Later, Mulder dropped Scully back off at the inn with her bag of
peculiar purchases. She'd explained the forensic uses of Play-
Doh to him long ago. Unlike clay or most generic children's
modeling dough, the Playskool brand had a very high surface
tension that caused it to tear at the edges of a puncture rather
than deform, much like human skin. This made it a useful, if
crude, medium for re-creating the pattern of wounds.
He watched her walk up the steps of Nye House, knowing that she'd
spend the afternoon busily slashing at Play-Doh and dictating the
results onto her recorder. An eccentric investigative method
perhaps, but at least it was cleaner than the experiments
attributed to Sherlock Holmes. He was supposed to have stabbed
pig carcasses with a fencing foil.
One she was inside, Mulder pulled out of the gravel drive, which
was muddy and much-rutted now from the rain and the unusually
high volume of traffic over the last few days. But at the moment
all the storm clouds were gone, and the afternoon was shaping up
to be a fine one. The sunlight had the silvery clarity that
seemed to belong only to the Atlantic Northeast in the spring,
and as Mulder made his way along the dirt track of Rural Route
1, he noticed that the canopy of bare branches overhead was
beginning to develop tiny green leaf buds.
Seasons changed more slowly out on the coast, and this spring had
been colder and wetter than many. And yet, there was only so
long that winter could last. After one of the hardest winters of
his life, Mulder was more than ready for spring.
The Dukes County Historical Society was a collection of buildings
along an Edgartown side street, only a few blocks away from the
jail he'd visited yesterday. He parked his car in the near-empty
lot behind the Gale Huntington Library, a two-story building done
in the same square, black-and-white Greek Revival style that had
been once so popular with whaling captains. The library
building, which also housed a maritime museum, was a modern
imitation of an old house, but truly old structures dotted the
Historical Society grounds around it. Gray, shake-sided Thomas
Cooke House stood off to one side, looking much as it had during
the youth of King George III.
As Mulder got out of his car and started up the walkway toward
the library, he found that Cooke House both drew and curiously
repelled his gaze. It was not an especially attractive building,
square in front but with a steeply sloping back that gave it a
slightly barn-like appearance. Its curtainless windows reflected
the early afternoon sun, giving the panes a blank, staring look.
Even the replica of an 18th century kitchen garden, which would
brighten the place in the coming months, was currently brown and
dead.
In all likelihood the house that had once stood by the South Road
Burying Ground had been nearly identical to this one, with the
exception of the rough fieldstone base that still remained among
the weeds. It occurred to him that there might be something
unwise, if not actually unhealthy, about Vineyarders' attachment
to the past. What did it say about a place when three-quarters
of the houses in town were built by the dead?
He walked up the damp brick steps to the library's front door.
Despite its house-like exterior, the inside was clearly that of a
public building. A black, rubberized mat lay over the shining
wooden floorboards and a rack of informational pamphlets stood at
the foot of the grand staircase, which was currently cordoned off
with a velvet rope. Mulder had no business upstairs in the
maritime museum anyway, so he turned left into what he recalled
was the library's reference section.
The place was largely as he remembered it, with bookshelves
running across the width of the room and glass display cases
standing along the walls. A few computer terminals were new
additions, but the room had the same familiar smell, one of
bookbinding glue and dust and the faint musty scent that rose
from the radiators. A hushed smell. It made Mulder think of
autumn leaves and damp sneakers and the great wooden card catalog
cabinet that had once stood in the corner. He recalled being
very pleased when he was tall enough to look down into the
topmost drawer. Until then, he'd needed a chair to access 20% of
the alphabet.
He wondered what made computers so much better than a card
catalog file, anyway. Nobody's card catalog ever crashed and
died when the power went out.
At the moment the library seemed deserted, so he walked up to the
information desk and rang the handbell. After a few moments a
petite middle-aged lady in a denim jumper walked out of the back
room. Her gray hair had been cut in the same quasi-military
style seen on statues of Roman soldiers -- the same crummy
haircut Mulder's father had given him every summer of his
boyhood, as a matter of fact. It probably looked better on the
librarian.
"Can I help you?" the lady asked.
"Yes--I hope so," Mulder said. "I'm hoping to track down the
source of a story. One related to Mary Brown and the South Road
Ghost."
The librarian smiled at him and said, "You're looking for
'Haunted Martha's Vineyard' by Vinton Marsden. It might be
checked out -- it's very popular with the kids."
"I know--I've read it. I used to come here a lot. My name's Fox
Mulder." Somewhat to his relief, the woman's face showed no
recognition.
"I'm Sue Bugay," she said, and shook his hand.
"Actually I was looking for a living source, a person. A friend
of mine told me a woman living somewhere down-island might know
something about the story. Apparently a deaf woman died many
years ago after meeting with an entity out in the woods outside
Chilmark."
"An entity . . .?" Sue blinked at him for moment from behind her
glasses. "Well, there's--" he got the impression she was
deliberately omitting a name, "there is a woman in our Island
Oral History Project who tells a story something like that. Can
I ask why you need to know?"
Mulder pulled his badge out of his coat pocket. He hadn't wanted
to rely on the symbol of authority to get information, but he
supposed he could understand Sue's reluctance. He showed her his
ID and said, "It's possible the event she remembers is relevant
to an open murder case."
Sue's eyes went wide. "Not that poor girl who fell over a cliff
last week?" she asked.
There weren't a lot of homicides on the Vineyard, so there was no
point in being evasive. "Yes, ma'am."
"But that can't be. The story Mrs. Langmann tells happened
before she was even born, and she's over 90 years old. There
must be some mistake," Sue said.
"I'd like to speak to Mrs. Langmann, if that's possible. Is there
way I could contact her?" Mulder asked.
Sue looked a little embarrassed at having given away the woman's
name. "I'll call her and ask her if she's willing to contact
you," she said, and walked back into the other room. Apparently
she wasn't thrilled at the idea of sending a nut with a badge and
a ghost story off to bother a little old lady.
Mulder wandered among the shelves, brushing his fingertips over
the book spines. Some of the titles were new, but many were
familiar to him from years ago. On impulse, he tugged out a book
called, "Old Families of the Lower Cape and Islands," and
examined the card tucked into the inside pocket. According to
the date stamps, the book had been checked out a dozen times
between 1959 and 1983. Somehow it was nice to see the faded
numbers at the top of the card. If something as insubstantial as
an index card could still be in good condition after 41 years, he
might stand a fighting chance after all.
He slipped the book back into place and examined a volume about
clothing worn at about the time of the Revolutionary War. Mulder
was contemplating historical female undergarments, which
apparently consisted of canvas, whalebone, steel and leather, and
imagining the inconvenient contortions that would be required to
get Scully out of such a thing, when Sue returned with a name and
address written on a slip of paper. He shut the book firmly and
put it away.
"The woman you're looking for is Amelie Langmann. I just spoke
with her granddaughter, who says it's all right for you to come
out. Mrs. Langmann is completely deaf, so she doesn't use the
phone. You'll have to meet her in person. For the next few
hours her great-grandson should be there to translate."
Mulder scanned the paper she'd given him and saw that the address
was a rural one, south of Vineyard Haven. "Thank you," he said.
She seemed to hesitate as he turned to leave. "Mr. Mulder?
Mulder stopped as he carefully talked the paper slip into his
wallet. "Yes?"
"There's . . . something else you might want to look at." She
went into the back room again and returned carrying a large book.
The pages looked as if they had been hand-cut to varying widths
and then stitched together, giving the edges a rippling look.
Sue set the book down on the information desk and said, "This is
a family Bible dating to the 1740s. The Chilmark courthouse
burned down in 1826, so family effects like this are the only
existing record of the town's early history."
She sat the book down on the desk and gently opened the leather
cover. The pages inside had turned a mellow brown at the edges,
but Mulder could still glimpse the printer's information near the
bottom. The book had been manufactured by some company in
Boston, or what looked like "Bofton," with the antiquated long
"S."
Sue turned the first page over and revealed a complicated
genealogy written in several different hands on the back.
Carefully ruled lines connected the names of parents, children,
stepchildren, half brothers and sisters born a generation apart,
and others whose relationships were not immediately clear.
Scanning the page, Mulder saw that the genealogy began with a
marriage in 1742 and ended with a death in 1927. Most of the
dead had tiny black crosses painted next to their names, making
him wonder about those who did not. Were they lost but not known
to be dead? Dead but presumably not resting in peace?
"If there was a historical Mary Brown, this may be her," Sue
said, not quite touching the paper as she pointed to a black spot
on the family ledger. One Robert Brown had apparently married a
woman in 1773 whose memory the family was not eager to keep
alive. His wife's name had been obliterated with a bar of black
ink.
"My family feels the same way about me," Mulder said.
If Sue was amused, she didn't show it. "You can see that Robert
and his two children died in the same year, 1777. This younger
one is unusual in that he or she was entered into the family book
without a name; there's only the single date."
Mulder shifted his position a little so he could see past her
pointing finger. The record showed that the Browns' first child
was a daughter, Susannah, born in 1774 and just three or four
years old when she died. The second child was memorialized with
only a date and a tiny cross.
"Why would they do that -- record that a baby was born but not
write down its name?" Mulder asked.
Sue shook her head. "Perhaps it died so young it never got one,
although in that case it would be strange to record its birth at
all. I expect that someone just felt especially bad about the
fact that it died."
"And maybe Mom and Dad weren't around to name it by then," Mulder
said.
"That could be."
Mulder glanced up at the librarian and asked, "Where did this
come from?"
"It's mine," Sue said, straightening up. She pointed at the
entry on the bottom of the page: Maria Flint, b. July 1888, d.,
December 1927. "She was my father's mother."
For the first time Mulder realized he was talking about more than
folklore -- this was family history. As tactfully as he could,
he asked, "Did any family traditions survive? Any information at
all about the woman whose name was blacked out?"
Sue shook her head. "I can tell you that the earliest written
record of the South Road Ghost story was from about 1850, in a
letter from a woman to her cousin on the mainland. She mentions
the story as if it's already quite old -- a headless woman
condemned to wander the cliffs on stormy night's after murdering
both her daughters."
"The second baby was a girl?" Mulder asked.
"Maybe. That's the only detail that gives the story any
credence, really. Society's imagination tends to default to male
-- even more so in Victorian times than now." Suddenly Sue
seemed to realize what she'd been implying and backed away from
that precipice. "It's all just folklore, really. I'm sure the
real Mary Brown, if she existed, would hardly recognize herself
in the stories that have grown up around her."
"Thank you," Mulder said, for once seeing no reason to force
someone out of her comfortable beliefs into the world of extreme
possibilities. After all, he found it comforting to imagine that
the Vineyard was very ordinary, too. He copied down the relevant
information from the book's frontispiece and walked back out to
the car.
*****
Half an hour later he guided his car over the deeply pitted
gravel drive leading up to Mrs. Langmann's house. It was a white
Victorian with pale yellow shutters, the paint peeling slightly
from the sides. Turned-wood posts which held up the overhang
above the front porch hinted at the house's age. People
sometimes faked Victorian gingerbreading of the kind that hung
from the house's eaves, but nobody bothered with carving wooden
posts anymore.
As Mulder walked up the steps to the front porch, a shaggy gray
cat lifted its head from the mold-spotted lawn chair seat it lay
on. It blinked its yellow eyes at him, then fled when he rang
the doorbell. Footsteps sounded inside and a teenage boy opened
the door. The kid's slouch and oversized clothes gave the
impression that he'd been picked up out of the lost-and-found at
the local bus station.
Mulder bit back the first comment that came to mind, about what
the kid was doing a wearing Marlon Brando's pants. Did it mean
he was getting old when he felt like making fun of teenagers'
fashion sense? //Nah.//
"You the guy who's here to see my O.G?" the kid asked.
Mulder couldn't help giving him a sharp look. As far as he knew,
"O.G." was a gangland term meeting "original gangster."
"Your O.G.?" Mulder asked. The boy opened the rusty screen door
and let Mulder into the house.
The kid looked a little embarrassed by Mulder scrutiny. "My old
Grandma," he said.
The front room was small and square, lit only by the sun through
the windows. A worn rug partially covered its bare hardwood
floor. The furniture had the spare, slightly space-agey look
popular in the early-60s, and a quick glance revealed that the
television had knobs and rabbit-ear antennas. Mulder wondered if
Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Welk would automatically appear if he
turned it on.
The kid led Mulder back into the little kitchen, where modern-
looking appliances sat next to older things on the gleaming
counter. Whether Mrs. Langmann used her modern conveniences was
doubtful -- the bowl of an electric bread-kneading machine was
stuffed full of what looked like magazine clippings, and what
appeared to be an honest-to-goodness wooden kneading trough sat
with a cloth over it on a sturdy aluminum table.
The kid muttered an invitation for Mulder to sit in one of the
aluminum-legged chairs and then wandered out the back door,
presumably looking for his great-grandmother. Before long the
door opened again and a truly ancient little woman walked in,
wiping garden dirt from her hands on a dishcloth tied at her
waist.
Mulder stood and asked, "Mrs. Langmann?" then suddenly felt like
an idiot for speaking aloud to a deaf woman.
He needn't have worried, because she answered, "Yes?" Apparently
she read lips.
He held his hand out to her and she pressed it gently between her
cool, knobby fingers. "I'm Fox Mulder. Susan Bugay suggested I
meet with you," he said.
Her great-grandson had followed her into the kitchen, and he
signed a translation of Mulder's statement with surprising
deftness.
"Oh! You mean about that girl that died," the old lady said.
She spoke with the flat, slightly throaty tones of the longtime
deaf.
"Yes, ma'am. I wanted to speak to you about the South Road
Ghost."
She peered at the boy as he translated, showing no surprise at
Mulder's request. Her heavy-lidded eyes were a pale, clouded
blue, and Mulder wondered if she weren't partially blind as well.
"Jeff, be a love and fetch us another chair," Mrs. Langmann said.
Jeff headed back into the living room, and while he was gone Mrs.
Langmann washed the rest of the garden soil from her hands at the
sink. She seemed to be in no hurry; Mulder supposed that being
more than 90 years old put the passage of time in perspective.
Jeff returned carrying a straight-backed wooden chair with a
cushion tied over the seat. He set this down by the table, and
Mrs. Langmann perched on the edge of it. She drew her kneading
trough to her and lifted the cloth off. Mulder and Jeff sat down
in the other two chairs, with the boy sitting between the two
adults.
Although not patient by nature, Mulder decided to let the old
lady begin her story in her own time. Mrs. Langmann began
punching and folding her dough. "So you think the ghost did for
that poor Herron girl," Mrs. Langmann said at last.
"Some people think so," Mulder said. Mrs. Langmann glanced up at
Jeff's translation.
"What did she see?" Mrs. Langmann asked.
"I'm sorry?"
"The girl. Out in the woods -- what did she see?" Mrs. Langmann
glanced up from her kneading, apparently waiting for Jeff to
translate Mulder's response.
"I don't know. She died before anyone could ask her." Mulder
hesitated before bringing Scully into the discussion, but saw no
way around doing it. He supposed news of her experience would
have traveled fast, anyway. "A friend of mine saw children, or
what she believed to be children, during the storm early Sunday
morning. She said they were bleeding, crying for their mother."
Mulder thought Jeff looked a little uneasy as he translated that
for Mrs. Langmann. "Ah," the old lady said. "Folks see
different things, you know. The headless lady gets all the
attention. I've known people who went out there looking for her;
they think she's some kind of tourist attraction, I guess. They
never do see anything but the wind and the rain, and maybe the
inside of a police car if they get too bold about trespassing.
That's because the South Road Ghost isn't the kind of ghost you
can go looking for. It's the kind that comes looking for you."
"Why?" Mulder asked, leaning forward with his elbows on the
table. "Why would it look for someone?"
Mrs. Langmann glanced up at Jeff and said, "Nobody knows that.
Nobody living, anyway. I can tell you that it calls those whose
roots aren't deep in this world, usually folks who have already
lost more than they can bear. I suppose those people are easy,
since they're halfway into the next world already."
"I've heard you knew someone who met it," Mulder said.
Jeff translated, and then Mrs. Langmann returned to her kneading
for so long that Mulder feared she had decided not to answer.
When she spoke at last, her words seemed like the ramblings of
the senile. "I went deaf of a fever when I was six," Mrs.
Langmann continued. "At the time, the only formal education
available for me was the deaf school on the mainland, but the
very thought of being sent away terrified me. It terrified my
mother, too, because I was the only child she had. In the end,
my parents brought in Miss Emma Stoy to be my tutor.
"Miss Emma was a spinster lady, and a good friend to me until she
died. She may have saved my life when I was a newly married
woman. My Edward became terribly sick with the influenza when we
were six months married. I was just nineteen and very silly. I
swore to Miss Emma that if Edward died, then I would die too.
When she heard that, she cried, 'For shame! For shame!'" Mrs.
Langmann raised her hands from the trough to show the signs Miss
Emma had made. Her sharp motions appeared to startle Jeff.
The old lady continued, "Then she told me the story of her sister
Pearl who died. Pearl was born deaf, and Miss Emma learned to
sign to her from a young age."
Mulder sat very still, listening intently without taking notes,
which were largely unnecessary for him. Some people found this
disconcerting, but Mrs. Langmann seemed hardly to notice.
"Pearl went to the very same deaf school I was so anxious to
avoid, and she hadn't thought much of it. In fact, she was far
more interested in a certain young Mr. Watkins than she was in
her studies, so as soon as she could she left school and was
married. She and her husband set up housekeeping just outside
Vineyard Haven, and before long they had a little daughter, Rose.
Pearl adored that child. For a time, she and her husband and
their little girl were very happy.
"One day when Rose had only just begun to get around well on her
feet, Pearl left her sleeping in her cradle while she went out to
hang the wash. While she was gone, the baby fell into the fire.
Pearl never heard what was going on inside the house; how could
she? The old dog began running around and around the yard,
around and around and around until he just crawled under a tree
and lay still. He heard that baby, all right. But Pearl could
make nothing of what he was carrying on about." Mrs. Langmann
continued to beat her dough, her hands moving in a slow, steady
rhythm.
"She never knew until she smelled smoke and saw flames through
the window. She ran inside with the wet washing, tried throwing
everything she could over the fire, but she couldn't find her
daughter.
"Neighbors finally pulled her out of the house. Nobody could go
in until after the foundation cooled. In the end, there was
hardly enough of that child left to bury."
Mulder recalled Samantha and the other children who had all but
dematerialized. He pressed the crease of his thumb hard against
the semi-sharp underside of the table's aluminum edging, hoping
the pain would act as a distraction. This was not a time to
think of the poor, thin bones pulled from Addie Sparks' shallow
grave. Not a time to think of the horrors underneath Santa's
North Pole Village off Route 74 or what Kathy Lee Tencate never
found of her son, Dean. He straightened up in his chair and
glanced at Jeff, not quite daring the boy to see something
besides calm professionalism in his eyes.
Mrs. Langmann continued, "Afterward, Pearl took to her bed.
Sometimes she told Miss Emma she heard her baby crying for her.
Since Pearl had never heard a thing in her life, Miss Emma was
puzzled, and Pearl explained that when she said 'heard' it was
more like 'felt,' a trembling in the breastbone, like when
thunder comes." Mrs. Langmann pressed her flour-covered fist
against her own breastbone.
"One night Pearl went tearing off into the woods near the
Wesquobsque Cliffs. The local men started a search party, but
they never found her until morning. Somebody had slashed her
throat, her face, her hands . . . certain folks thought she'd
done it to herself in a kind of frenzy, but they never did find
the knife."
Mulder recalled Scully lying in the emergency room with bandages
wrapped around the pale skin of her hands. For his sanity's
sake, he put that image from his mind. "What do you think
happened?"
Mrs. Langmann barely glanced at Jeff's translation. She replied
as if she hadn't seen it at all. "Miss Emma got me to understand
that sometimes, you got to let go. When someone you love is
going to that other side, you can hold their hand until the last
moment, but when the time comes, you got to let go. If you
don't, then they'll take you too. It's not wise to call into
that dark space beyond, son. Something might hear you. Maybe
not what you're expecting."
Jeff's hands had fallen into his lap. As if coming to himself,
he suddenly began to speak and sign at the same time, "You're
just joshing about something out there hearing you, right, O.G.?
It's a joke, right?"
Mrs. Langmann didn't answer.
Mulder glanced at the boy and asked, "Hey Jeff, could you get us
a pen and a piece of paper?"
The kid got up and hurried from the room as if glad for the
excuse to go. Mulder pulled a pen and a notepad from the inside
pocket of his coat. He wrote down, "My friend had a daughter who
died two years ago. Can't have any more children. Afraid it was
all her fault." He pushed the pen and pad toward Mrs. Langmann.
She scanned his note and asked, "Who says she can't have any
more?"
Mulder wrote at the bottom of the page, "Doctors."
"Huh." Mrs. Langmann said. That single syllable was apparently
enough to convey her opinion of doctors.
Once it became clear she would not elaborate, Mulder wrote on a
fresh page, "How can I help her?"
"Don't leave her alone," Mrs. Langmann said. "If you want to
protect her, don't leave her alone. If this thing out there
wants her bad enough, it'll start by tearing her away from her
friends, her family, her God. Everything that keeps her anchored
in this world. Alone, a soul is a weak thing, especially a
grieving soul."
Mulder thought of how Scully had uncharacteristically turned down
the Sacraments at the church on Sunday morning. "Is this thing
evil?" he wrote on the notepad.
Mrs. Langmann glanced at it but kept rhythmically punching her
dough. "Hard to say. Could be mean, spiteful. Could just be
sad, lost between here and there and looking for company. That's
the kind of company your friend doesn't need to keep."
Mulder looked down at the paper in his hands, suddenly feeling
powerless and lost himself. The recollection of Scully standing
at the window in her filmy nightgown returned to him with an
unsettling clarity.
Mrs. Langmann continued, "Just don't leave her alone, especially
not come nightfall. Going to get cold again -- snow, they say."
Mulder shut his eyes, thinking of Scully back in Nye House with
the long knife and the Kevlar gloves. He decided it was time to
go back there. Now.
*****
peculiar purchases. She'd explained the forensic uses of Play-
Doh to him long ago. Unlike clay or most generic children's
modeling dough, the Playskool brand had a very high surface
tension that caused it to tear at the edges of a puncture rather
than deform, much like human skin. This made it a useful, if
crude, medium for re-creating the pattern of wounds.
He watched her walk up the steps of Nye House, knowing that she'd
spend the afternoon busily slashing at Play-Doh and dictating the
results onto her recorder. An eccentric investigative method
perhaps, but at least it was cleaner than the experiments
attributed to Sherlock Holmes. He was supposed to have stabbed
pig carcasses with a fencing foil.
One she was inside, Mulder pulled out of the gravel drive, which
was muddy and much-rutted now from the rain and the unusually
high volume of traffic over the last few days. But at the moment
all the storm clouds were gone, and the afternoon was shaping up
to be a fine one. The sunlight had the silvery clarity that
seemed to belong only to the Atlantic Northeast in the spring,
and as Mulder made his way along the dirt track of Rural Route
1, he noticed that the canopy of bare branches overhead was
beginning to develop tiny green leaf buds.
Seasons changed more slowly out on the coast, and this spring had
been colder and wetter than many. And yet, there was only so
long that winter could last. After one of the hardest winters of
his life, Mulder was more than ready for spring.
The Dukes County Historical Society was a collection of buildings
along an Edgartown side street, only a few blocks away from the
jail he'd visited yesterday. He parked his car in the near-empty
lot behind the Gale Huntington Library, a two-story building done
in the same square, black-and-white Greek Revival style that had
been once so popular with whaling captains. The library
building, which also housed a maritime museum, was a modern
imitation of an old house, but truly old structures dotted the
Historical Society grounds around it. Gray, shake-sided Thomas
Cooke House stood off to one side, looking much as it had during
the youth of King George III.
As Mulder got out of his car and started up the walkway toward
the library, he found that Cooke House both drew and curiously
repelled his gaze. It was not an especially attractive building,
square in front but with a steeply sloping back that gave it a
slightly barn-like appearance. Its curtainless windows reflected
the early afternoon sun, giving the panes a blank, staring look.
Even the replica of an 18th century kitchen garden, which would
brighten the place in the coming months, was currently brown and
dead.
In all likelihood the house that had once stood by the South Road
Burying Ground had been nearly identical to this one, with the
exception of the rough fieldstone base that still remained among
the weeds. It occurred to him that there might be something
unwise, if not actually unhealthy, about Vineyarders' attachment
to the past. What did it say about a place when three-quarters
of the houses in town were built by the dead?
He walked up the damp brick steps to the library's front door.
Despite its house-like exterior, the inside was clearly that of a
public building. A black, rubberized mat lay over the shining
wooden floorboards and a rack of informational pamphlets stood at
the foot of the grand staircase, which was currently cordoned off
with a velvet rope. Mulder had no business upstairs in the
maritime museum anyway, so he turned left into what he recalled
was the library's reference section.
The place was largely as he remembered it, with bookshelves
running across the width of the room and glass display cases
standing along the walls. A few computer terminals were new
additions, but the room had the same familiar smell, one of
bookbinding glue and dust and the faint musty scent that rose
from the radiators. A hushed smell. It made Mulder think of
autumn leaves and damp sneakers and the great wooden card catalog
cabinet that had once stood in the corner. He recalled being
very pleased when he was tall enough to look down into the
topmost drawer. Until then, he'd needed a chair to access 20% of
the alphabet.
He wondered what made computers so much better than a card
catalog file, anyway. Nobody's card catalog ever crashed and
died when the power went out.
At the moment the library seemed deserted, so he walked up to the
information desk and rang the handbell. After a few moments a
petite middle-aged lady in a denim jumper walked out of the back
room. Her gray hair had been cut in the same quasi-military
style seen on statues of Roman soldiers -- the same crummy
haircut Mulder's father had given him every summer of his
boyhood, as a matter of fact. It probably looked better on the
librarian.
"Can I help you?" the lady asked.
"Yes--I hope so," Mulder said. "I'm hoping to track down the
source of a story. One related to Mary Brown and the South Road
Ghost."
The librarian smiled at him and said, "You're looking for
'Haunted Martha's Vineyard' by Vinton Marsden. It might be
checked out -- it's very popular with the kids."
"I know--I've read it. I used to come here a lot. My name's Fox
Mulder." Somewhat to his relief, the woman's face showed no
recognition.
"I'm Sue Bugay," she said, and shook his hand.
"Actually I was looking for a living source, a person. A friend
of mine told me a woman living somewhere down-island might know
something about the story. Apparently a deaf woman died many
years ago after meeting with an entity out in the woods outside
Chilmark."
"An entity . . .?" Sue blinked at him for moment from behind her
glasses. "Well, there's--" he got the impression she was
deliberately omitting a name, "there is a woman in our Island
Oral History Project who tells a story something like that. Can
I ask why you need to know?"
Mulder pulled his badge out of his coat pocket. He hadn't wanted
to rely on the symbol of authority to get information, but he
supposed he could understand Sue's reluctance. He showed her his
ID and said, "It's possible the event she remembers is relevant
to an open murder case."
Sue's eyes went wide. "Not that poor girl who fell over a cliff
last week?" she asked.
There weren't a lot of homicides on the Vineyard, so there was no
point in being evasive. "Yes, ma'am."
"But that can't be. The story Mrs. Langmann tells happened
before she was even born, and she's over 90 years old. There
must be some mistake," Sue said.
"I'd like to speak to Mrs. Langmann, if that's possible. Is there
way I could contact her?" Mulder asked.
Sue looked a little embarrassed at having given away the woman's
name. "I'll call her and ask her if she's willing to contact
you," she said, and walked back into the other room. Apparently
she wasn't thrilled at the idea of sending a nut with a badge and
a ghost story off to bother a little old lady.
Mulder wandered among the shelves, brushing his fingertips over
the book spines. Some of the titles were new, but many were
familiar to him from years ago. On impulse, he tugged out a book
called, "Old Families of the Lower Cape and Islands," and
examined the card tucked into the inside pocket. According to
the date stamps, the book had been checked out a dozen times
between 1959 and 1983. Somehow it was nice to see the faded
numbers at the top of the card. If something as insubstantial as
an index card could still be in good condition after 41 years, he
might stand a fighting chance after all.
He slipped the book back into place and examined a volume about
clothing worn at about the time of the Revolutionary War. Mulder
was contemplating historical female undergarments, which
apparently consisted of canvas, whalebone, steel and leather, and
imagining the inconvenient contortions that would be required to
get Scully out of such a thing, when Sue returned with a name and
address written on a slip of paper. He shut the book firmly and
put it away.
"The woman you're looking for is Amelie Langmann. I just spoke
with her granddaughter, who says it's all right for you to come
out. Mrs. Langmann is completely deaf, so she doesn't use the
phone. You'll have to meet her in person. For the next few
hours her great-grandson should be there to translate."
Mulder scanned the paper she'd given him and saw that the address
was a rural one, south of Vineyard Haven. "Thank you," he said.
She seemed to hesitate as he turned to leave. "Mr. Mulder?
Mulder stopped as he carefully talked the paper slip into his
wallet. "Yes?"
"There's . . . something else you might want to look at." She
went into the back room again and returned carrying a large book.
The pages looked as if they had been hand-cut to varying widths
and then stitched together, giving the edges a rippling look.
Sue set the book down on the information desk and said, "This is
a family Bible dating to the 1740s. The Chilmark courthouse
burned down in 1826, so family effects like this are the only
existing record of the town's early history."
She sat the book down on the desk and gently opened the leather
cover. The pages inside had turned a mellow brown at the edges,
but Mulder could still glimpse the printer's information near the
bottom. The book had been manufactured by some company in
Boston, or what looked like "Bofton," with the antiquated long
"S."
Sue turned the first page over and revealed a complicated
genealogy written in several different hands on the back.
Carefully ruled lines connected the names of parents, children,
stepchildren, half brothers and sisters born a generation apart,
and others whose relationships were not immediately clear.
Scanning the page, Mulder saw that the genealogy began with a
marriage in 1742 and ended with a death in 1927. Most of the
dead had tiny black crosses painted next to their names, making
him wonder about those who did not. Were they lost but not known
to be dead? Dead but presumably not resting in peace?
"If there was a historical Mary Brown, this may be her," Sue
said, not quite touching the paper as she pointed to a black spot
on the family ledger. One Robert Brown had apparently married a
woman in 1773 whose memory the family was not eager to keep
alive. His wife's name had been obliterated with a bar of black
ink.
"My family feels the same way about me," Mulder said.
If Sue was amused, she didn't show it. "You can see that Robert
and his two children died in the same year, 1777. This younger
one is unusual in that he or she was entered into the family book
without a name; there's only the single date."
Mulder shifted his position a little so he could see past her
pointing finger. The record showed that the Browns' first child
was a daughter, Susannah, born in 1774 and just three or four
years old when she died. The second child was memorialized with
only a date and a tiny cross.
"Why would they do that -- record that a baby was born but not
write down its name?" Mulder asked.
Sue shook her head. "Perhaps it died so young it never got one,
although in that case it would be strange to record its birth at
all. I expect that someone just felt especially bad about the
fact that it died."
"And maybe Mom and Dad weren't around to name it by then," Mulder
said.
"That could be."
Mulder glanced up at the librarian and asked, "Where did this
come from?"
"It's mine," Sue said, straightening up. She pointed at the
entry on the bottom of the page: Maria Flint, b. July 1888, d.,
December 1927. "She was my father's mother."
For the first time Mulder realized he was talking about more than
folklore -- this was family history. As tactfully as he could,
he asked, "Did any family traditions survive? Any information at
all about the woman whose name was blacked out?"
Sue shook her head. "I can tell you that the earliest written
record of the South Road Ghost story was from about 1850, in a
letter from a woman to her cousin on the mainland. She mentions
the story as if it's already quite old -- a headless woman
condemned to wander the cliffs on stormy night's after murdering
both her daughters."
"The second baby was a girl?" Mulder asked.
"Maybe. That's the only detail that gives the story any
credence, really. Society's imagination tends to default to male
-- even more so in Victorian times than now." Suddenly Sue
seemed to realize what she'd been implying and backed away from
that precipice. "It's all just folklore, really. I'm sure the
real Mary Brown, if she existed, would hardly recognize herself
in the stories that have grown up around her."
"Thank you," Mulder said, for once seeing no reason to force
someone out of her comfortable beliefs into the world of extreme
possibilities. After all, he found it comforting to imagine that
the Vineyard was very ordinary, too. He copied down the relevant
information from the book's frontispiece and walked back out to
the car.
*****
Half an hour later he guided his car over the deeply pitted
gravel drive leading up to Mrs. Langmann's house. It was a white
Victorian with pale yellow shutters, the paint peeling slightly
from the sides. Turned-wood posts which held up the overhang
above the front porch hinted at the house's age. People
sometimes faked Victorian gingerbreading of the kind that hung
from the house's eaves, but nobody bothered with carving wooden
posts anymore.
As Mulder walked up the steps to the front porch, a shaggy gray
cat lifted its head from the mold-spotted lawn chair seat it lay
on. It blinked its yellow eyes at him, then fled when he rang
the doorbell. Footsteps sounded inside and a teenage boy opened
the door. The kid's slouch and oversized clothes gave the
impression that he'd been picked up out of the lost-and-found at
the local bus station.
Mulder bit back the first comment that came to mind, about what
the kid was doing a wearing Marlon Brando's pants. Did it mean
he was getting old when he felt like making fun of teenagers'
fashion sense? //Nah.//
"You the guy who's here to see my O.G?" the kid asked.
Mulder couldn't help giving him a sharp look. As far as he knew,
"O.G." was a gangland term meeting "original gangster."
"Your O.G.?" Mulder asked. The boy opened the rusty screen door
and let Mulder into the house.
The kid looked a little embarrassed by Mulder scrutiny. "My old
Grandma," he said.
The front room was small and square, lit only by the sun through
the windows. A worn rug partially covered its bare hardwood
floor. The furniture had the spare, slightly space-agey look
popular in the early-60s, and a quick glance revealed that the
television had knobs and rabbit-ear antennas. Mulder wondered if
Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Welk would automatically appear if he
turned it on.
The kid led Mulder back into the little kitchen, where modern-
looking appliances sat next to older things on the gleaming
counter. Whether Mrs. Langmann used her modern conveniences was
doubtful -- the bowl of an electric bread-kneading machine was
stuffed full of what looked like magazine clippings, and what
appeared to be an honest-to-goodness wooden kneading trough sat
with a cloth over it on a sturdy aluminum table.
The kid muttered an invitation for Mulder to sit in one of the
aluminum-legged chairs and then wandered out the back door,
presumably looking for his great-grandmother. Before long the
door opened again and a truly ancient little woman walked in,
wiping garden dirt from her hands on a dishcloth tied at her
waist.
Mulder stood and asked, "Mrs. Langmann?" then suddenly felt like
an idiot for speaking aloud to a deaf woman.
He needn't have worried, because she answered, "Yes?" Apparently
she read lips.
He held his hand out to her and she pressed it gently between her
cool, knobby fingers. "I'm Fox Mulder. Susan Bugay suggested I
meet with you," he said.
Her great-grandson had followed her into the kitchen, and he
signed a translation of Mulder's statement with surprising
deftness.
"Oh! You mean about that girl that died," the old lady said.
She spoke with the flat, slightly throaty tones of the longtime
deaf.
"Yes, ma'am. I wanted to speak to you about the South Road
Ghost."
She peered at the boy as he translated, showing no surprise at
Mulder's request. Her heavy-lidded eyes were a pale, clouded
blue, and Mulder wondered if she weren't partially blind as well.
"Jeff, be a love and fetch us another chair," Mrs. Langmann said.
Jeff headed back into the living room, and while he was gone Mrs.
Langmann washed the rest of the garden soil from her hands at the
sink. She seemed to be in no hurry; Mulder supposed that being
more than 90 years old put the passage of time in perspective.
Jeff returned carrying a straight-backed wooden chair with a
cushion tied over the seat. He set this down by the table, and
Mrs. Langmann perched on the edge of it. She drew her kneading
trough to her and lifted the cloth off. Mulder and Jeff sat down
in the other two chairs, with the boy sitting between the two
adults.
Although not patient by nature, Mulder decided to let the old
lady begin her story in her own time. Mrs. Langmann began
punching and folding her dough. "So you think the ghost did for
that poor Herron girl," Mrs. Langmann said at last.
"Some people think so," Mulder said. Mrs. Langmann glanced up at
Jeff's translation.
"What did she see?" Mrs. Langmann asked.
"I'm sorry?"
"The girl. Out in the woods -- what did she see?" Mrs. Langmann
glanced up from her kneading, apparently waiting for Jeff to
translate Mulder's response.
"I don't know. She died before anyone could ask her." Mulder
hesitated before bringing Scully into the discussion, but saw no
way around doing it. He supposed news of her experience would
have traveled fast, anyway. "A friend of mine saw children, or
what she believed to be children, during the storm early Sunday
morning. She said they were bleeding, crying for their mother."
Mulder thought Jeff looked a little uneasy as he translated that
for Mrs. Langmann. "Ah," the old lady said. "Folks see
different things, you know. The headless lady gets all the
attention. I've known people who went out there looking for her;
they think she's some kind of tourist attraction, I guess. They
never do see anything but the wind and the rain, and maybe the
inside of a police car if they get too bold about trespassing.
That's because the South Road Ghost isn't the kind of ghost you
can go looking for. It's the kind that comes looking for you."
"Why?" Mulder asked, leaning forward with his elbows on the
table. "Why would it look for someone?"
Mrs. Langmann glanced up at Jeff and said, "Nobody knows that.
Nobody living, anyway. I can tell you that it calls those whose
roots aren't deep in this world, usually folks who have already
lost more than they can bear. I suppose those people are easy,
since they're halfway into the next world already."
"I've heard you knew someone who met it," Mulder said.
Jeff translated, and then Mrs. Langmann returned to her kneading
for so long that Mulder feared she had decided not to answer.
When she spoke at last, her words seemed like the ramblings of
the senile. "I went deaf of a fever when I was six," Mrs.
Langmann continued. "At the time, the only formal education
available for me was the deaf school on the mainland, but the
very thought of being sent away terrified me. It terrified my
mother, too, because I was the only child she had. In the end,
my parents brought in Miss Emma Stoy to be my tutor.
"Miss Emma was a spinster lady, and a good friend to me until she
died. She may have saved my life when I was a newly married
woman. My Edward became terribly sick with the influenza when we
were six months married. I was just nineteen and very silly. I
swore to Miss Emma that if Edward died, then I would die too.
When she heard that, she cried, 'For shame! For shame!'" Mrs.
Langmann raised her hands from the trough to show the signs Miss
Emma had made. Her sharp motions appeared to startle Jeff.
The old lady continued, "Then she told me the story of her sister
Pearl who died. Pearl was born deaf, and Miss Emma learned to
sign to her from a young age."
Mulder sat very still, listening intently without taking notes,
which were largely unnecessary for him. Some people found this
disconcerting, but Mrs. Langmann seemed hardly to notice.
"Pearl went to the very same deaf school I was so anxious to
avoid, and she hadn't thought much of it. In fact, she was far
more interested in a certain young Mr. Watkins than she was in
her studies, so as soon as she could she left school and was
married. She and her husband set up housekeeping just outside
Vineyard Haven, and before long they had a little daughter, Rose.
Pearl adored that child. For a time, she and her husband and
their little girl were very happy.
"One day when Rose had only just begun to get around well on her
feet, Pearl left her sleeping in her cradle while she went out to
hang the wash. While she was gone, the baby fell into the fire.
Pearl never heard what was going on inside the house; how could
she? The old dog began running around and around the yard,
around and around and around until he just crawled under a tree
and lay still. He heard that baby, all right. But Pearl could
make nothing of what he was carrying on about." Mrs. Langmann
continued to beat her dough, her hands moving in a slow, steady
rhythm.
"She never knew until she smelled smoke and saw flames through
the window. She ran inside with the wet washing, tried throwing
everything she could over the fire, but she couldn't find her
daughter.
"Neighbors finally pulled her out of the house. Nobody could go
in until after the foundation cooled. In the end, there was
hardly enough of that child left to bury."
Mulder recalled Samantha and the other children who had all but
dematerialized. He pressed the crease of his thumb hard against
the semi-sharp underside of the table's aluminum edging, hoping
the pain would act as a distraction. This was not a time to
think of the poor, thin bones pulled from Addie Sparks' shallow
grave. Not a time to think of the horrors underneath Santa's
North Pole Village off Route 74 or what Kathy Lee Tencate never
found of her son, Dean. He straightened up in his chair and
glanced at Jeff, not quite daring the boy to see something
besides calm professionalism in his eyes.
Mrs. Langmann continued, "Afterward, Pearl took to her bed.
Sometimes she told Miss Emma she heard her baby crying for her.
Since Pearl had never heard a thing in her life, Miss Emma was
puzzled, and Pearl explained that when she said 'heard' it was
more like 'felt,' a trembling in the breastbone, like when
thunder comes." Mrs. Langmann pressed her flour-covered fist
against her own breastbone.
"One night Pearl went tearing off into the woods near the
Wesquobsque Cliffs. The local men started a search party, but
they never found her until morning. Somebody had slashed her
throat, her face, her hands . . . certain folks thought she'd
done it to herself in a kind of frenzy, but they never did find
the knife."
Mulder recalled Scully lying in the emergency room with bandages
wrapped around the pale skin of her hands. For his sanity's
sake, he put that image from his mind. "What do you think
happened?"
Mrs. Langmann barely glanced at Jeff's translation. She replied
as if she hadn't seen it at all. "Miss Emma got me to understand
that sometimes, you got to let go. When someone you love is
going to that other side, you can hold their hand until the last
moment, but when the time comes, you got to let go. If you
don't, then they'll take you too. It's not wise to call into
that dark space beyond, son. Something might hear you. Maybe
not what you're expecting."
Jeff's hands had fallen into his lap. As if coming to himself,
he suddenly began to speak and sign at the same time, "You're
just joshing about something out there hearing you, right, O.G.?
It's a joke, right?"
Mrs. Langmann didn't answer.
Mulder glanced at the boy and asked, "Hey Jeff, could you get us
a pen and a piece of paper?"
The kid got up and hurried from the room as if glad for the
excuse to go. Mulder pulled a pen and a notepad from the inside
pocket of his coat. He wrote down, "My friend had a daughter who
died two years ago. Can't have any more children. Afraid it was
all her fault." He pushed the pen and pad toward Mrs. Langmann.
She scanned his note and asked, "Who says she can't have any
more?"
Mulder wrote at the bottom of the page, "Doctors."
"Huh." Mrs. Langmann said. That single syllable was apparently
enough to convey her opinion of doctors.
Once it became clear she would not elaborate, Mulder wrote on a
fresh page, "How can I help her?"
"Don't leave her alone," Mrs. Langmann said. "If you want to
protect her, don't leave her alone. If this thing out there
wants her bad enough, it'll start by tearing her away from her
friends, her family, her God. Everything that keeps her anchored
in this world. Alone, a soul is a weak thing, especially a
grieving soul."
Mulder thought of how Scully had uncharacteristically turned down
the Sacraments at the church on Sunday morning. "Is this thing
evil?" he wrote on the notepad.
Mrs. Langmann glanced at it but kept rhythmically punching her
dough. "Hard to say. Could be mean, spiteful. Could just be
sad, lost between here and there and looking for company. That's
the kind of company your friend doesn't need to keep."
Mulder looked down at the paper in his hands, suddenly feeling
powerless and lost himself. The recollection of Scully standing
at the window in her filmy nightgown returned to him with an
unsettling clarity.
Mrs. Langmann continued, "Just don't leave her alone, especially
not come nightfall. Going to get cold again -- snow, they say."
Mulder shut his eyes, thinking of Scully back in Nye House with
the long knife and the Kevlar gloves. He decided it was time to
go back there. Now.
*****