Title: Disciple
Author: CeilidhO
Summary & Disclaimer: Please see previous chapters.
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Scully stared around the room wildly, her head in turmoil, completely frozen with shock. The room was thick with sudden silence, and as the suspended second passed, they sprang into action. Mulder was at the computer in a second, his eyes scanning the screen hurriedly. He slammed his fist down on the table in a strange gesture, half angry, half triumphant.
"The son's name is Jude. I'm bringing up the birth records now." He typed furiously. "There! His full name's Judas Laurence Hoffman." He turned to them, his lips thin and white. "So it's true… That's his twelfth Disciple."
Dan was pale, his eyes over-bright. "His own son…" he breathed. Scully could see him holding the mental image of his own daughters to his breast like a talisman, protecting against the proof of the unbelievable monstrosity he was hearing.
Paring was still in the position he had frozen in when Scully had first spoken. He looked up at them blankly, unnervingly like a small child. "What do we do?" he whispered.
"We work fast." Scully said. "Dan; we knew that Hoffman owns property. Search the database and find out what and where. Alex; think carefully. Where might he take the boy? Work with Dan on that, so you can narrow it down a bit. Mulder and I will head straight to his house. When you find out where you think he is, call us and then call upstairs to get teams to search everywhere that's a possibility, and to provide emergency back-up for us. We'll be at the primary site, the one that seems most likely. Is that all right?" They stared at her in blank wonderment for a moment, and then began to move. Dan replaced Mulder in the computer chair, and quickly scrawled an address down on a scrap of paper, double-checking it on the monitor.
"This is his house. Good luck." Mulder grabbed his jacket and they began to stride out of the office. Scully heard Paring clear his throat quickly, and then he reached out and put his hand on Mulder's arm, gently, a slight touch, an infinitely intimate farewell. His mouth opened with difficulty.
"Be safe, Mulder." It was all he said, but his voice and his hand conveyed a world of feeling and pain. Scully felt her heart twist. Mulder understood in a sweep of expression, a thousand emotions flickering over his face in a moment. Then he smiled softly, and held Paring's gaze in sympathy.
"I will," he said, and it was enough.
They were out of the office in seconds, sweeping down the hallway to the elevator. Scully could feel her pulse pounding and her mouth dry up as she began to comprehend the reality of the situation. As the elevator doors parted the images flickered before her: the gasping blue lips, the trickling blood, the unfurling wings stark against the sky, a small crooked finger protruding from the dancing grasses. Above them all was the ice-cold memory of glittering black eyes, piercing and watching, reducing her to nothing as the wind blew her away.
The elevator spat them out in the lobby, and then as they passed the tall pillars and the noise of their feet echoed and ricocheted to the ceiling, the second elevator spat them out into the parking garage where they ran to Scully's car, ran as if they were pursued.
The tires squealed as the shining top of the car disappeared past the sleepy guard, on into the night.
The man was back in his shelter at last, Inside, into the great studio of his Art. The Shining Thing, his Masterpiece, lay at his feet, twitching and moaning in its rude, animal way. Soon it would sing as his Art bit into its back, flowing from his heart onto the silken white Canvas, creating a miracle of Beauty.
The first stirrings began as it struggled against the rough edges of the ugly chains that bound it, beginning the red marks that would soon begin to leak Holiness as it struggled. It was a pity that they all marred their Canvases like that, but it couldn't be helped.
As he felt the stirrings gain in hunger, he slipped off his clothes and luxuriated in the feel of the warm candlelight. He gazed thoughtfully at the Masterpiece, and, whispering his own prayer, he stepped forward and began to Carve.
The screams were every bit as powerful and as beautiful as he expected, every bit as beautiful as the screams of the choirboys who had been the first Canvases. As the Art had slipped from his hand, from their throats had torn notes they had never hit in practice.
Such was the power of Art.
Scully ran a red light in a heavy roar from the engine, her foot hitting the floor as she ripped the car around a turn onto Victoria Crescent, sliding to a stop on the wrong side of the street. Her neck bobbed sharply as they hit and mounted the curb, and she was out of the car as soon as the engine was silent.
The tall, narrow house facing her was dark and silent, brooding behind the strip of grass and shrub that passed for a front lawn. She and Mulder ran softly across the street and tiptoed up the steps to the front porch. Her throat was throbbing with the strength of her pulse, and her hands shook as she slipped her gun from the holster at her back. Spots were exploding in front of her eyes, luminous as fireworks against the dark. She could see the pale gleam of Mulder's face across the door, and she could see the droplets of sweat lit like will-'o-the-wisps in the faint orange glow from the streetlight.
Mulder raised his hand and held up all five fingers, and after a suspended moment dropped one. Scully nodded, her tongue thick in her mouth. She knew they were both remembering the eyes.
Three. Two. I don't want to die. I feel like I'm drowning. One.
They threw themselves at the door in perfect unison, and they felt it rip and tear away from the frame under the weight of their bodies. They stumbled forward into the blackness, each pivoting in unconscious obedience to their drilled, trained and hardwired brains, rotating on the balls of their feet to find their danger spots.
Corner. Side. Stairs. Opposite room. Other side. Behind. Above.
Nothing.
They looked each other in the eye, and then Scully nodded. In unison, almost back-to-back, they searched the ground floor. In each room, Scully felt her ears sing as they entered, adrenaline pumping through her so fast she felt like she was choking. There was no basement. The first floor was empty. They found themselves back in the foyer, the stairs looming ahead, the most frightening thing in her world. Turning to face the side and front, they marched slowly up the stairs. The tension was ripping her apart. They repeated the process upstairs, searching room by room, being careful not to disturb any evidence. Mulder gestured to a child's bus ticket sitting on the dresser in the master bedroom. It was from Bountiful, the Salt Lake City suburb.
So Judas had arrived already.
There was only one room on the third floor, a narrow, peaked room running half the width of the floor, the other half a long hallway. A tree scratched against the window as a gust of wind eddied past the house. The room was clear. The house was clear. Why was the skin on her body still stretched so tight that she felt if she moved too fast it would split, spilling her forth from within it, cold and vulnerable? Why-
In the pressing dark, Scully experienced pure terror. The noise spit her skin and she jumped so hard that sweat sprang out all over her body in a cool wave of clammy release. She choked on her lungs as they surged into her mouth in the abrupt convulsion of every muscle in her, a thin thread of bile seeping into the corners of her jaw as she spent every instant trying not to fall apart.
Her cell phone was ringing.
Release from the terror was sweet and sudden, a draining of energy as quickly as it had come. Her hands, white and trembling, gleaming in the dark, scrabbled on the plastic case of the phone as she tried to answer it. Mulder was staring at her with his hand pressing at his heart like a middle-aged man in a badly staged anti-cholesterol commercial. Her thumb slid over the answer button and she pressed it to her ear, hearing the disembodied voice float from the other end.
"Agent Scully? Agent Scully?"
"Yes?" she said. Her voice was shocking to her, the way it boomed out as if completely ignorant of the pressing need for silence and hiding consuming the rest of her body.
"Scully, we found the most likely place for Hoffman to be." It was Paring. "He owns a warehouse downtown that's abandoned. It's supposed to be 'awaiting renovations', but no work has been done on it for years." As if noticing her tone for the first time, he said: "Is everything all right over there? He's not there, is he? I assumed that because you answered-"
"Its all right, he's not here. It's just… tense." Her heart was finally beginning to slow. "Okay, give me the address of the warehouse, then call upstairs to AD Chilton. He needs to know where we are, and he needs to send a few more agents just in case."
"I'll do that. The address is 435 Madill. Be careful, Scully."
"We will." She hung up and turned to Mulder, who was still a faint grey color. "We're going back to the car."
He was enjoying a brief respite from his work as the man considered his next design. The wings were already magnificent, trembling and poised, as if they might sweep outward at any moment. He was beyond pleased.
The knife blade was a beautiful glittering silver, but even its honed, deathly beauty could not outshine the jewelled eyes of the man, as dark as the ceiling that was the only witness to the ferocity of his Art.
Excitement pulsed through his body, and he licked his lips as the familiar tingling hunger began in his gut. The Canvas moaned as it awoke, writhing in convoluted patterns on the rough floor of its block that raised it just above the floor. The man prodded it upright, and as the Hunger roared through him he leaned forward and gently bit down, just between its neck and shoulder.
It screamed again, and the man smiled into its skin. This was as good as any signature.
Scully had no time to think about the consequences of what she was doing. She only knew, like Mulder had felt many times before, that this case was hers, this killer was hers, and these boys were hers. She had to be there when it ended, that it had to be here. Nothing else mattered; not the rules, not her safety, not procedure, nothing. She had to bring him down. It helped her understand the dozens of times Mulder had 'ditched'
her to bring down one of his criminals. It was like a bizarre, violent, twisted, love affair; obsession, intense involvement, jealousy, fear. All the symptoms are there.
All she knew was that it had to be her.
She sped up the car.
The man felt the Art fill his world, flow through him, coupled with, dancing with, ferociously attacking the Hunger that filled his stomach, suffusing him with heat.
It had never been like this before.
This was the power of his Masterpiece.
The car screeched onto the lonely industrial street, and Scully and Mulder were across to the door of 435 in seconds, and with no time for fear they threw themselves at the door. It opened with a crash and squeal of twisting metal, and they spilled into the darkened room.
It was empty.
Something was wrong. Something was intruding on his ecstasy of Art. The warm room was suddenly suffused with rage. The shadows trembled on the square pillars surrounding him.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
Scully shone the broad beam of her flashlight around the huge room.
"Mulder," she hissed. "Something's wrong. This room's too high off the ground. You shouldn't have to climb stairs to get to the ground floor of a warehouse. I think there's-" She stopped. There it was.
A small, heavy steel door, nestled into the cement floor. A basement…
Scully scrabbled at the small ring sunk into the door.
The Intrusion was above him, scratching to get in. How dare it?
A small puff of air hit him where he stood.
The Outside, coming in.
The door lifted free with a puff of air. Scully could see that the latch of the trapdoor had, for whatever reason, not closed completely, and so was not locked. She said a real prayer of thanks for the first time in years.
The air below her was warm and golden with the flickering dance of candles. Scully gazed at Mulder for a long moment. She saw herself reflected back in his eyes in the shifting, otherworldly light. Something sparked, deep within her.
She mouthed silently that she would go first, and slipped over the edge, Mulder's hand firmly on her arm. Then, with a sudden rush of horrible wind, Scully felt it slip, and she was falling to the hard cement floor below. In the sickening whirl and sharp collision, she heard a deep clang of metal, and, as if from very far away, the simple click of a lock.
And then the lights went out.
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A/N: Yay! That didn't take quite as long as the last one! I'll try to go even faster now, because I cruelly left y'all with a cliffhanger. Only about two chapters left! (*sniff*)
Until next time, please review as much as is humanly possible.
~Love, Ceilidh