her, guiding her steps along the quickest path
back to the Inn. They cast long shadows away to their right as
they crossed the snowy field. Lights had already appeared in
some of Nye House's windows.
"Mulder, can I ask you something?" she asked.
He glanced down at her, grateful to be distracted from the dread
that had begun to dog him. "What is it?"
"Do you have a juvenile record in Connecticut?"
At first her question confused him. "Do I have a what?"
"Irv told me to ask you about Fairfield County Juvenile Court
sometime," Scully asked.
Mulder had a mental flash of himself at 15, staring at his too-
shiny wingtips and listening to a judge talk to his father. "You
know, I hate Irv. Did he tell you how many books I never
returned to the library, too? Somewhere I have one from 1987."
"No. Well, he asked whether you were into enemas and plastic
pants," she said.
"That figures. I hope you told him 'Yes.'"
She looked appalled. "Of course I didn't. I didn't think his
question was even worth answering."
"By getting upset you just confirmed the idea in his mind. You
should have told him, yeah, I'm into plastic pants, and peanut
butter and farm animals, and looking at posters of Freddy Mercury
while I engage in autoerotic electric shock with the toaster.
Then he wouldn't know what to believe."
"Sorry. I guess I'm not as up on my perversions as I should be,"
she said.
"Stick with me, kid. I'll teach you everything there is to
know." He thought she tried to repress a smile. "You already
know the Juvenile Court story," he said.
She shook her head. "No I don't."
"Yes, you do. You just didn't recognize it because Irv tried to
make it sound worse. Remember the third case we worked together
-- maybe the fourth, when we were in Idaho staking out the guy
who could telekinetically turn his microwave into a MAZER?"
"Oh . . ." He saw the glimmer of recollection in her eyes.
The over-humid car with its persistent fried-food smell was
permanently etched into his memory, as was the white curve of
Scully's chin and throat, fuller then than it was now, backlit by
halogen streetlights. "You asked me if I thought I was capable
of killing someone, and I said yes, because I'd been ready to
kill Eric Magnus in the 10th grade."
"That's the kid you went after with -- what, a roll of dimes?"
"It was quarters." Eric had been the first one to wrap his fist
around a roll of currency in order to harden the impact of his
punch, but Fox had learned fast. "He was the 'Chester the
Molester' kid," Mulder said. The older boy discovered early
in Mulder's Greenwich High career that if he wanted to pick a
fight with the weirdo Vineyard kid, all he had to do was whisper,
"Who got your sister, Freak? It was Chester the Molester."
"You didn't say they arrested you for that," she said.
"Yes, I did. Remember me and Eric got into it on the street
behind the school, and then somebody called the cops? When
the officer asked, 'What's going on here?' Eric said, 'Nothing,'
and I said, 'I'm going to kill this motherfucker.'"
"Oh, that's right . . . . I forgot you have that Eagle Scout
quality -- always honest," she said. She pulled her arm loose
and slipped it beneath his coat, tucking her fingertips into the
top of his back pocket. A good reason never to keep it buttoned,
he thought. He put his arm around her waist, and as they walked
he could feel the muscles of her hip working.
"So after that they brought me in. From their perspective, who
started it wasn't important. I was the one who threatened to
kill someone.
"Back then, every case with an underage defendant went to
Juvenile Court. I felt pretty lousy standing there in front of
the judge, even though he spent most of his time telling off my
parents."
Mulder could still hear the gravelly voice of the Honorable Peter
Shamsideen saying, //"Mr. and Mrs. Mulder, I am very sorry for
the loss of your daughter. But you must remember that you have a
son who needs you."// Fox had kept his hands jammed in his
pockets, even though he'd been told not to do that, and had been
very close to crying, even though he'd been told not to do that
either. When Judge Shamsideen said, //"Young man, I hope you
succeed in making something of your life,"// Fox had only managed
a soft, //"Yessir."// Mulder wasn't sure if being senior agent
on the X-Files Unit would count as a success in Judge
Shamsideen's opinion or not.
"My sentence was therapy and community service -- the therapy
really *was* a sentence, but the community service wasn't. One
of the cops had taken a certain liking to me, and he helped fix
it so that I spent my unoccupied time at the police station,
typing, taking out the trash, snooping through their case files,
that sort of thing. That was my introduction to forensic psyche,
for what it's worth. I was sitting at Detective Nagle's desk
when I read an article in the 'Law Enforcement Bulletin' about
Brian Murphy teaching behavioral science at Oxford -- the only
place in the world teaching it at the time, besides Quantico. So
really, trying to kill Eric Magnus with a roll of quarters was
the best thing that could have happened to me."
By this time they'd reached the front porch of Nye House, its
worn boards dusted with snow and shielded from the lit room
inside by lacy half-curtains. Maybe it was the location or the
topic of their conversation, but Mulder felt like a teenager
walking his girlfriend home.
He looked down at her and saw her pupils were wide in the honey-
colored late afternoon light. He bent and lightly touched his
lips to hers, a tentative kiss that quickly turned hungry. Her
mouth had the faintly inorganic taste of lipstick. He knew
he'd have "Evening Rust #7" or whatever it was all over his
mouth in a minute, but he didn't care.
After several seconds he pulled away and said, "Stay with me
tonight. I won't sleep well if you're alone."
Something in her face closed like a flower. "Mulder . . ."
"Please," he said. Begging anyone but her would've been
intolerable. "Why does it matter so much what other people
think?"
Her glance toward the covered window was so brief it probably
hadn't been a conscious decision, but he caught it. Whatever
she saw inside, it wasn't enough to make her move away.
Scully looked up and ran her fingertips across his cheek, and he
felt the slight drag of her skin over the stubble he developed
late in the day. The look on her face was almost sad. "Okay,"
she said. "Okay, I'll stay with you."
He hoped that sorrowful look wasn't one of martyrdom. He'd
almost rather she leave him than stay with him out of pity.
Almost, but not tonight. Right now he was too needy, too tired
and confused.
She lifted her face to kiss him and he bent to meet her more than
halfway. Her hands rested lightly on his elbows. This time her
kiss was schoolgirl-chaste, but he felt a powerful response
gathering from his skin inward. It was like sensing the momentum
of an incoming wave by the way the tide drew back from the beach.
He did not prevent her from stepping away. "Let's go in," she
said. The spark in her eyes was not schoolgirlish at all. That
was a look that could lead a man to damnation, and make him
expect to enjoy the trip. Perhaps her earlier manner had been
tenderness rather than pity. He hoped to God it was tenderness.
As he took her hand and led her inside, the front room was
blessedly empty. The door shut softly behind them.
*****
all he wanted to do was take a shower and go to sleep beside
Scully, preferably after making gentle, tender love. No Stupid
Spice Channel Tricks tonight. In fact, he might be willing to
settle for watching old movies on TV and falling asleep with his
head in her lap.
When he opened the door he found a few State Troopers standing
near the front desk, talking in lowered voices. Their
conversation stopped the moment he entered the room. Mulder
ignored them and walked down the hall marked, "Employees Only
Beyond This Point." Tammy Williams' old room was the first one
on the left.
There was no answer at his knock, and when he opened the door, he
saw that Scully's coat was gone, but her cell phone lay beneath a
chair. A closer inspection revealed that she'd left her purse
but taken her gun. "Your partner's gone out," one of the
officers called. Mulder didn't like the strange emphasis the man
put on "out."
He had a pretty good idea where she'd gone. //Scully, don't do
this to me.// In the last 24 hours, he'd slept less and cried
more than was good for his sanity. The last thing he needed was
to be chasing her over the empty hills with who-knew-what loose
in the woods.
The men in the front room gave him curious looks as he wearily
headed back out the way he came. As he'd feared, his car was
parked in the gravel lot, its hood cold. A line of footprints in
the snow led from the Inn's front door toward the field behind
Nye House. They were wavy-soled orthopedic sneaker prints --
Scully's autopsy shoes.
Mulder walked across the frozen field thinking -- what? That
when he found her, he'd grab her by the shoulders and shake her
until her teeth rattled? He'd send her to her room with no TV?
Sure. She'd shoot him first.
Mulder's anger slowly drained away as he hiked across the frozen
field, leaving nothing but cold fear in its place. Scully was
practically all he had, and he was afraid he wouldn't survive
losing her.
He found her crouching in front of the old Cartwright tombstone
in the South Road Burying Ground, her head bent, whispering to
herself. He was able to catch the sibilants in "Jesus" and
"sinner."
"Hi," he said.
She jumped a little at the sound of his voice. Scully brushed
her cheeks with her fingertips before she turned to face him.
"Hi."
He walked over and crouched down next to her. Gesturing at the
tombstone, he said, "Ezra doesn't say much, but he's all right."
She dug in her pockets, presumably for a Kleenex. "I just needed
some time alone."
Mulder nodded, but didn't take the hint to go away. He didn't
think she needed to be alone out here, with her own and Kristie's
blood spattering the trees not fifty yards away. When her search
for a tissue was unsuccessful, he gave her his clean
handkerchief. The one he'd dried his own tears with was in his
back pocket. "I used to come out here when I was a kid. Joey
and I had a tree fort over in that willow." He pointed to a
massive gray willow tree, now more dead than alive, which still
had the remains of boards and some raveling ropes fastened to it.
"Must've been nice," she said. She blew her nose and folded the
handkerchief neatly. Mulder knew Scully's childhood had spanned
seven states, and that if she and her siblings had built forts,
she no longer knew where.
"We had a good time," Mulder said. He didn't bother asking how
she was doing, since he knew the answer would only be "Fine." He
rubbed her back with his hand.
"Mulder?"
"Mmm-hm?"
"Did you ever poison a cat?"
He looked over at her, saw the earnestness in her mascara-smudged
eyes. "What?"
"I talked to Irv Stuckey today, and he said I should ask you
about the time you poisoned the cat. He said that was what sent
Sheriff Luce 'sniffing' after you."
"Irv said . . . ? Irv's an asshole," Mulder said. After a
moment he stood and walked a few steps away, fighting a powerful
desire to go out to Menemsha and wring Irv's neck. "I never
killed anybody's cat." He'd meant the statement to be a firm
denial, but to his dismay he sounded hurt and resentful, like an
eleven-year-old wrongfully accused.
He heard the snow crunch beneath her feet as she stood and came
over to him. Scully threaded her arm through his and rested her
head against his bicep. "What happened?"
He looked over at the broken tombstones, like jagged teeth
sticking out of the ground. This was not a story he much liked
telling. "Ah . . . hell. I was rotten kid. I knew I'd be in
trouble if I hit my sister, so I mentally abused her instead.
Sometimes when I got mad at her I said I'd do things . . .
to her dolls or to her cat. Never poison -- it was Baroque
things, 'The Pit and the Pendulum' stuff. It made her scream.
I guess that's what I wanted." He felt Scully's body tense
against him, and he looked over, asking a wordless question.
She shook her head against his arm. "It's nothing. It's just I
had a rabbit once. I called him Peter. As in Cottontail. A
stupid name, but I was six. My brother kept threatening to skin
and cook him."
Mulder nodded, avoiding her eyes. "Maybe your brother feels kind
of bad about it now."
"Maybe."
"Kids say things, you know?"
"Yes."
"My sister's cat turned up dead at the bottom of the basement
stairs one day."
Scully ran her bandaged hand up and down his forearm. "That
must've been awful."
"The cat had blood running out of her mouth. She was an indoor
cat and this was in March -- nothing outside to chew on,
poisonous or not. Samantha ran upstairs crying and told our mom
the stuff I'd been saying. Mom just lost it. She took my dad's
belt to me -- the worst whipping I ever got from her. Didn't
matter that I said I hadn't done anything. I think she wanted to
believe that I poisoned the cat, because it was better than the
alternative."
For a moment, the chilly afternoon was so quiet. There were no
car noises this far out, not even the distant roar of airplane
engines. The only sounds were the wind and the calls of the
birds. Scully kept rubbing his arm. "Someone came in and did
it," she said.
"Yeah." The word was almost a sigh. "This was early in the year
we lost my sister. I think my father was fighting the Syndicate
at the time, so they sent him a little message. 'Hand over one of
your kids for our Project, or next time it'll be more than just
the cat.'"
"That's horrible."
"I couldn't convince my mom I hadn't done it. Before long I even
had my sister believing me, which is saying something. I guess
your sister always knows if you're lying or not."
Scully's sharp intake of breath was somewhere between a laugh and
a gasp of pain. He figured her bruised ribs were hurting her.
"Melissa and I sounded exactly the same way when we lied. I
always knew."
"Well, Samantha knew. She was--" He decided not to describe
that scene, himself lying across his bed, in more pain than he'd
known existed, begging his mother for mercy while she blistered
his behind and told him he'd done something very, very wicked.
Samantha had stood on the other side of the bedroom door and
shouted, "Don't you hit my brother!"
"Anyway . . . she knew," Mulder said.
He felt Scully shifting position as she looked up at him, but he
kept his own gaze on a stand of black trees in the middle
distance. Almost three decades later, he was still ashamed. Not
so much because he'd been punished, but because his own mother
thought him capable of doing such a thing. Knowing what he did
now about the sort of children who tortured animals, the
accusation was actually worse.
"Did your mom ever believe you?" Scully asked.
"Eventually. It helped that my dad believed me, or at least he
believed my sister. Or maybe he knew something we didn't. I
don't know." One of the braver things he'd done as a child was
to stand in his pajamas in the middle of the living room, risking
another spanking by simply being out of his room, and insist to
his father that he hadn't killed the family cat. Bill Mulder had
looked a little gray around the lips as he'd stood in his damp
raincoat, confronted by the whole family yelling at him. He'd
turned Fox around and sent him back upstairs with a surprisingly
gentle nudge. //"Go on up, son. I'll talk to you later."//
"Cats do sometimes just die, you know," Scully said.
"You'd think that would have occurred to someone. It sure didn't
seem to occur to my parents, at least not as the most likely
possibility. There was something wrong, Scully. Something they
weren't going to tell me about. They actually had the cat
autopsied. I mean, how weird is that?"
"When it's an animal, the procedure's usually called a necropsy,
but it's not so unusual," Scully said.
"There was blood inside of her. Or something. My parents
weren't very forthcoming with information. The vet said she'd
definitely eaten something poisonous, but he couldn't say what."
"No. Isolating a toxin is hard enough now, and with the methods
they had back in the early 70's it would have been worse.
Probably even the FBI lab couldn't have identified the poison
precisely. If whatever the cat ingested had cleared her stomach,
there was really no way for the vet to know."
Scully's tone was kinder than her clinical words implied. He
turned toward her and rested his cheek against the smooth curve
of her bangs. "Once my mom was sure I hadn't killed the cat, she
wouldn't let my sister and I eat anywhere. We had to come home
from school for lunch. She'd taste our food before she gave it
to us, that sort of thing. I think this may have been when the
neighbors first realized that something was really wrong with us.
It was about that time when Joey's uncle started telling Mrs.
Luce that maybe her kids shouldn't play with us anymore. I
actually think he kind of liked me when I was little, it's just
he could sense something really bad was coming down and didn't
want his family involved. I guess I can't blame him."
"As a law officer, it was his job to help you," Scully said.
"You wouldn't turn away from a family in a desperate situation
like that, would you?"
"No." Mulder mouthed the word more than he spoke it. "But I
don't have kids to protect, you know? If it was between a
neighbor family and my own niece and nephew . . . I don't know.
Anyway, people remembered what happened to the cat when my sister
went missing. I was the only other person home when it happened,
and they figured I was already a pet-poisoning junior psycho."
"You weren't," she said firmly. "I hope your mother apologized
to you."
"She did, in her way." She'd cupped his face in her hands, a
gesture somewhere between a caress and a restraint to keep him
from looking away. //"Fox, if you didn't do this thing, I'm
sorry."// She'd scanned his eyes, probably both hoping and
fearing to find innocence.
//"I didn't, Mom. I swear I didn't."// He'd been crying as he
said it, afraid this would only make him seem guiltier. *"If*
you didn't," she'd said.
"Did she comfort you?"
He nodded, rubbing his cheek against Scully's hair. "She let me
curl up in her lap while we watched some stupid nature show."
Actually he'd lain with his head and shoulders in his mother's
lap while his drawn-up knees sweated against the plastic-covered
couch.
Scully sometimes held him like this, because their size
differential and the conventions of the sexes prevented him from
sitting in her lap. As a child, the reason had been quite
different. Fox had a seam of blisters where his buttocks met his
thighs, and another cluster on his left hip, where the belt had
snapped around. Sitting in anyone's lap was quite beyond him.
His mother had stroked his hair while they watched a bear stalk
an otter community in too-vivid 70's Technicolor. Samantha would
normally have seized the chance to bump her big brother aside so
she could assert her baby-of-the-family right to snuggle with
Mom, but she climbed into their father's lap instead. She'd
understood that Fox and his mother needed a chance to make up
with one another. Bill read a newspaper around the little girl.
Hurting, sleepy from crying even though his bedtime was an hour
away, Fox turned toward his mother and twisted the ends of her
long, dark hair in his fingers. The nature show announcer boomed
behind him: //"Olivia nips and claws her kits away from the
bear's snapping teeth."//
The conversation Fox hadn't had with his mother that night
remained one of the most powerful moments in their relationship.
She'd rubbed his back through the terrycloth of his bathrobe and
hadn't said: I'm so sorry I hurt you. I would have forgiven you
even if you had poisoned the cat. I'm desperate to protect you
and I don't know how.
He'd looked up into her green eyes, big as a child's in her
pretty face, and hadn't said: I forgive you because I know that
you're scared. Actually, I'd forgive you anything.
"What're you thinking about?" Scully asked. She slipped her hand
beneath the folds of his coat and rested it in the small of his
back, two of her fingers pressing against the waistband of his
trousers. She'd been taking tease lessons from him, wicked
thing.
"Nothing. A long time ago," he said. Better to turn the
conversation back to her. "What're you thinking about?"
"Nothing. The last days. Religion."
The hand almost over his ass said otherwise. He wondered if he
were a magnet for people who sent mixed messages. Between his
relatives, lovers, ex-lovers, co-workers, and shadowy informants,
the mind games got a little excessive.
"That tombstone says, 'Resurgam,' or, 'I will rise again,'" she
said, pointing the toe of her sneaker at one of the broken
headstones. Actually only part of the "s" and the "urgam" were
left.
Mulder, who tended to look at all things on the Vineyard with the
eyes of childhood, had always had a vague assumption that
"Surgam" was some kind of family name. The Oxford grad in him
was disgusted.
Feeling a little too vulnerable to confess his ignorance, he
said, "That guy's pretty confident for someone with a big rock
over his head."
"It's ironic, isn't it? The first headstones were weights to
keep the dead from walking, and now we carve messages about the
Resurrection into them."
//I love you, I hate you, come here, go away . . . story of my
life.// "Those rocks right there are probably headstones too,"
Mulder said, pointing at two granite mounds beneath soft caps of
snow.
"Wow. They didn't even rate a slate slab. I can see the TV
special right now: 'It's your headstone, Charlie Brown.' 'I got
a rock.'"
Mulder had a twisted mental image of the Grim Reaper handing out
all the good tombstones before Charlie Brown got to the front of
the line. "You're sick," he told her. "I knew I liked something
about you." He kissed the top of her head. "This used to be a
family graveyard. Those rocks are probably covering poor
relatives, servants, kids, maybe."
She made a small, disgusted noise in her throat.
"The 18th century didn't have the same ideas about kids that we
do."
"I know."
Mulder considered asking her whether she wanted to talk about
what she'd seen last night, but there was something closed and
self-protective about her. At every chance she could, she'd
turned their conversation back to him.
"C'mere. I want to show you something," he said. He took her
hand and led her toward the ruined foundations that lay a little
to the east of the graveyard, not far from where he'd found her
last night. The structure had fallen down so long ago that a
maple with a trunk the diameter of a woman's forearm grew inside
what had once been solid walls. At the moment, snow covered even
the crumbling fieldstone wall base, but the building's outlines
were hinted at by straight, contiguous gaps in the weeds and
other vegetation. The effect was a little eerie, as if the
memory of the house had so impressed itself upon nature that even
the grasses still respected boundaries that had long since ceased
to exist.
Mulder kicked at the approximate location of the wall base until
the tip of his shoe struck rock. He bent and cleared the half-
frozen mud and clotted leaves away until he exposed a low, flat
chunk of Massachusetts brownstone.
"There," he said with satisfaction. "This was a house, a
farmhouse from back before the Revolutionary War. It belonged to
the family buried back over there. Actually, the cemetery used
to be named after them before people forgot who they were and
South Road became the major landmark. On really old maps it's
called the 'Brown-Cartwright Grave Yard.' If you're curious
about it, you can visit the Dukes County Historical Society.
Lots of the little old ladies around here are grave-hunters.
You'd be surprised."
Scully looked around wide-eyed, as if the place frightened her.
"What happened to the people who lived here?" she asked.
"I think the house burned in about 1790-something. I'm not sure
about the family, but I can tell you there are still plenty of
Browns and Cartwrights on the Vineyard," Mulder said. He dug in
the cold dirt along the wall line until his fingertips touched
something hard and rough. When he tugged it out and brushed the
mud off, he found it was a jumble of rusted metal. "Sometimes
you find spoons out here, or old nails, or -- here's a nail here.
You can tell it's original to the house because the head is just
a kind of hammered-down section. It looks like a miniature
railroad spike." He plucked the little chunk of twisted iron
from the mass and held it out to Scully. "See how the sharp end
just kind of withers away? That's because it was burned.
Occasionally you find lumps of melted glass out here, too."
She stretched her fingertips toward the object but then pulled
away, as if it were still hot. She looked up at him and asked,
"Where did Irv's story come from? I mean the South Road Ghost
story."
He sprinkled the twists of rusted iron back onto the ground and
wiped his fingers on the hem of his coat.
"The truth?" he asked. "There's a book in the county library
called 'Haunted Martha's Vineyard.' Every Island child I knew
checked that book out at some time or another, usually around
Halloween. That's where I got it from. That's probably where
Irv got it from. As far as I know, there's no other record that
the South Road Ghost ever existed."
"So what did I see, Mulder? There were little children dying --
they were there and then not there. You think I made the whole
thing up?" Scully asked.
"No. I don't think you made it up. I think you saw something,
probably even something paranormal. All I'm saying is that this
being may not be what it first appears. I'll be honest -- I'm
suspicious of a good story, where everything is explained and
everything makes sense. Real life just isn't like that. So when
someone tells me that this awful mom kills her kids and then
she's doomed to walk the night inflicting vengeance on wayward
women, it's a just little too neat. It sounds like somebody's
idea of poetic justice, exactly the kind of thing that people
would invent.
"Scully, if there is something out here . . . calling you, it may
be choosing to present itself as part of a good story. I mean,
what attracts us more than the idea that the world makes sense?
Because if we can understand the world, we can control it, and
then we never have to get hurt again. Right?"
She looked away toward some point on the horizon. "You don't
understand," she said.
"Then explain it to me." She didn't reply. "Explain it so I can
help you," he urged.
"Mulder," her voice was infinitely weary, as if she'd crossed a
great distance to speak with him. "This is just one of those
things that isn't about you."
"If it's about you, it's about me."
That was clearly the wrong thing to say. Scully actually seemed
to flinch.
"Don't shut me out," he pleaded. He felt about eleven years old,
tormented unjustly, and yet desperate to be comforted by his
tormentor. Why did he most need the people he loved right after
they'd hurt him?
"It's okay," she said. Her eyes remained distant but she held
out her hand. He took it in both of his own. "It's okay.
Things haven't changed between us. This isn't about you. It's
about me."
"You realize that's the second-biggest lie in the world after
'the check is in the mail?'"
She pulled him close and held him. "I'm not going anywhere."
"If I lost you, I just -- I wouldn't deal with it well." He
hugged her so tightly he could feel the bones of her shoulder
blades pressing his forearm.
He felt more than heard her gasp of pain. "Mulder, don't."
Too late, he remembered her bruised ribcage and released her.
She pulled back from him. Twilight came to the woods first, and
in the dimness her pupils were very wide. The shadows made her
eyes seem infinitely deep, like black water locked beneath black
ice. What lay in that darkness was apparently not for him to
know. She placed two cool fingertips over his lips. "Just
don't."
He looked away first. "Sure."
She slipped her arm through his. "Come on. It's cold, let's go
back."
He walked with her, guiding her steps along the quickest path
back to the Inn. They cast long shadows away to their right as
they crossed the snowy field. Lights had already appeared in
some of Nye House's windows.
"Mulder, can I ask you something?" she asked.
He glanced down at her, grateful to be distracted from the dread
that had begun to dog him. "What is it?"
"Do you have a juvenile record in Connecticut?"
At first her question confused him. "Do I have a what?"
"Irv told me to ask you about Fairfield County Juvenile Court
sometime," Scully asked.
Mulder had a mental flash of himself at 15, staring at his too-
shiny wingtips and listening to a judge talk to his father. "You
know, I hate Irv. Did he tell you how many books I never
returned to the library, too? Somewhere I have one from 1987."
"No. Well, he asked whether you were into enemas and plastic
pants," she said.
"That figures. I hope you told him 'Yes.'"
She looked appalled. "Of course I didn't. I didn't think his
question was even worth answering."
"By getting upset you just confirmed the idea in his mind. You
should have told him, yeah, I'm into plastic pants, and peanut
butter and farm animals, and looking at posters of Freddy Mercury
while I engage in autoerotic electric shock with the toaster.
Then he wouldn't know what to believe."
"Sorry. I guess I'm not as up on my perversions as I should be,"
she said.
"Stick with me, kid. I'll teach you everything there is to
know." He thought she tried to repress a smile. "You already
know the Juvenile Court story," he said.
She shook her head. "No I don't."
"Yes, you do. You just didn't recognize it because Irv tried to
make it sound worse. Remember the third case we worked together
-- maybe the fourth, when we were in Idaho staking out the guy
who could telekinetically turn his microwave into a MAZER?"
"Oh . . ." He saw the glimmer of recollection in her eyes.
The over-humid car with its persistent fried-food smell was
permanently etched into his memory, as was the white curve of
Scully's chin and throat, fuller then than it was now, backlit by
halogen streetlights. "You asked me if I thought I was capable
of killing someone, and I said yes, because I'd been ready to
kill Eric Magnus in the 10th grade."
"That's the kid you went after with -- what, a roll of dimes?"
"It was quarters." Eric had been the first one to wrap his fist
around a roll of currency in order to harden the impact of his
punch, but Fox had learned fast. "He was the 'Chester the
Molester' kid," Mulder said. The older boy discovered early
in Mulder's Greenwich High career that if he wanted to pick a
fight with the weirdo Vineyard kid, all he had to do was whisper,
"Who got your sister, Freak? It was Chester the Molester."
"You didn't say they arrested you for that," she said.
"Yes, I did. Remember me and Eric got into it on the street
behind the school, and then somebody called the cops? When
the officer asked, 'What's going on here?' Eric said, 'Nothing,'
and I said, 'I'm going to kill this motherfucker.'"
"Oh, that's right . . . . I forgot you have that Eagle Scout
quality -- always honest," she said. She pulled her arm loose
and slipped it beneath his coat, tucking her fingertips into the
top of his back pocket. A good reason never to keep it buttoned,
he thought. He put his arm around her waist, and as they walked
he could feel the muscles of her hip working.
"So after that they brought me in. From their perspective, who
started it wasn't important. I was the one who threatened to
kill someone.
"Back then, every case with an underage defendant went to
Juvenile Court. I felt pretty lousy standing there in front of
the judge, even though he spent most of his time telling off my
parents."
Mulder could still hear the gravelly voice of the Honorable Peter
Shamsideen saying, //"Mr. and Mrs. Mulder, I am very sorry for
the loss of your daughter. But you must remember that you have a
son who needs you."// Fox had kept his hands jammed in his
pockets, even though he'd been told not to do that, and had been
very close to crying, even though he'd been told not to do that
either. When Judge Shamsideen said, //"Young man, I hope you
succeed in making something of your life,"// Fox had only managed
a soft, //"Yessir."// Mulder wasn't sure if being senior agent
on the X-Files Unit would count as a success in Judge
Shamsideen's opinion or not.
"My sentence was therapy and community service -- the therapy
really *was* a sentence, but the community service wasn't. One
of the cops had taken a certain liking to me, and he helped fix
it so that I spent my unoccupied time at the police station,
typing, taking out the trash, snooping through their case files,
that sort of thing. That was my introduction to forensic psyche,
for what it's worth. I was sitting at Detective Nagle's desk
when I read an article in the 'Law Enforcement Bulletin' about
Brian Murphy teaching behavioral science at Oxford -- the only
place in the world teaching it at the time, besides Quantico. So
really, trying to kill Eric Magnus with a roll of quarters was
the best thing that could have happened to me."
By this time they'd reached the front porch of Nye House, its
worn boards dusted with snow and shielded from the lit room
inside by lacy half-curtains. Maybe it was the location or the
topic of their conversation, but Mulder felt like a teenager
walking his girlfriend home.
He looked down at her and saw her pupils were wide in the honey-
colored late afternoon light. He bent and lightly touched his
lips to hers, a tentative kiss that quickly turned hungry. Her
mouth had the faintly inorganic taste of lipstick. He knew
he'd have "Evening Rust #7" or whatever it was all over his
mouth in a minute, but he didn't care.
After several seconds he pulled away and said, "Stay with me
tonight. I won't sleep well if you're alone."
Something in her face closed like a flower. "Mulder . . ."
"Please," he said. Begging anyone but her would've been
intolerable. "Why does it matter so much what other people
think?"
Her glance toward the covered window was so brief it probably
hadn't been a conscious decision, but he caught it. Whatever
she saw inside, it wasn't enough to make her move away.
Scully looked up and ran her fingertips across his cheek, and he
felt the slight drag of her skin over the stubble he developed
late in the day. The look on her face was almost sad. "Okay,"
she said. "Okay, I'll stay with you."
He hoped that sorrowful look wasn't one of martyrdom. He'd
almost rather she leave him than stay with him out of pity.
Almost, but not tonight. Right now he was too needy, too tired
and confused.
She lifted her face to kiss him and he bent to meet her more than
halfway. Her hands rested lightly on his elbows. This time her
kiss was schoolgirl-chaste, but he felt a powerful response
gathering from his skin inward. It was like sensing the momentum
of an incoming wave by the way the tide drew back from the beach.
He did not prevent her from stepping away. "Let's go in," she
said. The spark in her eyes was not schoolgirlish at all. That
was a look that could lead a man to damnation, and make him
expect to enjoy the trip. Perhaps her earlier manner had been
tenderness rather than pity. He hoped to God it was tenderness.
As he took her hand and led her inside, the front room was
blessedly empty. The door shut softly behind them.
*****