Scully sat at Tammy Willams' small vanity table, watching the
pages of her autopsy report churn slowly out of her portable
printer. The clinical 8" x 10" autopsy photos spread around her
laptop contrasted bizarrely with the pictures of smiling kids in
prom night finery tucked into the frame around the mirror.
Her experiments with modeling dough suggested a scenario in which
Kristie fell forward onto a knife blade held at about the same
level as the entry-wound. One way to interpret that data was
to conjecture that the young woman had fallen while pursuing a
smaller, armed person. If Scully used her knife and a handful of
Play-Doh to replicate the motion of a person stabbed while
backing away, she got a different pattern entirely. Such a crude
experimentation method would never be admissible in court, but
her results were enough to make her feel a great deal of doubt
about the prosecution's version of events. McBer's defense
lawyer would love this. Detective Davis would not be happy at
all.
Personally, Scully had mixed feelings about her conclusions.
McBer was without doubt a despicable person who had no reason to
wish Kristie well. He might even have planned to kill her, and
what was worse, if he were allowed to go free he might harm
others.
//Don't think about doing this for him. Think about doing it for
the truth,// Scully told herself. Then she answered her own
thought: //Uh-huh. Since when did the truth become a murderous
drug dealer in a wheelchair?//
Coming up with no answer for that, she sighed and stared at her
slow portable printer as it churned out pages of her autopsy
report. Apparently the Bureau considered pathetic printing speed
to be a Faustian trade-off for the convenience of being able to
pack the device in a carry-on bag.
Try as she might, she had not been able to shake the depression
that had settled over her early Sunday morning. She reminded
herself this was Holy Week -- her mother would be baking egg
bread and the choir at St. Mary's would be practicing the
Alleluja Chorus for a triumphal Easter service. Even the thought
of April sunlight streaming through the church's stained glass
failed to cheer her. It was as if something inside her had gone
dead.
Scully watched the printer inch out line after line of text for a
few more minutes, then got up and walked out into the empty front
room. The sun shone through the lace curtains and brought out
rich, amber tones in the polished wood floor. By daylight, the
woods across the road were stately rather than menacing, their
branches fringed with pale green leaflets. She groped toward
Scriptural references that had comforted her in the past: //This
is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.//
She felt not the slightest lifting of the shroud over her heart.
St. John of the Cross had written about something like this . . .
the Dark Night of the Soul. She'd tried unsuccessfully to get
Mulder to read that book, hoping he would identify with the
saint, an unfortunate man of integrity who had refused to bow before
the repressive paranoia of his superiors. Mulder had managed to
put off reading it for years. She'd privately smiled at him,
thinking she'd never met a man so desperate not to have a
conversion experience.
And yet here she was, as blind as Mulder had ever been -- perhaps
more so. Scully heard the stairs creak beneath a light tread and
looked up. Leigh was walking down with a basket of folded sheets
on her hip. The proprietress looked a bit apologetic and said,
"You got a phone call earlier. It didn't seem urgent, so I
didn't disturb you."
"Who was it?" Scully asked. Who even knew she was here?
"Patty Herron. She just wanted to know why the police were
delaying the release of Kristie's body. She said that as far as
she knew, you'd completed the autopsy Saturday."
There was only one reason for Davis to delay the release of
Kristie's body. He was going over Scully's head and having the
autopsy redone. //"I don't want this to be repeat of
the LaPierre case,"// he'd said. Scully gave Leigh a smile that
was probably as brittle as glass and said, "I'm afraid she'll
have to ask Detective Davis that question."
Leigh looked puzzled, but before she could reply Scully turned
and walked out outside. The afternoon was cool but clear,
beautiful except for the angry singing in her ears. She'd seen
skepticism of her conclusions before. Other pathologists had
reviewed her test results, and victims' families had challenged
her conclusions. That came with the territory and was only to be
expected. But this was the first time a state agency had
withheld remains from a grieving family expressly to recheck her
work.
She strode around to the back of the house, where she dropped
down into a mostly dry slat-seated bench swing with a view of the
woods beyond the meadow. Somewhere, a woodpecker knocked on a
tree. Scully bent forward and rested her forehead in her hands,
trying to hold onto her rage and sense of injury. Anger was
lively, and lively was good.
The feeling soon drained away, just the same. What did it matter
whether Scully's colleagues respected her, or when Kristie's body
would be released, or if her autopsy report ever saw the light of
day? Scully's story would one day end just like everyone else's:
beneath a tilted headstone in a weed-choked graveyard.
A bird splashed in the garden's cement birdbath, and Scully
looked up. The little creature cocked its head to one side and
gazed at her with eyes as shiny and dark as beads. "You want to
trade places?" she asked. "I'll be the little bird and you be
the FBI agent with a career circling the drain." The bird
cheeped at her, fluttered its wings, and flew away.
"That's what I thought," Scully said.
She sat looking toward the woods beyond the meadow until she
became chilled and drew the lapels of her jacket closer across
her chest. The wind was steadily growing colder, bearing the
first hint of snow.
*****
Mulder drove well in excess of the speed limit over the
washboarded up-island roads, though he knew his FBI badge
wouldn't be a get-out-of-ticket-free card here on the Vineyard.
//"Don't leave her alone,"// Mrs. Langmann had said.
He pulled into Nye House's driveway amid a spray of mud and
gravel, then ran up the slightly-cockeyed wooden steps. The
front room was sunny, silent and empty.
When he opened the door to Tammy's old room, he found Scully's
printer running, but Scully herself gone. Her purse was still
slung by its strap over the back of the white-painted vanity
chair. A brief check of the Williams family's quarters turned up
no one.
Mulder headed back outside again, afraid to find Scully in the
old graveyard, crouching by the tombstones -- or worse, to be
unable to find her at all. But as he rounded the corner of the
house he saw her sitting on an old swing bench, rocking herself
absently as she gazed out at the woods. After a moment, his panic
subsided.
The swing's chains creaked in a soothing rhythm as he walked up
beside her. The brisk spring wind had reddened her cheeks and
blown her hair until it resembled tufts of copper-colored prairie
grass framing her face. He dropped down onto the seat next to
her. "Don't go," he said. He wasn't sure if it was his words or
simply the squeak of the overhead swing hooks that caused her to
look over at him.
She blinked as if awakened from a dream. "What? Mulder, what
are you talking about?"
"I saw the old lady Irv told you about," he said, digging the
notes he'd made at the Historical Society from his pants pocket.
For himself, he didn't really need such notes, but long
partnership with Scully had taught him that she liked to have
data she could hold in her hand.
As he explained what he'd learned, she gazed down at the
scribbled notes he'd given her. When she repeated the name of
Capt. Brown's oldest child, "Susannah," the distance in her eyes
chilled him.
"Scully . . . you can't help them," Mulder said. "Whenever they
needed -- or need -- you can't give it to them." When she didn't
reply, he pressed, "They're not Emily. Scully, you don't owe
them anything." He could hear the edge of fear in his voice.
"You don't understand," she said softly.
Mulder's frustration was so great that he had to get up and pace
across the muddy, brown lawn. "I understand," he said. He
understood completely, and that was what scared him. He had been
willing to give up everything for Samantha, and he was selfish
enough to hope that Scully wasn't willing to do the same for her
lost daughter. "I understand that you think they need something
from you."
The corners of her mouth tensed as if in mild exasperation, but
she did not reply. Mrs. Langmann's words came back to him--
//"It's not the kind of ghost you can look for. It's the kind of
ghost that comes looking for you."//
"No," he said, comprehension slowly dawning. "They don't need
something from you. You need something from them."
"You're not making any sense at all," she said. The look of
annoyance on her face was at least a sign of life.
Having found a plausible theory, he was unwilling to let it go.
"Folklore is full of stories about ghost children who come back
to haunt their parents. In Scandinavia they call them Utburds,
in Russia they're Navky. These are kids who died nameless or at
the hands of their parents. We always assume they come forward
in time with us, still calling for the help and attention they
never got. What if that's not true? What if there's something
inside us that stays back with them? Maybe guilt and grief keep
us from letting go of these children and lead us backward in
time. Perhaps some people are so wounded that they don't have
the will to return to the present."
Scully's expression approximated her old look of wry skepticism.
"Mulder, that's insane," she said. "Time does not go backward,
no matter how much we want it to. That's the whole problem --
that's why people grieve. The Second Law of Thermodynamics . .
."
Mulder waved away her explanation. "You're thinking of going out
there again, aren't you?"
She cut her speech on thermodynamics short, as if his words
surprised her.
Mulder believed he knew her true thoughts, even if she wouldn't
admit them to herself. After all, he'd had similar, secret hopes
for years. "You think those entities have something you need,
and you'll keep going out to them until you find it. Fine.
Fine, go ahead, I have no right to stop you." He sat down next
her, weary from anxiety and lack of rest. "Just take me with
you. Mrs. Langmann said that the most dangerous thing for you
was to be alone right now. She said that this thing will try to
call you away from everyone who loves you."
Scully met his eyes as he said the last words, and then she
looked away toward the trees. After a moment that felt like
hours, she released a long breath. "Yes," she said.
"Come with me."
*****
Mulder drove with Scully to town, where they picked up flares,
flashlight batteries, and knit gloves to cover Scully's injured
hands. If the store's gray-bearded proprietor was interested in
any of their purchases, he didn't show it. Neither did Scully,
who wandered through the aisles like a woman lost in thought.
Mulder was encouraged when she wanted to stop by the church on
the way back, although she asked him to wait in the car and
wouldn't tell him what she went in for. As she returned, Mulder
scanned her face for some sign of inner peace, or resignation, or
anything at all that would give him a view into her world and
leave him feeling less shut out.
Cold air came in with her when she opened the car door. She did
not meet his gaze, and instead looked out into some middle
distance as she groped for her shoulder belt. Her manner was not
cruel; it was only as if she were alone.
It was almost full dark by the time their car bobbed its way into
Nye House's rutted driveway. Pellets of sleet bounced off the
windshield and formed a swarm that coursed through the headlight
beams. Mulder pulled into the near-empty gravel lot and shut the
car off. Beside him, Scully was drawing on her new knit gloves
over her protective Kevlar ones. Something about her
businesslike eagerness unnerved him.
Mulder considered turning around and driving back to Vineyard
Haven. Two more ferries would run back to the mainland tonight,
and he could have Scully safe in Boston by midnight, whether she
was a willing traveler or not.
He sat with both hands resting on the steering wheel while the
cooling engine block ticked. As Scully pocketed extra batteries
and ejected the magazine of her gun to examine it, Mulder looked
down at the ignition key. What would happen if he hauled her out
of here against her will? Perhaps she would forgive him in time;
perhaps she would even agree it was the right thing to do.
But he suspected she'd come back. And she'd come back alone, no
longer trusting him to accompany her. Mulder's hands slid to the
bottom of the steering wheel. "This is payback time for the
Bermuda Triangle, isn't it?" he asked.
"Of course not." She finished checking her equipment and opened
the car door. "Are you coming?" she asked.
Not knowing what else to do, he unfolded himself from the
confines of the car and stepped outside, where a layer of fallen
ice crystals crunched beneath his feet. He made sure his own 9
mm was securely clipped to the waistband of his jeans. He
doubted it would do any good to shoot at the beings that waited
out there, but he felt better armed.
"Let's go," he said.
Side by side, they walked away from the inn's circle of light,
toward the silver-gray expanse of the frozen field. For a time
the only sounds were their footsteps and the faint tapping of the
sleet falling all around, like a skeleton rain.
Mulder repressed his urge to lead her toward the bike path that
was an easier, more roundabout way into the woods. Scully seemed
certain of the path she wanted to take, and he followed her lead.
The terrain began to drop as they entered the trees. They were
descending into a valley cut by millennia-worth of spring runoff
water, and he knew the soil would grow softer and more
treacherous as they neared the bottom. Yet Scully descended the
steep slope with confident speed, and it was Mulder who skidded
in the leaf-choked mud while struggling to keep up with her. He
swore under his breath as he found he could not keep an eye on
her and his footing at the same time.
She stopped briefly about midway down the steepest part of the
slope, her foot braced against the semi-exposed roots of a small
maple. "This is where I heard it," she said as he caught up with
her.
Mulder stopped and listened. The sleet continued to patter down,
and every so often, last year's dead leaves would stir in the
wind, making a wild, rushing sound. But that was all. "You hear
it now?" he asked.
She hesitated, then said, "No." Scully continued down the slope,
with Mulder laboring in her wake.
The valley had not changed much since his boyhood. If he
remembered correctly, this pocket of land was entrusted to the
Dukes County Historical Society and forbidden to developers.
Still, he did not recall the wet black trees being this tangled
and thick, or the sting of the sea air this fierce. He had the
strange sense of walking on a parallel Vineyard, a wild,
thicketed island where whalers had never come and no wealthy
mainlanders visited.
He continued to follow as Scully picked her way among the low-
hanging branches and the juniper canes. They passed the tiny
cemetery on the right, and Mulder was somewhat relieved to see
the space between its tilted stones was silent and empty.
A few dozen yards further on, the old house foundation came into
view. Even in the semi-darkness of the ice-filled night, the
stone base could be seen as a collection of dark lines lying
among the ice-coated weeds. "So what now?" Mulder asked,
turning to Scully.
He was alone.
Looking back, he saw that his own footprints were the only track
visible for a long way.
****
Once again, Scully stood at the edge of the clearing that
surrounded the small house. Moonlight shone down upon the snow
and turned the house's weathered shingling to muted silver. In
the deep shadow by its side, two small, pale figures huddled.
"I came back," Scully said. Somehow, the temperature seemed less
bitter than a moment ago. The infant's gasps were as dreadful as
she remembered, and ambient moonlight reflected as pale pinpoints
in the older child's eyes.
"Did you think I forgot you?" Scully asked. The snow crunched
softly under her feet as she walked closer.
The girl made a quiet sound, like the cry of a wounded bird.
Scully held her hand out to the child, ready this time for the
slight shifting of the cloth over her hand.
The knife flashed up from beneath the fabric folds, and Scully
caught the blade in the V between her forefinger and thumb. The
impact made her wince although her Kevlar gloves protected her
hand from the edge.
The child's strength was tremendous, and Scully found herself
struggling to keep the blade pushed down and away. Her breathing
sounded loud in the still air.
"She left us," the girl said at last. Her speech had such an
odd, flat sound, not any American accent Scully was familiar
with, and yet no European accent either.
"I know. I'm sorry," Scully managed. The exertion caused her to
take deep breaths, and the air was thick with the smell of blood.
If fighting against Scully was any struggle for the girl, she
didn't show it. Her bloodied face was calm, her gray eyes clear
as late winter ice. "She left us. But you won't."
"No," Scully said. "No, I won't leave you." The terrible
pressure on the blade began to subside, and the girl let it drop
into the blood-spattered snow. "Susannah," Scully whispered.
This time, the child did not resist as Scully gathered her and
the infant into her arms. Their skin was so cold -- colder than
the surrounding air, but they curled close and did not pull away.
Scully sat in the snow with her back against the house's wall,
both children lying in her lap.
*****
Retracing his steps, Mulder discovered Scully's track in the new-
fallen sleet not far from the graveyard. She had walked into a
small thicket, but there her prints became muddled and seemed to
disappear.
He began searching in a spiral pattern outward from the thicket.
He was sure that less than five minutes had passed since he last
saw her ahead of him, not nearly long enough for her to travel
out of earshot. Any yet, even when he called her name so loudly
it echoed off the valley wall, he received no reply. He tried not
to think about the black-and-red clay cliffs rising hundreds of
feet from the surf less than half a mile from where he stood.
Sweeping his flashlight beam over the ground revealed nothing of
use. The weeds of the forest floor all had delicate straws of
ice hanging from them, obviously undisturbed for days.
It was as if Scully had simply vanished off the face of the
earth. Mulder had a nightmare sense of history repeating itself.
His spiral searching pattern grew more oblong than circular,
stretching toward the South Road Burying Ground and the ruined
house. Such a small patch of land. Scully would be there; she
had to be.
She was not. Flashes of what increasingly seemed like
desperation rather than intuition led him from the graveyard to
the house foundations and back again. Each time he reached one
location and found it empty, he would become sure that Scully
waited for him in the other, safe and probably irritated with him
for wandering off. Each time, he was disappointed.
Before long his footprints had stitched a great zigzag pattern
between cemetery and house, obliterating any traces Scully might
have left. When it sunk in that his "search" was only pacing
that did more harm than good, he stopped by a tree near the stone
foundations and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his
eyes.
There was no reason to panic. He had only failed to find Scully
because he had not yet looked in the place she was at. Every
time he looked somewhere and did not find her, he narrowed his
search. He was a good searcher; he'd made his career at the FBI
by finding things no one else could.
Yet he had never found the things he wanted most. One by one,
the objects of his quests had all slipped beyond his reach.
He shouted for his partner before the terror creeping up on him
could truly take hold. "Scully!"
Though it felt good to release his nervous energy, calling her
was no more effective than before. He began pacing again,
circling the stone foundations this time. He had to move in
order to think. Ghosts had motives like anybody else, and
therefore their behavior should be predictable within certain
limits. Days ago, Scully had categorized the paranormal events
here as a Revenge Haunting, dismissing the differential category
of Reenactment Haunting for somewhat arbitrary reasons. Properly
speaking, the situation had characteristics of both types. The
entities Scully had discovered were filled with rage, and yet the
object of their rage was inaccessible to them.
//Join the club.//
The creatures that haunted this area needed a specific type of
person to play the opposing role in their drama -- a wounded
person with loose ties to the world of the living, a mother whose
spirit had nearly followed her child's into the other world.
How could he get such an entity to look for him? As a
childless man, he was far from its preferred victim.
So many times, he had drawn killers out by simply seeming
interested in them, appealing to their vanity. Perhaps
reenactment haunting, like some reenactment killings, was a
performance art whose creators craved an audience.
Mulder called out, "Susannah!"
Half-frozen branches clacked in the wind, sending down a new
scattering of sleet, then all grew quiet. A strange, listening
silence followed while the name seemed to hang in the air. Mulder
had the maddening feeling that the ghost's world lay behind a
thin veil, and if he only knew where to place his hand, he could
draw it aside and step through.
The sense of being trapped between worlds was eerily familiar,
and he remembered that he carried a portal to the past within his
head -- the faulty synaptic connection that would periodically
rip him out of his everyday reality. Could he induce a seizure?
He'd never tried, but here, of all places, it should be possible.
Mulder shut his eyes, and the thudding of his heart seemed
louder. Clammy sweat had accumulated on his upper lip and he
wiped it off with his fingers.
How did his seizures begin? Usually with a powerful emotion in a
familiar place. Concentrating, he thought about climbing the
gray willow to drop maple-seed helicopters as a child . . . or
being a teenager hunkering down among the tilted headstones in
the muggy August heat, hating the town that had rejected him.
But none of the memories he conjured up produced the strange
sense of dislocation in time.
"Fuck Irv," he whispered. "Fuck him and his South Road Ghost."
If only the little shit hadn't been so eager to upset Scully with
his ugly stories of lost children and poisoned cats --
The terrible sensation came over him of falling against a solid
barrier and passing straight through.
He was eleven years old, curled against the side of his bed,
crying.
His mother had beaten him.
He was crying for his mother.
Samantha, loyal in her own way, had to be removed from his
doorway in order to keep her from coming to him, but it wasn't
her he wanted.
His mother had been cruel to him.
He needed his mother.
The pain of his tightened throat intruded on the vision, and it
soon dissolved around him. Mulder grabbed a tree for support and
rested his forehead against the coolness of the bark. As usual,
the seizure's aftermath left him nauseated and gagging, and he
shut his eyes against the dizziness.
//This is not helping her.// Grief and illness had left him too
weak to be the rescuer Scully needed. He groped in the deep
pocket of his coat for the flares he'd brought. Maybe he could
draw a rescue party. And yet, he knew that men with flashlights
and two-way radios were not enough to save her. Fighting
sickness, he bargained with any power that could hear. //Leave
her alone. You can have me instead. I'm the one who drilled a
hole in my own head. I deserve to be taken -- she doesn't.//
Slowly, became aware that it was not only the seizure making him
ill. There was also a smell -- one he'd learned to identify far
later than age eleven.
It was blood.
The image of Kristie Herron lying on the autopsy table flashed in
his mind. But the moment he opened his eyes, the smell of blood
faded. He was all alone in the ordinary woods.
Mulder took a step away from the tree, holding an unlit flare in
his hand. "What do you want?" he shouted at the thing that slunk
among the stones out here, waiting to take unhappy young women
away. "How many people have to die before you're satisfied?"
The dry, clinical profiler voice that had guided him through
thousands of investigations told him: //You know what they
want.//
Mary Brown's daughters had died waiting for their mother. She'd
killed them, and yet they waited. The two centuries' worth of
rage they carried was eclipsed by their need.
If Mulder could not get into the ghosts' world by stepping into
Mary Brown's place, perhaps he could get there by stepping into
Susannah's. He called the child's name again, seeking the
vision-place where the present and past ran together. As before,
the wind swirled fiercely, and Mulder could almost hear angry
denial in the sound: //"Go away,"// it seemed to say. //"She's
ours now."//
When the wind died again, the otherworldly sense faded with it.
These were the woods of his childhood -- dark, eerie, but
essentially familiar. Perhaps for once, familiarity was too
great an anchor to the everyday world. It could be that he knew
the stone house foundation, the woods, and the graveyard so well
that they kept him from seeing what was truly there. After
hesitating a moment, Mulder shut his flashlight off and put it
and the flare away.
The icy night's diffuse luminance seemed to have vanished. He
was in utter darkness, and he felt a powerful urge not to move.
Motion would cause noise, and that would bring . . . something.
He was certain that something was near, watching him with empty
holes in a pale, dry face.
Mulder stood motionless, his chest feeling almost too tight to
breathe, while he waited for the thing to make some noise and
betray itself.
When his eyes began to adjust to the scant light, the thick
shadows resolved once again to the shapes of old logs and briar
bushes. His fear faded.
But there *had* been something there. With dull dread, he
thought the key might be blindness. There were apparently only
two doors to the cold, bloody world that Scully had slipped into.
One was for mothers driven half mad by grief. The other one, the
little, cramped door, was for dying things. Susannah and her
sister had entered through that door, clawing against it like
wounded animals in their terror and desperation. Perhaps Kristie
and the other dead women had drifted out if it on their way to
the next world.
If Mulder truly wanted to enter Susannah's reality, he would have
to force his way through that little door by becoming as helpless
as the dying, as frightened as an abandoned child. His throat
felt very dry as he swallowed.
His cell phone was inside his inner coat pocket. He could call
Joe up, have him bring his officers out to search the place
properly. And when dawn came, they would find Scully's body
curled in some icy hollow, or smashed at the foot of the cliffs.
Mulder closed his eyes. The smell of blood returned, and grew
stronger. Once again, he became sure he was being watched.
An mournful baying sounded in the near distance. He jumped, then
identified the sound as the cry of a wolf. Whatever lay bleeding
nearby was attracting a beast that had been extinct on the
Vineyard for over 150 years.
Mulder cupped his hands around his mouth and called, "Scully!"
He heard a strange, shuffling half-step a few yards to his right.
His eyes snapped open involuntarily as he turned. In his
peripheral vision he glimpsed a silvery-gray wall, and beyond
that a pale figure that swayed as if its forward momentum had
been abruptly checked.
Once he faced the thing directly, it was gone. He was alone
again by the foundations of the long-ruined house. The freezing
wind turned the sweat on his face and throat into icy droplets.
//Shit. Holy shit.//
He recalled the horror stories he used to tell Joey Luce about
the things that lurked deep in the woods. At each gristly
detail, Joey's eyes would get bigger and bigger . . .
//That's crap. You know these woods. You know the paranormal.
Nine times out of ten, ghosts are only dangerous if you're afraid
of them.//
But he was afraid. There had been something wrong about the pale
thing standing by the wall. Its lower portion had swung like
sodden curtains, yet the upper part seemed to freeze motionless
too quickly for the energy of that swinging, dragging fabric. It
was as if a mannequin had been filmed walking in stop-motion
while its clothes continued to flow in liquid real time.
Mulder had no desire at all to close his eyes again. //You have
to. Think about Scully.// Scully in his Knicks shirt and
pajama bottoms, curled on his couch on a sunny Saturday morning.
Scully gently waking him from his nightmares, taking away the
worst of the terror and grief. He shut his eyes and called his
partner again.
He heard no sound but the rushing noise of the wind for some
time, and then the shuffling step came again, nearer this time.
Mulder struggled to sweep away the coat folds that covered his
gun. He drew it and took a triangular stance against the thing
that moved toward him, only to strike a solid wall with his foot
and lose his balance. He fell against a hard, knobby surface.
When he lifted his hand to touch it, it felt like the jutting
wooden panels of an old, shake-sided house.
//This is it. This is the structure Scully saw.//
The thing to his right shuffled nearer, and Mulder backed away,
keeping his unarmed hand against the wall for guidance. His
fingers brushed a corner and he turned it, relieved to be out of
the shuffling thing's line of sight, if indeed it could see. The
smell of blood was strong now, and as he backed away, eyes shut,
he feared putting his foot down on something wet and cold, with
stiffening hands and an awesome grip.
*****
Scully huddled against the rough-hewn shingles with both children
in her lap. The air around her seemed to grow milder, even warm,
and she shrugged out of her coat, easing the plastic bottle from
its inner pocket before wrapping the garment like a blanket
around the wounded girls. She had filled the screw-cap soda
bottle with holy water from the church's baptismal font.
Catholic doctrine forbade baptism of the dead, but how could she
call these children dead, when they gasped for breath in her
arms? Awkwardly, she poured some of the water into her cupped
hand. The liquid felt as warm as bathwater. Nestled against her
shoulder, Susannah gazed at her activities with calm uninterest.
As she had once been taught to do by Sister Mary, Scully
administered the only Sacrament permissible for a lay Catholic to
perform in cases of emergency. Splashing the dying infant's head
with water of three times, she said, "I baptize you, Maria, in
the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." She'd
chosen the name after some deliberation. It was the name of an
Italian child who'd converted her own murderer on her deathbed,
and who had become an unofficial patron saint of wronged girls.
Having no idea of the religious practices of Susannah's family,
she refilled her cupped hand with water and recited an alternate
prayer for the older girl, "If you have not already been
baptized, I baptize you, Susannah, in the name of the Father, and
the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
The holy water made rivulets in the blood on the girls' faces,
but had no other obvious effect. Scully shut her eyes and
released a long breath. She had no idea what else to do for
them, and she was so tired.
*****
pages of her autopsy report churn slowly out of her portable
printer. The clinical 8" x 10" autopsy photos spread around her
laptop contrasted bizarrely with the pictures of smiling kids in
prom night finery tucked into the frame around the mirror.
Her experiments with modeling dough suggested a scenario in which
Kristie fell forward onto a knife blade held at about the same
level as the entry-wound. One way to interpret that data was
to conjecture that the young woman had fallen while pursuing a
smaller, armed person. If Scully used her knife and a handful of
Play-Doh to replicate the motion of a person stabbed while
backing away, she got a different pattern entirely. Such a crude
experimentation method would never be admissible in court, but
her results were enough to make her feel a great deal of doubt
about the prosecution's version of events. McBer's defense
lawyer would love this. Detective Davis would not be happy at
all.
Personally, Scully had mixed feelings about her conclusions.
McBer was without doubt a despicable person who had no reason to
wish Kristie well. He might even have planned to kill her, and
what was worse, if he were allowed to go free he might harm
others.
//Don't think about doing this for him. Think about doing it for
the truth,// Scully told herself. Then she answered her own
thought: //Uh-huh. Since when did the truth become a murderous
drug dealer in a wheelchair?//
Coming up with no answer for that, she sighed and stared at her
slow portable printer as it churned out pages of her autopsy
report. Apparently the Bureau considered pathetic printing speed
to be a Faustian trade-off for the convenience of being able to
pack the device in a carry-on bag.
Try as she might, she had not been able to shake the depression
that had settled over her early Sunday morning. She reminded
herself this was Holy Week -- her mother would be baking egg
bread and the choir at St. Mary's would be practicing the
Alleluja Chorus for a triumphal Easter service. Even the thought
of April sunlight streaming through the church's stained glass
failed to cheer her. It was as if something inside her had gone
dead.
Scully watched the printer inch out line after line of text for a
few more minutes, then got up and walked out into the empty front
room. The sun shone through the lace curtains and brought out
rich, amber tones in the polished wood floor. By daylight, the
woods across the road were stately rather than menacing, their
branches fringed with pale green leaflets. She groped toward
Scriptural references that had comforted her in the past: //This
is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.//
She felt not the slightest lifting of the shroud over her heart.
St. John of the Cross had written about something like this . . .
the Dark Night of the Soul. She'd tried unsuccessfully to get
Mulder to read that book, hoping he would identify with the
saint, an unfortunate man of integrity who had refused to bow before
the repressive paranoia of his superiors. Mulder had managed to
put off reading it for years. She'd privately smiled at him,
thinking she'd never met a man so desperate not to have a
conversion experience.
And yet here she was, as blind as Mulder had ever been -- perhaps
more so. Scully heard the stairs creak beneath a light tread and
looked up. Leigh was walking down with a basket of folded sheets
on her hip. The proprietress looked a bit apologetic and said,
"You got a phone call earlier. It didn't seem urgent, so I
didn't disturb you."
"Who was it?" Scully asked. Who even knew she was here?
"Patty Herron. She just wanted to know why the police were
delaying the release of Kristie's body. She said that as far as
she knew, you'd completed the autopsy Saturday."
There was only one reason for Davis to delay the release of
Kristie's body. He was going over Scully's head and having the
autopsy redone. //"I don't want this to be repeat of
the LaPierre case,"// he'd said. Scully gave Leigh a smile that
was probably as brittle as glass and said, "I'm afraid she'll
have to ask Detective Davis that question."
Leigh looked puzzled, but before she could reply Scully turned
and walked out outside. The afternoon was cool but clear,
beautiful except for the angry singing in her ears. She'd seen
skepticism of her conclusions before. Other pathologists had
reviewed her test results, and victims' families had challenged
her conclusions. That came with the territory and was only to be
expected. But this was the first time a state agency had
withheld remains from a grieving family expressly to recheck her
work.
She strode around to the back of the house, where she dropped
down into a mostly dry slat-seated bench swing with a view of the
woods beyond the meadow. Somewhere, a woodpecker knocked on a
tree. Scully bent forward and rested her forehead in her hands,
trying to hold onto her rage and sense of injury. Anger was
lively, and lively was good.
The feeling soon drained away, just the same. What did it matter
whether Scully's colleagues respected her, or when Kristie's body
would be released, or if her autopsy report ever saw the light of
day? Scully's story would one day end just like everyone else's:
beneath a tilted headstone in a weed-choked graveyard.
A bird splashed in the garden's cement birdbath, and Scully
looked up. The little creature cocked its head to one side and
gazed at her with eyes as shiny and dark as beads. "You want to
trade places?" she asked. "I'll be the little bird and you be
the FBI agent with a career circling the drain." The bird
cheeped at her, fluttered its wings, and flew away.
"That's what I thought," Scully said.
She sat looking toward the woods beyond the meadow until she
became chilled and drew the lapels of her jacket closer across
her chest. The wind was steadily growing colder, bearing the
first hint of snow.
*****
Mulder drove well in excess of the speed limit over the
washboarded up-island roads, though he knew his FBI badge
wouldn't be a get-out-of-ticket-free card here on the Vineyard.
//"Don't leave her alone,"// Mrs. Langmann had said.
He pulled into Nye House's driveway amid a spray of mud and
gravel, then ran up the slightly-cockeyed wooden steps. The
front room was sunny, silent and empty.
When he opened the door to Tammy's old room, he found Scully's
printer running, but Scully herself gone. Her purse was still
slung by its strap over the back of the white-painted vanity
chair. A brief check of the Williams family's quarters turned up
no one.
Mulder headed back outside again, afraid to find Scully in the
old graveyard, crouching by the tombstones -- or worse, to be
unable to find her at all. But as he rounded the corner of the
house he saw her sitting on an old swing bench, rocking herself
absently as she gazed out at the woods. After a moment, his panic
subsided.
The swing's chains creaked in a soothing rhythm as he walked up
beside her. The brisk spring wind had reddened her cheeks and
blown her hair until it resembled tufts of copper-colored prairie
grass framing her face. He dropped down onto the seat next to
her. "Don't go," he said. He wasn't sure if it was his words or
simply the squeak of the overhead swing hooks that caused her to
look over at him.
She blinked as if awakened from a dream. "What? Mulder, what
are you talking about?"
"I saw the old lady Irv told you about," he said, digging the
notes he'd made at the Historical Society from his pants pocket.
For himself, he didn't really need such notes, but long
partnership with Scully had taught him that she liked to have
data she could hold in her hand.
As he explained what he'd learned, she gazed down at the
scribbled notes he'd given her. When she repeated the name of
Capt. Brown's oldest child, "Susannah," the distance in her eyes
chilled him.
"Scully . . . you can't help them," Mulder said. "Whenever they
needed -- or need -- you can't give it to them." When she didn't
reply, he pressed, "They're not Emily. Scully, you don't owe
them anything." He could hear the edge of fear in his voice.
"You don't understand," she said softly.
Mulder's frustration was so great that he had to get up and pace
across the muddy, brown lawn. "I understand," he said. He
understood completely, and that was what scared him. He had been
willing to give up everything for Samantha, and he was selfish
enough to hope that Scully wasn't willing to do the same for her
lost daughter. "I understand that you think they need something
from you."
The corners of her mouth tensed as if in mild exasperation, but
she did not reply. Mrs. Langmann's words came back to him--
//"It's not the kind of ghost you can look for. It's the kind of
ghost that comes looking for you."//
"No," he said, comprehension slowly dawning. "They don't need
something from you. You need something from them."
"You're not making any sense at all," she said. The look of
annoyance on her face was at least a sign of life.
Having found a plausible theory, he was unwilling to let it go.
"Folklore is full of stories about ghost children who come back
to haunt their parents. In Scandinavia they call them Utburds,
in Russia they're Navky. These are kids who died nameless or at
the hands of their parents. We always assume they come forward
in time with us, still calling for the help and attention they
never got. What if that's not true? What if there's something
inside us that stays back with them? Maybe guilt and grief keep
us from letting go of these children and lead us backward in
time. Perhaps some people are so wounded that they don't have
the will to return to the present."
Scully's expression approximated her old look of wry skepticism.
"Mulder, that's insane," she said. "Time does not go backward,
no matter how much we want it to. That's the whole problem --
that's why people grieve. The Second Law of Thermodynamics . .
."
Mulder waved away her explanation. "You're thinking of going out
there again, aren't you?"
She cut her speech on thermodynamics short, as if his words
surprised her.
Mulder believed he knew her true thoughts, even if she wouldn't
admit them to herself. After all, he'd had similar, secret hopes
for years. "You think those entities have something you need,
and you'll keep going out to them until you find it. Fine.
Fine, go ahead, I have no right to stop you." He sat down next
her, weary from anxiety and lack of rest. "Just take me with
you. Mrs. Langmann said that the most dangerous thing for you
was to be alone right now. She said that this thing will try to
call you away from everyone who loves you."
Scully met his eyes as he said the last words, and then she
looked away toward the trees. After a moment that felt like
hours, she released a long breath. "Yes," she said.
"Come with me."
*****
Mulder drove with Scully to town, where they picked up flares,
flashlight batteries, and knit gloves to cover Scully's injured
hands. If the store's gray-bearded proprietor was interested in
any of their purchases, he didn't show it. Neither did Scully,
who wandered through the aisles like a woman lost in thought.
Mulder was encouraged when she wanted to stop by the church on
the way back, although she asked him to wait in the car and
wouldn't tell him what she went in for. As she returned, Mulder
scanned her face for some sign of inner peace, or resignation, or
anything at all that would give him a view into her world and
leave him feeling less shut out.
Cold air came in with her when she opened the car door. She did
not meet his gaze, and instead looked out into some middle
distance as she groped for her shoulder belt. Her manner was not
cruel; it was only as if she were alone.
It was almost full dark by the time their car bobbed its way into
Nye House's rutted driveway. Pellets of sleet bounced off the
windshield and formed a swarm that coursed through the headlight
beams. Mulder pulled into the near-empty gravel lot and shut the
car off. Beside him, Scully was drawing on her new knit gloves
over her protective Kevlar ones. Something about her
businesslike eagerness unnerved him.
Mulder considered turning around and driving back to Vineyard
Haven. Two more ferries would run back to the mainland tonight,
and he could have Scully safe in Boston by midnight, whether she
was a willing traveler or not.
He sat with both hands resting on the steering wheel while the
cooling engine block ticked. As Scully pocketed extra batteries
and ejected the magazine of her gun to examine it, Mulder looked
down at the ignition key. What would happen if he hauled her out
of here against her will? Perhaps she would forgive him in time;
perhaps she would even agree it was the right thing to do.
But he suspected she'd come back. And she'd come back alone, no
longer trusting him to accompany her. Mulder's hands slid to the
bottom of the steering wheel. "This is payback time for the
Bermuda Triangle, isn't it?" he asked.
"Of course not." She finished checking her equipment and opened
the car door. "Are you coming?" she asked.
Not knowing what else to do, he unfolded himself from the
confines of the car and stepped outside, where a layer of fallen
ice crystals crunched beneath his feet. He made sure his own 9
mm was securely clipped to the waistband of his jeans. He
doubted it would do any good to shoot at the beings that waited
out there, but he felt better armed.
"Let's go," he said.
Side by side, they walked away from the inn's circle of light,
toward the silver-gray expanse of the frozen field. For a time
the only sounds were their footsteps and the faint tapping of the
sleet falling all around, like a skeleton rain.
Mulder repressed his urge to lead her toward the bike path that
was an easier, more roundabout way into the woods. Scully seemed
certain of the path she wanted to take, and he followed her lead.
The terrain began to drop as they entered the trees. They were
descending into a valley cut by millennia-worth of spring runoff
water, and he knew the soil would grow softer and more
treacherous as they neared the bottom. Yet Scully descended the
steep slope with confident speed, and it was Mulder who skidded
in the leaf-choked mud while struggling to keep up with her. He
swore under his breath as he found he could not keep an eye on
her and his footing at the same time.
She stopped briefly about midway down the steepest part of the
slope, her foot braced against the semi-exposed roots of a small
maple. "This is where I heard it," she said as he caught up with
her.
Mulder stopped and listened. The sleet continued to patter down,
and every so often, last year's dead leaves would stir in the
wind, making a wild, rushing sound. But that was all. "You hear
it now?" he asked.
She hesitated, then said, "No." Scully continued down the slope,
with Mulder laboring in her wake.
The valley had not changed much since his boyhood. If he
remembered correctly, this pocket of land was entrusted to the
Dukes County Historical Society and forbidden to developers.
Still, he did not recall the wet black trees being this tangled
and thick, or the sting of the sea air this fierce. He had the
strange sense of walking on a parallel Vineyard, a wild,
thicketed island where whalers had never come and no wealthy
mainlanders visited.
He continued to follow as Scully picked her way among the low-
hanging branches and the juniper canes. They passed the tiny
cemetery on the right, and Mulder was somewhat relieved to see
the space between its tilted stones was silent and empty.
A few dozen yards further on, the old house foundation came into
view. Even in the semi-darkness of the ice-filled night, the
stone base could be seen as a collection of dark lines lying
among the ice-coated weeds. "So what now?" Mulder asked,
turning to Scully.
He was alone.
Looking back, he saw that his own footprints were the only track
visible for a long way.
****
Once again, Scully stood at the edge of the clearing that
surrounded the small house. Moonlight shone down upon the snow
and turned the house's weathered shingling to muted silver. In
the deep shadow by its side, two small, pale figures huddled.
"I came back," Scully said. Somehow, the temperature seemed less
bitter than a moment ago. The infant's gasps were as dreadful as
she remembered, and ambient moonlight reflected as pale pinpoints
in the older child's eyes.
"Did you think I forgot you?" Scully asked. The snow crunched
softly under her feet as she walked closer.
The girl made a quiet sound, like the cry of a wounded bird.
Scully held her hand out to the child, ready this time for the
slight shifting of the cloth over her hand.
The knife flashed up from beneath the fabric folds, and Scully
caught the blade in the V between her forefinger and thumb. The
impact made her wince although her Kevlar gloves protected her
hand from the edge.
The child's strength was tremendous, and Scully found herself
struggling to keep the blade pushed down and away. Her breathing
sounded loud in the still air.
"She left us," the girl said at last. Her speech had such an
odd, flat sound, not any American accent Scully was familiar
with, and yet no European accent either.
"I know. I'm sorry," Scully managed. The exertion caused her to
take deep breaths, and the air was thick with the smell of blood.
If fighting against Scully was any struggle for the girl, she
didn't show it. Her bloodied face was calm, her gray eyes clear
as late winter ice. "She left us. But you won't."
"No," Scully said. "No, I won't leave you." The terrible
pressure on the blade began to subside, and the girl let it drop
into the blood-spattered snow. "Susannah," Scully whispered.
This time, the child did not resist as Scully gathered her and
the infant into her arms. Their skin was so cold -- colder than
the surrounding air, but they curled close and did not pull away.
Scully sat in the snow with her back against the house's wall,
both children lying in her lap.
*****
Retracing his steps, Mulder discovered Scully's track in the new-
fallen sleet not far from the graveyard. She had walked into a
small thicket, but there her prints became muddled and seemed to
disappear.
He began searching in a spiral pattern outward from the thicket.
He was sure that less than five minutes had passed since he last
saw her ahead of him, not nearly long enough for her to travel
out of earshot. Any yet, even when he called her name so loudly
it echoed off the valley wall, he received no reply. He tried not
to think about the black-and-red clay cliffs rising hundreds of
feet from the surf less than half a mile from where he stood.
Sweeping his flashlight beam over the ground revealed nothing of
use. The weeds of the forest floor all had delicate straws of
ice hanging from them, obviously undisturbed for days.
It was as if Scully had simply vanished off the face of the
earth. Mulder had a nightmare sense of history repeating itself.
His spiral searching pattern grew more oblong than circular,
stretching toward the South Road Burying Ground and the ruined
house. Such a small patch of land. Scully would be there; she
had to be.
She was not. Flashes of what increasingly seemed like
desperation rather than intuition led him from the graveyard to
the house foundations and back again. Each time he reached one
location and found it empty, he would become sure that Scully
waited for him in the other, safe and probably irritated with him
for wandering off. Each time, he was disappointed.
Before long his footprints had stitched a great zigzag pattern
between cemetery and house, obliterating any traces Scully might
have left. When it sunk in that his "search" was only pacing
that did more harm than good, he stopped by a tree near the stone
foundations and pressed his thumb and forefinger against his
eyes.
There was no reason to panic. He had only failed to find Scully
because he had not yet looked in the place she was at. Every
time he looked somewhere and did not find her, he narrowed his
search. He was a good searcher; he'd made his career at the FBI
by finding things no one else could.
Yet he had never found the things he wanted most. One by one,
the objects of his quests had all slipped beyond his reach.
He shouted for his partner before the terror creeping up on him
could truly take hold. "Scully!"
Though it felt good to release his nervous energy, calling her
was no more effective than before. He began pacing again,
circling the stone foundations this time. He had to move in
order to think. Ghosts had motives like anybody else, and
therefore their behavior should be predictable within certain
limits. Days ago, Scully had categorized the paranormal events
here as a Revenge Haunting, dismissing the differential category
of Reenactment Haunting for somewhat arbitrary reasons. Properly
speaking, the situation had characteristics of both types. The
entities Scully had discovered were filled with rage, and yet the
object of their rage was inaccessible to them.
//Join the club.//
The creatures that haunted this area needed a specific type of
person to play the opposing role in their drama -- a wounded
person with loose ties to the world of the living, a mother whose
spirit had nearly followed her child's into the other world.
How could he get such an entity to look for him? As a
childless man, he was far from its preferred victim.
So many times, he had drawn killers out by simply seeming
interested in them, appealing to their vanity. Perhaps
reenactment haunting, like some reenactment killings, was a
performance art whose creators craved an audience.
Mulder called out, "Susannah!"
Half-frozen branches clacked in the wind, sending down a new
scattering of sleet, then all grew quiet. A strange, listening
silence followed while the name seemed to hang in the air. Mulder
had the maddening feeling that the ghost's world lay behind a
thin veil, and if he only knew where to place his hand, he could
draw it aside and step through.
The sense of being trapped between worlds was eerily familiar,
and he remembered that he carried a portal to the past within his
head -- the faulty synaptic connection that would periodically
rip him out of his everyday reality. Could he induce a seizure?
He'd never tried, but here, of all places, it should be possible.
Mulder shut his eyes, and the thudding of his heart seemed
louder. Clammy sweat had accumulated on his upper lip and he
wiped it off with his fingers.
How did his seizures begin? Usually with a powerful emotion in a
familiar place. Concentrating, he thought about climbing the
gray willow to drop maple-seed helicopters as a child . . . or
being a teenager hunkering down among the tilted headstones in
the muggy August heat, hating the town that had rejected him.
But none of the memories he conjured up produced the strange
sense of dislocation in time.
"Fuck Irv," he whispered. "Fuck him and his South Road Ghost."
If only the little shit hadn't been so eager to upset Scully with
his ugly stories of lost children and poisoned cats --
The terrible sensation came over him of falling against a solid
barrier and passing straight through.
He was eleven years old, curled against the side of his bed,
crying.
His mother had beaten him.
He was crying for his mother.
Samantha, loyal in her own way, had to be removed from his
doorway in order to keep her from coming to him, but it wasn't
her he wanted.
His mother had been cruel to him.
He needed his mother.
The pain of his tightened throat intruded on the vision, and it
soon dissolved around him. Mulder grabbed a tree for support and
rested his forehead against the coolness of the bark. As usual,
the seizure's aftermath left him nauseated and gagging, and he
shut his eyes against the dizziness.
//This is not helping her.// Grief and illness had left him too
weak to be the rescuer Scully needed. He groped in the deep
pocket of his coat for the flares he'd brought. Maybe he could
draw a rescue party. And yet, he knew that men with flashlights
and two-way radios were not enough to save her. Fighting
sickness, he bargained with any power that could hear. //Leave
her alone. You can have me instead. I'm the one who drilled a
hole in my own head. I deserve to be taken -- she doesn't.//
Slowly, became aware that it was not only the seizure making him
ill. There was also a smell -- one he'd learned to identify far
later than age eleven.
It was blood.
The image of Kristie Herron lying on the autopsy table flashed in
his mind. But the moment he opened his eyes, the smell of blood
faded. He was all alone in the ordinary woods.
Mulder took a step away from the tree, holding an unlit flare in
his hand. "What do you want?" he shouted at the thing that slunk
among the stones out here, waiting to take unhappy young women
away. "How many people have to die before you're satisfied?"
The dry, clinical profiler voice that had guided him through
thousands of investigations told him: //You know what they
want.//
Mary Brown's daughters had died waiting for their mother. She'd
killed them, and yet they waited. The two centuries' worth of
rage they carried was eclipsed by their need.
If Mulder could not get into the ghosts' world by stepping into
Mary Brown's place, perhaps he could get there by stepping into
Susannah's. He called the child's name again, seeking the
vision-place where the present and past ran together. As before,
the wind swirled fiercely, and Mulder could almost hear angry
denial in the sound: //"Go away,"// it seemed to say. //"She's
ours now."//
When the wind died again, the otherworldly sense faded with it.
These were the woods of his childhood -- dark, eerie, but
essentially familiar. Perhaps for once, familiarity was too
great an anchor to the everyday world. It could be that he knew
the stone house foundation, the woods, and the graveyard so well
that they kept him from seeing what was truly there. After
hesitating a moment, Mulder shut his flashlight off and put it
and the flare away.
The icy night's diffuse luminance seemed to have vanished. He
was in utter darkness, and he felt a powerful urge not to move.
Motion would cause noise, and that would bring . . . something.
He was certain that something was near, watching him with empty
holes in a pale, dry face.
Mulder stood motionless, his chest feeling almost too tight to
breathe, while he waited for the thing to make some noise and
betray itself.
When his eyes began to adjust to the scant light, the thick
shadows resolved once again to the shapes of old logs and briar
bushes. His fear faded.
But there *had* been something there. With dull dread, he
thought the key might be blindness. There were apparently only
two doors to the cold, bloody world that Scully had slipped into.
One was for mothers driven half mad by grief. The other one, the
little, cramped door, was for dying things. Susannah and her
sister had entered through that door, clawing against it like
wounded animals in their terror and desperation. Perhaps Kristie
and the other dead women had drifted out if it on their way to
the next world.
If Mulder truly wanted to enter Susannah's reality, he would have
to force his way through that little door by becoming as helpless
as the dying, as frightened as an abandoned child. His throat
felt very dry as he swallowed.
His cell phone was inside his inner coat pocket. He could call
Joe up, have him bring his officers out to search the place
properly. And when dawn came, they would find Scully's body
curled in some icy hollow, or smashed at the foot of the cliffs.
Mulder closed his eyes. The smell of blood returned, and grew
stronger. Once again, he became sure he was being watched.
An mournful baying sounded in the near distance. He jumped, then
identified the sound as the cry of a wolf. Whatever lay bleeding
nearby was attracting a beast that had been extinct on the
Vineyard for over 150 years.
Mulder cupped his hands around his mouth and called, "Scully!"
He heard a strange, shuffling half-step a few yards to his right.
His eyes snapped open involuntarily as he turned. In his
peripheral vision he glimpsed a silvery-gray wall, and beyond
that a pale figure that swayed as if its forward momentum had
been abruptly checked.
Once he faced the thing directly, it was gone. He was alone
again by the foundations of the long-ruined house. The freezing
wind turned the sweat on his face and throat into icy droplets.
//Shit. Holy shit.//
He recalled the horror stories he used to tell Joey Luce about
the things that lurked deep in the woods. At each gristly
detail, Joey's eyes would get bigger and bigger . . .
//That's crap. You know these woods. You know the paranormal.
Nine times out of ten, ghosts are only dangerous if you're afraid
of them.//
But he was afraid. There had been something wrong about the pale
thing standing by the wall. Its lower portion had swung like
sodden curtains, yet the upper part seemed to freeze motionless
too quickly for the energy of that swinging, dragging fabric. It
was as if a mannequin had been filmed walking in stop-motion
while its clothes continued to flow in liquid real time.
Mulder had no desire at all to close his eyes again. //You have
to. Think about Scully.// Scully in his Knicks shirt and
pajama bottoms, curled on his couch on a sunny Saturday morning.
Scully gently waking him from his nightmares, taking away the
worst of the terror and grief. He shut his eyes and called his
partner again.
He heard no sound but the rushing noise of the wind for some
time, and then the shuffling step came again, nearer this time.
Mulder struggled to sweep away the coat folds that covered his
gun. He drew it and took a triangular stance against the thing
that moved toward him, only to strike a solid wall with his foot
and lose his balance. He fell against a hard, knobby surface.
When he lifted his hand to touch it, it felt like the jutting
wooden panels of an old, shake-sided house.
//This is it. This is the structure Scully saw.//
The thing to his right shuffled nearer, and Mulder backed away,
keeping his unarmed hand against the wall for guidance. His
fingers brushed a corner and he turned it, relieved to be out of
the shuffling thing's line of sight, if indeed it could see. The
smell of blood was strong now, and as he backed away, eyes shut,
he feared putting his foot down on something wet and cold, with
stiffening hands and an awesome grip.
*****
Scully huddled against the rough-hewn shingles with both children
in her lap. The air around her seemed to grow milder, even warm,
and she shrugged out of her coat, easing the plastic bottle from
its inner pocket before wrapping the garment like a blanket
around the wounded girls. She had filled the screw-cap soda
bottle with holy water from the church's baptismal font.
Catholic doctrine forbade baptism of the dead, but how could she
call these children dead, when they gasped for breath in her
arms? Awkwardly, she poured some of the water into her cupped
hand. The liquid felt as warm as bathwater. Nestled against her
shoulder, Susannah gazed at her activities with calm uninterest.
As she had once been taught to do by Sister Mary, Scully
administered the only Sacrament permissible for a lay Catholic to
perform in cases of emergency. Splashing the dying infant's head
with water of three times, she said, "I baptize you, Maria, in
the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit." She'd
chosen the name after some deliberation. It was the name of an
Italian child who'd converted her own murderer on her deathbed,
and who had become an unofficial patron saint of wronged girls.
Having no idea of the religious practices of Susannah's family,
she refilled her cupped hand with water and recited an alternate
prayer for the older girl, "If you have not already been
baptized, I baptize you, Susannah, in the name of the Father, and
the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
The holy water made rivulets in the blood on the girls' faces,
but had no other obvious effect. Scully shut her eyes and
released a long breath. She had no idea what else to do for
them, and she was so tired.
*****