Sacrifice.
Glasgow, Kentucky.
May 23, 2010.
Mulder spun around, trying to find the closest pair of oak trees. Everything looked the same in the fresh dawn light – massive trees, haloed in sunshine, connecting in a web of leaves fifty feet above them. It went on like that in every direction, with gentle hills breaking up sections of the valley. He wasn't even really positive they were in the right part of the woods, let alone where he should put his shovel to dig up centuries-old bodies.
"We should have brought the elder," Gene commented. He was gazing up one of the trunks, squinting, and a sudden excitement erupted in his eyes. "Have you heard the stories about the terror birds, Fox? They were rumored to nest in these woods at one point."
He forgot what he was looking for immediately, joining Gene and gazing up into the tree. "Do you think those scrape marks could be signs of perching?"
"Guys, focus," Scully said. She whacked Mulder lightly on the back with her shovel, pointing to a cluster of oak trees. "Do you think that looks like the one the elder described? It has three trunks and low branches. Or perhaps that one next to it."
"I think they all look like the one she described," Mulder responded dryly, dragging his shovel along as he followed her. "She basically described an oak tree."
Scully glanced back at him, smiling. "Hmm. I wonder whose idea this was."
"Yeah, yeah, kick him while he's down," Mulder responded.
Gene, who had just noticed he was alone at the terror bird perch, came running toward them. His shovel jumped and clattered along the ground. "Hey, I really think we should go back and see if the elder will come with us. She might be able to find this place."
"She heard a story about a story that someone else heard through the grapevine," Scully said.
"Pessimism is the cousin of failure," Mulder pointed out. "I get the feeling your heart isn't in this. Since when did you start hating nature, Scully?"
"I don't hate nature, I just hate wandering around these woods for no reason. There are hundreds of oak trees here, and any one of them could be the ceremonial oak the elder told us about. And even if we found it, there's no guarantee that the bones are still there. Someone could have dug them up, or maybe they weren't even buried there in the first place. Maybe the whole story was made up so Gene would stop calling the reservations!"
Mulder shrugged, letting her objections roll right off his shoulders. He was hesitant to push her after the incident at the house. "If you want to try something else, I'm all ears."
She sighed. "I think we should go to the library and check the local records. There has to be some kind of documentation of the history here before it was settled."
"It's sounding a lot like you believe in ghosts, Scully."
"Don't start with me, Mulder."
"How about we split up?" Gene asked. "Fox and I can keep searching the woods, and you can go look at the library, Scully."
She gave him a sour expression, but before she could burst his bubble, Mulder intervened. "How about you two go get the elder – or someone who knows where this tree is – and work on locating those bones while I look through the records at the library? I've seen both of their faces, so I know what to look for. Besides, the library has air-conditioning."
Scully smirked. "You're really going to leave me here with him?"
"Tell her about the terror birds," Mulder said. "She loves cryptozoology."
"That's not a legitimate field of science," Scully said blandly.
Mulder started back toward the car, using his compass to make sure he was headed in the opposite direction of their approach. He was pursued by his two companions. "See? You said bringing a compass was stupid. I should make you guys find your own way."
"We'll drop you off at the car rental place on Cedar Street," Gene said, catching up. He lowered his voice, leaning in a little. "We can talk about the terror birds later."
Scully came to his other side. "I have a better idea. Gene can work on finding the bones and you and I can go to the library."
"Gene is green."
"He's going on a walk with an old woman," Scully said, giving the scientist a hard look. "You can handle that yourself, right?"
Gene was caught in the spotlight. He nodded reluctantly.
"See? He can handle it."
"Gene, blink twice if you're under duress."
"I'm staying with you, Mulder. End of discussion."
"Fine, fine."
When they got to the van, Mulder slid into the back, surprised when Scully sat beside him. She watched him intently for a moment. "What year is it?"
"Did you hit your head when you slipped back there?"
"Why are we going to a library? We can google from home."
His neck prickled. She was right about that, but he wanted to go anyway. "Like you said, they could have historic documents pertaining to our ghosts. Everything isn't accessible online."
"Is that the only reason, Mulder?"
"Why would there be another reason?"
She frowned, and then shrugged, dropping the topic completely. She kept looking over at him during the ride, trying to read him, but he did his best to keep his expression neutral. He was trying to figure out his own motivations. He had dreamt of the library when he was taken. He had gone there to find an image of the woman, to put a name to her face, but it was all in his imagination. He had to confirm that to himself, because the visions still seemed real.
Gene dropped them off at the rental place, handing Scully a laminated card. "I have historic document privileges here. Please, treat the books with respect."
"Of course," Scully responded. For once she wasn't glaring at him.
When they got to the library, Mulder took a moment to gaze at the grand front entrance. It was completely flat. In his dream, he had stumbled up the stairs in the pouring rain. He was already comforted, even before he stepped up to the door and saw a completely different layout.
"This place is fancy," Scully commented as they cross the front room. It seemed to be divided into sections, with a wide spiral staircase going up the middle. Some workers sat behind elegant wooden desks, gazing into their books. It reminded Mulder of the lobby of a five star hotel, not a public library. Scully elbowed him, smiling, "I have a good feeling about this place."
Mulder followed her, a little too dazed to walk on his own. He was put off by her enthusiasm, by the beauty of this place. It seemed more like a dream than the first library. But how would he prove that to himself? He had caused Scully enough anxiety in the last few days – she didn't need to see him babbling about being in a dream world.
Unless he really was.
He was glad that he recognized none of the faces in the library. He must have made up the employees and the patrons when the ghost was playing with him. He had used faces he had seen on the streets, people whose names he did not know, and he would never know.
Scully approached a desk near the back, by a set of stairs that led almost straight down into a marked restricted area. She presented the library card to the man guarding it, and after a quick scan, he got up to unlock the door for them. He looked extraordinarily bored with his job. His shoulder nudged Mulder's as he walked back around them to flop down in his chair.
"How did you find this section so fast?" Mulder asked as they descended the stairs. He had to hold onto the railing, fearing he would trip and drag her down with him.
She laughed. "I was looking at the signs, Mulder. Have you not been listening this whole time? I was pointing them out to you while we walked."
"Sorry." He landed hard on the bottom, flashing her a quick, reassuring smile to knock the worry out of her eyes. "I was thinking about the terror bird again."
The historical documents section was a cool sixty degrees, with air so dry he started licking his lips before they passed the first archway. Each document, or set of documents, had its own special case, with plastic sleeves covering the stand-alone papers, and zipped bags protecting the books. Some of them sat up on stands, displayed in cases with careful instructions on their handling. Several of them had notes instructing curious viewers to ask the guard for help handling them.
Scully went from shelf to shelf, calling out the names of old texts and manuscripts like she was giving him her Christmas list. He walked more slowly, coming down an aisle of old books and looking over each title. Some of them were simply intriguing for their age, and others displayed artwork iconic to their time periods.
Only one stole his attention the moment he laid eyes on it.
It was a ledger, as flat and bulky as an atlas, and as elegantly created as a silk dress. It sat alone near the back of the room, its case illuminated by soft lights on either side, rather than directly above it. It was a list of names, hundreds, maybe thousands long, with each entry written in a different script. The title was in French, and the columns began eerily with 'original' and ended with 'integrated.' Some of the original places were blank, some had illegible handwriting, and some simply contained letters and symbols, but all of them had an entry for the integrated column.
Scully came to his side after he had been staring at it for some time. She leaned into his shoulder, her eyes skimming the page, and then she sighed. "They must have used this to keep a record of the Native American names after they changed them."
"It was written a few years before Rousseau and his team came through," Mulder commented.
"There was no French settlement here during that time."
"I know." Mulder leaned over the glass, wishing he could turn the pages. "It's weird, huh? Why would they make a ledger like this? I mean, think about it. The year is 1647. Small French settlements are starting to encroach on the territory that will someday be known as the US. British colonies are spreading across the eastern shore of the continent. French explorers are probing southward to expand the fur trade. Native Americans are dying from European diseases, French-funded wars, and famine because of the shortage of available prey. Turmoil rocks North America. Everyone is just fighting to survive and to make their way in this part of the world – so why would they take the time to make this book? They could barely survive the winter, and yet they were keeping documents?"
Scully bit her lip, leaning in a little more. She squinted. "What if they were keeping track of Native American labor? If they were employing the natives to help them get furs, they would have to have some sort of ledger to pay them, or to track their contributions."
"But this integration column… it seems like they were trying to initiate these people into their society, but what society would that be?"
"I don't know, Mulder."
Suddenly it came to him. "I never finished reading the journal."
Her expression changed from curiosity to uncertainty in a split second. "That journal was messing with your head. Gene told me all about it."
"It wasn't the journal, it was the ghost."
"You said it scared you."
"I said… he has a way with words."
"You meant to say that you were afraid."
He put his hands on her shoulders, pressing a kiss to her forehead. "Okay. You caught me. The symmetry between his journal and what I encountered in that cave was pretty terrifying, but that doesn't mean I can leave it unfinished. It might contain more information about the ghosts, or a way to get them out of our heads." He sensed her doubt building up, so he did his best to divert her thoughts. "We're already down here, so let's get what we came for."
She shrugged his hands off, glancing around. "I'll look for photo albums."
"I'll look for… something to explain this integration thing."
For hours, the two of them scoured the basement level. Mulder created a stack of books in the corner and settled in to read them, while Scully laid out massive picture books and flipped through them, diligently going over each and every photo in search of the man she had seen. Mulder went through the English books first, frustrated when they gave him nothing, and then he started skimming the French ones, doing his best to translate them. When he came to the books written in local tongues, he gave up completely.
He sat in his little den, surrounded by books, for a long time before he saw a book on the shelf across the aisle. It was staring right at him, waiting for him to notice it.
It was a tiny photo album, bound in leather and protected only by a plastic baggie. It was marked as 'unsorted,' with its tattered edges and faded photographs, but as soon as he opened it he felt that he had picked up the right thing. It gave him a warm feeling in his stomach.
He went back to his hole and sunk into it, turning the first pages and breathing the smell of old parchment. The photographs were secured with dots of dried ink, some of them barely clinging to their pages, but the faces within them mesmerized Mulder. Someone had photographed the local tribes in the early 20th century, showing masses of sad looking faces dressed up and standing in a line. The more pages he turned, the older the pictures got, until they were replaced with sketches. He saw wooded areas, fertile fields, and family gatherings.
And then he saw her face.
She appeared first at a feast, hovering at the back, like she didn't belong there. Her face was sullen even when the others seemed to be enjoying themselves. He found her again a few pages later, on an image within the image. She was painted on the wall of someone's home, and the family in the drawing was gazing up at her image, a mix of reverence and fear in them. Further along, he found a series of images with tiny pieces of paper attached – English text identified them as 'religious images,' but there was nothing else to qualify them.
The first sets of images showed a young girl being bathed in blocky, dappled colors. She donned a gown of some sort and she was surrounded by celebrating people. The next page showed the celebrating people burning something in a big pot, with the girl looking on. The third page had three images on it, and his eyes moved between them in quick succession. The girl was standing, looking at the burning pot, with what appeared to be her family alongside her, and then one of the men pulled a blue object from a basket. In the last image the man plunged the object into the young girl, her face showed agony, and her family seemed to be holding a vigil.
The final image was of a happy village, with crops growing and children running around. He thought it must be some sort of harvest ritual – a human sacrifice for the good of the whole tribe. He looked over it again and again, drawing parallels between it and their current situation.
"Scully, come over here and look at this."
She glanced up from her picture books, rubbing her neck. "Did you find something relevant, or are you going to show me a picture of the Loch Ness monster?"
He beckoned her, sliding his books away to give her room. When she was sitting beside him, flipping through the images like he had, he let out his theory. "Look at the girl in this picture. She's wearing a white dress – in my visions, I saw you in a white dress, with a wound just like the one she receives in the last panel."
"Well, considering her waist is a large rectangle, that could very well be her leg he's stabbing," Scully pointed out, though she seemed deeply interested in the pictures.
"What if our ghosts were supposed to take part in this ritual, but something went wrong? What if she didn't want to die? Or he didn't want her to die?"
"I would say he failed in that respect. He was the one who killed her."
"It's a crime of passion, Scully. He killed someone dear to him before she could be used by others. Maybe he didn't believe in their rituals."
"Or maybe she wanted to be a part of it, and he took that opportunity away in a fit of rage."
"You have to admit that it fits. I mean, these images could have been produced around the same time as their deaths."
"But you still can't explain the ledger."
"I'll give you another layer for that one, Scully. How did these images even survive all this time? We fought two wars, negotiated over territory, and uprooted the indigenous peoples of this area. This library wasn't built until the 1950s, and this picture book can't be much older than that. Someone preserved these and collected them here. Someone put these drawings – these almost four hundred year old drawings – in this book."
"How about one more mystery, to top it off?" she offered, hopping up and holding out her hand to him. She led him over to her picture books, turning a few pages and pointing faces out to him. "Do you see that young man? He was the one I saw at Gene's house."
Mulder leaned in, squinting, and adrenaline shot through his veins. He was looking at another tribal lineup of sad faces, this one broken up by a very familiar scowl. It was the mourning boy. "That's the one I saw in my visions. He was in a meadow with the girl, holding her. He carried her into a cabin and then left with his knife."
"I found him two more times," she said, bringing his attention to a more modern book of photography. "But it's not where you might think."
"This book is from the 1800s," Mulder murmured.
She looked up, her eyes bright with curiosity, and nodded. "It is. I found an image of the boy in the background of another picture. Here." She pointed it out to him, sitting back so he could see.
It was a group of young men posing near the mouth of a cave, looking weary from travel. Within the depths of the cave, Mulder saw another figure clearly. It was a man, standing away from the others, staring at them with a monstrous malice.
"On the original photograph, the photographer wrote this note." She tapped the page. "It lists the names of the men posing, and also 'unknown Indian.'"
"He had no idea he was snapping a photo of a ghost," Mulder said. He looked around them. "You have another picture of him?"
"Well, this one isn't exactly a picture, but I deduced that it was him." She went to a book of sketches – copies of original documents, bound by leather and laminated. She flipped to the back and showed him a massive group sketch of a tribe, this one lacking the sad-face pose he had become accustomed to. Instead, the people were going about their everyday business. "Look at this family in the back. Does this look like the woman you saw?"
He followed her fingers, examining the little sketched family relaxing in the back of the photo. His ghosts were younger in this image, but he still recognized the beauty of the girl, and the hardened determination of the boy. It was truly incredible to see them like this.
"I have a hunch about their identities," Scully said. "We already know they lived around the time that the exploration team set out, so that puts them in the early 1600s. This drawing was supposedly created in 1640, about ten years before Rousseau and his men encountered the ghosts. They were children at the time it was drawn, so it had to be at least five years later that they were killed."
She hopped up, dragging out an even larger book. It flipped open with a massive thud. "This is documentation of the moon cycles as seen from Jamestown. Please tell me your picture books have a moon in them somewhere."
Mulder went back to grab the book, handing it to her.
"Right here. It was a half moon, and these symbols indicate it was waxing."
"Okay, so they were killed when the moon was waxing sometimes around 1645. That still gives you twelve waxing moons."
"Think about it, Mulder. This ritual is a harvest ritual. You don't do those in the winter, or the fall. You do them in the summer and the spring."
"So they were killed between spring and summer, 1645. Excellent time of death, Dr. Scully."
"I'm not done yet," she responded, holding up her finger to him. "Most of the trees in the ravine we were searching weren't old enough to have seen that year."
"So… we're looking for the oldest tree in the forest?"
"Very nice connection, Mr. Mulder."
"If they cut it down between then and now, we're screwed. New growth would produce roots that would send any bones down into the soil."
"One step at a time."
"That's my line," Mulder responded. He started closing books and returning them to their shelves. "Still, that forest has hundreds of trees that old enough to fit the bill scattered all over it. We can't dig them all up and we don't have anything to go on as far as appearance. The elder was still basically describing an oak tree."
"Maybe she'll remember something peculiar about it."
"Or maybe she won't, and those bones are lost forever."
She turned on him, frowning. "I'm usually the one pointing out the logical fallacies to you. What gives? Is your head bothering you again?"
"It's nothing. Let's get out of here before we freeze to death." She stayed where she was, waiting for him to go on, so he grabbed both of her shoulders. He kissed her cheek. "Scully, I love you. You're a genius. Putting all that together is the most impressive thing I've seen in the last decade. I think you deserve a break after that. What do you say?"
"Stop trying to distract me."
"I saw a Dairy Queen down the road."
"You're buying."
He directed her to the exit. "Yes, dear."
"Wait. You left your books on the floor," she turned, about to go back to them.
Mulder stopped her. "I got it. Wait for me upstairs. Entertain the security guard. I wanted to sneak a butt scratch in anyway."
She smiled. "Don't break anything."
He started gathering up his books, carrying them back to their rightful homes. He came across a few more interesting titles, but he resisted the temptation to grab them. Perhaps he would come back here someday and steal Gene's library card again. He could try to find photographic evidence of the terror bird, buried in these endless piles of paper.
When he left the last aisle to walk to the exit, he found that he was not alone. There was a little old woman just making it to the bottom of the stairs. Her face was strikingly familiar.
"Oh, hi, sorry," she said, noticing him standing there. "I come down here to sort the papers. I didn't realize there was anyone perusing."
He was trying to place her face, but his mind was starting to cloud. "Um, no, it's fine. I was just… I was just leaving."
She stared at him, not seeming to notice his fascination with her. There was a weird, glittering happiness in her eyes. "Why, aren't you a sweet young man? It's been so long since I've been able to talk to anyone. Won't you stay and tell me what you were looking for down here?"
He felt like a mouse trapped in her eyes. He walked around her to the stairs, never breaking away from the look she was giving him. "No, uh, I have someone waiting for me."
"Oh, that pretty girl up there? Best not to keep her waiting."
He started up the stairs, doing his best to keep his eyes forward. He was halfway up when he felt an intense chill. It made every hair on his body stand straight up, and a prickle of anxiety ran through his spine. He felt like someone was behind him – directly behind him – looking over his shoulder. He felt their curiosity, their intensity, like mist settling on his skin.
He turned around quickly, prepared to fight if it came down to it, but there was no one there. He was alone again. He came back down the stairs, glancing into the other rooms.
"Hello?" he called, jogging down the aisles and looking down each of them. The whole basement was empty. He stopped at the back, watching his breath billow out in a cloud of frost. Everything in him was unsettled. His stomach was twisting into knots.
He knew where he had seen her before. She was in his visions. She had been the one to come to his table in the dream library. She had given him a card because she thought he was a drug addict.
He walked stiff-legged back to the stairs, running up them and slamming the door behind him. Scully had been saying something to the security guard, and both of them looked up, startled, as the sound rang out through the library.
"Did you see that old woman leave?" Mulder demanded.
Scully looked around. "Old woman?"
"She came by you. She went downstairs. She said she works here."
"I didn't see anyone, Mulder. Come on, we need to call Gene back. He left me three messages."
Mulder looked at the door, beyond spooked about what he had just encountered. Was it the ghosts from the cave messing with him again, or was he truly going crazy?
Scully frowned. "You okay?"
"Yeah I'm… I'm fine. Let's get out of here."