Solar Flare By Loch Ness Introduction International readers: US4 spoilers for everything but "Gethsemane." Timeline: Occurs between "Demons" and "Gethsemane." Rating: R, for VIOLENCE, PROFANITY and references to what some may regard as deviant SEX that occurs off-stage between consenting adults, none of whom is Mulder, Scully, Skinner, Krycek, Marita, CSM, or anybody else you know from the show. If you are under-age, please do not read this. Please note that the "Solar Fusion" cult and its members are myths of my making. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Likewise, the events of this story are fictional; however, in this case, there's one coincidence sufficiently bizarre it requires explanation. None of the storm scenes in this story are based on any specific incident; they are composites of my own several close calls with tornadoes. I wrote the outline and opening parts of this story in late April--weeks before I knew what the weather would be like in Central Texas in late May, 1997. On May 27, I found myself watching a wall-cloud come straight at me in downtown Austin and listening to emergency scanner reports tell of twisters savagely raking small towns all around me. Not until a couple of weeks later did it occur to me that I had accidentally selected a date for the climactic scene of the story that roughly coincided with an actual tornado. At that point, I gave serious consideration to reworking the story or at least changing the dates--I certainly don't wish to pander to the misfortunes of others. However, as I said, my plan all along was to draw on my own experience for this material. So ultimately, I decided to stick with my original outline. For whatever it's worth, this story is dedicated to the people who lost their lives and/or homes in Jarrell, Cedar Park and the Pedernales Valley, Texas, on May 27, 1997. We will rebuild, but we won't forget. Many thanks are due--overdue--to my beta reader, Gem, who should've gotten the same credit for "Letters of Transit," except that I was too dopey to think of it at the time. Oh, yeah, and for those who may not have been watching the show long enough to know (and those whose memories have been wiped by watching the writers play fast and loose with the characters so much), it's *Mulder* who's the psychologist and *Scully* who's the medical doctor. We can all be forgiven for being a bit confused about that these days. DISCLAIMER: This is intended as an homage, not a rip-off. Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Walter Skinner and the X Files universe were created by and/or are the property of Chris Carter, Ten-Thirteen and Fox Broadcasting, all of whom are smarter and richer than I. No infringement is intended. Anybody who sues me is wasting a lot of time and effort, because I'm broke and this story is actually *costing* me money to produce. ************************************************************************ Part 1 People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. - Frank Herbert May 17, 1997 Richardson, Texas 11:42 p.m. The thunder woke Sandra, though she had never been one of those kids who got scared at a little summer storm. She lifted her head, saw a distant flash of lightning, and settled back on her pillow again. The branches of the crape myrtle bush outside her window scratched gently on the glass in the breeze. Then she heard the door open quietly, and the soft pad of feet on the carpet in her room. "Sandy," a voice whispered. "There's no crickets." It was her little brother, Paulie. "Go to bed," Sandra whispered back. "It's just a storm." "Grandma said storms are bad when there's no crickets. She said the crickets know when it's bad, and they stop singing and hide." He was right--there were no crickets chirping outside, and that was strange this time of year. "They probably just don't want to get wet," Sandra said, feeling very superior because she was three years older and clearly so much cooler of head. "Go back to sleep." "Sandy, I'm scared," Paulie said. "It's a bad storm; I can tell. And Daddy went to Julie's house." *Julie,* Sandra thought, annoyed. Their father's girlfriend. Julie had dyed her brown hair so it looked almost purple, painted her nails blood red and wore four earrings in one ear. So different from their mother, with her natural blond hair, who never wore jewelry or makeup. Sandra weighed the consequences of letting Paulie climb in beside her. It would irritate their father to find she and her brother sleeping in the same bed--he would say it wasn't ladylike of Sandra to let him stay and wasn't manly of Paulie to be scared enough to ask. Let him be mad. "Okay," Sandra said. "Get in." Paulie crawled up onto the bed. He really was scared, she realized; he was clutching his teddy bear. He had claimed he didn't want to sleep with it anymore about a year ago. Another flash outlined the thin, leafy branches of the crape myrtle in stark relief. No thunder this time. She felt Paulie shivering. "If it's really bad, Daddy will come back for us," she said, though she didn't believe it. Suddenly a heavy rattle sounded on the roof. Hail, Sandra thought, and then she was a little nervous, too. The branches smacked loudly against the window in a hard gust, and a roaring started up outside. Maybe a tornado, Sandra thought, in horror. She'd seen a movie about tornadoes. In the movie, people had tried to get underground. There was no place where she and Paulie could get underground--the house had no basement. She struggled to remember what she had been told in her fifth-grade class about taking shelter. Paulie was crying. *Center of the house,* she recalled. The hail stopped as abruptly as it had begun, giving her a moment to think it might be over, then started again, harder, louder. The noise was terrifying; her heart thudded painfully in her chest. Sandra dragged Paulie out of bed, towed him toward the kitchen. From the skylight over the dining room, a continuous, brilliant glare burned down into the house--cold, blue light that hurt her eyes, as if one lightning bolt overhead glowed for a long time. She turned away, still trying to remember how to hide from a tornado. She could feel the house shaking around them, as if something gigantic were trying to tear it out of the ground. She could feel the rumble of the thunder under her feet. *Somewhere with no windows. Bathroom.* The front door blew open, whipped around on its hinges and slammed against the wall. The glass panes in the door shattered, spraying both children with sharp, shiny splinters. Sandra screamed, let go of Paulie and flung her hands up to her face; the wind roared in. She reached to shove her brother into the hall behind her, but suddenly he wasn't there. "*Paulie!*" she screamed. Then she saw him, suspended in the blue light. He didn't look frightened, just stunned, staring helplessly at her as he hung in the air, arms and legs spread as if he were flying. Sandra tried to reach for him, but she couldn't move. She was rooted to the spot, frozen in place, as he floated slowly past her and out the broken front door. And from where he had gone, in the blazing glare coming through the open door, she saw the silhouette of a strange, small figure approaching. Something not exactly like a man. **** Fightin' with the devil Harder all the time Sinkin' to his level But I'm only, yes I'm only Halfway down... - Jim Lauderdale **** May 21, 1997 Washington, D.C. 2:17 a.m. Fox Mulder woke suddenly, drenched in cold sweat, shivering and breathing hard. He had been dreaming of Samantha's abduction again-- the cold, blue-white light in which his sister had floated away and disappeared, apparently forever; the strange creature who had stood in the doorway and whispered into Mulder's mind that everything would be all right; the terror and the paralysis he had felt. Mulder sat up on the couch and drew a long breath, trying to get his galloping heart rate under control. He felt vaguely dizzy, sluggish in body and brain despite the adrenaline roaring through his veins. The tape he had been watching when he had fallen asleep had stopped, rewound itself and yielded to an info-mercial about car wax. *Things have come to quite a pass when "Dora and Joe Get it On" won't keep you awake long enough to jerk off, son,* he thought. Of course, that basically summed it up. Things had, in fact, come to quite a pass, and not a pretty one at that. It had been weeks since Dr. Charles Goldstein's "treatment," long enough for the seizures to subside, but Mulder could still feel the tiny hole where Goldstein had drilled into his skull in an effort to stimulate recall of Mulder's childhood memories. The place where the hole had been still ached sometimes, prickled. He avoided touching the scar when he shampooed his hair. And then there was the really embarrassing part-- that it hadn't worked worth a damn. True or false, the memories that seemed to have come back to him hadn't told him anything he hadn't already known or guessed anyway. So he had a hole in his head, and nothing constructive to show for it. And then, of course, there was the inescapable fact that everybody who knew about the incident--and way too many people knew--now had conclusive proof that he really was a nut case. His partner, Dana Scully, had been kind enough to blow some convincing psycho-medical bullshit around that had made it sound like it really hadn't been Mulder's fault, but *she* at least knew better. After all, he had let Goldstein drill into his skull *twice.* He suspected she had not been able to conceal the truth from A.D. Skinner, and all three of them now were walking on egg shells, trying to avoid the subject. They were right, too. He *was* a nut case. In retrospect, going to Goldstein had been the craziest fucking thing Mulder had ever done, and he had a list of crazy things to his account longer than his arm. Was what he had recalled real? He didn't know. Looking at it objectively, he had to admit that the images generated were basically what he had already come to suspect before the "treatment." He had recalled pretty much what he had expected. And what he had remembered before Goldstein was terrifying enough that there'd been almost no possibility he would've recalled anything more benign than an ax murder. His throat was painfully dry. He sighed and debated getting up for a drink of water, but that seemed like it would've required a huge effort. Not worth it. He lay down again and let himself drift between lassitude and real rest, staring aimlessly at the ceiling as the light from the television flickered, reflecting on the plaster over his head. The phone rang. Scully, he suspected. How did she do that? How did she always seem to know when he was down in it this way? No, wait--that was the phone on the desk. Scully would've dialed the cell number, knowing the cell phone was more likely to be near him and that he was less likely to ignore it. This was probably somebody trying to sell him car wax. At 2:30 in the morning? His tired brain couldn't work that out, so he sighed, rolled over and let the machine pick up. "This is Fox Mulder. Leave a message." Did his voice on the tape really sound that dull, that listless? *Beep.* "Agent Mulder, this is Assistant Director Skinner..." *Shit.* Mulder stumbled up and slogged over to the desk, snatched up the receiver. "I'm here, sir," he said. God, his throat felt raw. Had he been yelling, in the middle of that dream? "I've got a situation I need for you to handle," Skinner said. There was something tight and hard in his tone. "Can you leave for Dallas at noon?" *Situation? What the fuck did that mean?* "Mulder?" Skinner said, into his silence. "I'm sorry, sir," Mulder said. "I'm not quite awake yet. A situation?" "A possible kidnapping." *Why me?* "I'd rather not discuss it over the phone," Skinner said, as if he knew what Mulder was thinking. "Uh, sure. At noon, you say." "Yes. I'll meet you at the airport. American Flight 1310." *Holy shit!* Skinner was proposing to go along! Mulder was suddenly wide awake, his heart racing again. "Yes, sir. I'm expecting Agent Scully back from her medical leave tomorrow." "I don't know that she needs to be involved," Skinner said. Mulder blinked in surprise. Skinner didn't want Scully to go, but he wasn't going to say so outright, wasn't prepared to make an order of it. Mulder wasn't prepared to argue it, one way or the other. "I'll be there at noon." Skinner hung up, leaving Mulder standing there with the phone buzzing in his hand, debating with himself. Some choice. Call Scully and piss Skinner off. Don't call Scully and piss Scully off. He put the phone down, then lifted it again and hit the speed dial for Scully's number. He had no desire to be partnered with Skinner, not without somebody else around to watch his back. And the truth was, though Skinner was a foot taller and probably outweighed her by a hundred pounds, of the two, Scully was the more intimidating. **** Irving, Texas 3:46 p.m. Outside the picture windows in the departure lounges at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, the sun peeked out from under a black puffy cloud silhouetted in golden light. The rain was coming down in sheets, driven by a sharp, gusty wind. On her way to the baggage claim, Special Agent Dana Scully wondered where the hell her partner was, and whether he had thought to pack an umbrella. Mulder had been vague about what they were doing in Dallas. He had just told her to get a flight to Dallas and meet him there. The vagueness was no surprise--he often dragged her out of town without telling her why they were going, and she knew he disliked detailing his plans over the phone, anyway. The surprise was that something at last had caught his attention firmly enough that *he* was willing to go out of town. Ever since recovering from Goldstein's "treatment," he had been dull and lethargic, the old enthusiasm for the chase eroded away, as if he just didn't have the energy to bother. The last few months had been hell on both of them. She had been trying to grapple with the fact that cancer was inexorably shortening her personal calendar. It seemed unlikely that, if and when Mulder finally found the end of his quest, she would be around to see it. And whether she wanted it or not, his search for the truth had become hers, if not from the moment when Duane Barry had dragged her off, then surely from the moment when her sister Melissa had been killed in the name of Mulder's quest. When she took the time to reflect, Scully had to concede that she had not grappled especially well. She had lashed out at her family and at Mulder over innumerable small things--as if it really mattered to her whether she had a desk in the basement office. Left to cope on her own while Mulder had taken a rare vacation, she had gone off and done something nearly as foolhardy as his ill-fated dip into pseudo- medicine. And like Mulder, she still bore the mark of it, in the form of a snake tattoo on her back that would've been a lot more attractive if it hadn't almost gotten her killed. She had withdrawn from the very people most likely to help her, finding it suddenly easier to confide her feelings to strangers than to those close to her, those who really *ought* to understand. Her family wanted her to quit working. "Take some time," her mother kept saying. Mulder at least understood what her family had missed--time was the one thing she didn't have. Scully suspected that was at least part of the reason he had let Goldstein work on his head. He had hoped recovering his memories would speed things up--provide the clues they needed to move farther ahead faster, to get to the end of the race before her clock ran out, in the wild hope that finding his answers would lead to the answers she needed. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and Mulder was not a man to shrink from the extreme. That was the pressure the last few months had exerted on them: She had gone aloof; he had gone frantic. She saw him halfway between the luggage carousels and a Lariat car rental counter, easily visible through the crowd. Special Agent Fox Mulder was tall even when slouching over the black crash bag at his feet. Scully saw a woman at the carousel nearest him cast a come- hither look--his beautifully tailored dark-gray suit nicely showed off his broad shoulders and long limbs. Mulder appeared not to have noticed his admirer. The expression in his hazel eyes was profound ennui--from a distance Scully couldn't be sure whether it was real or studied. She went to him. "So," she said lightly, "are we supposed to find out who shot J.R.?" "Kristin Shepherd," Mulder said. "His wife's sister, pregnant with his baby after a torrid affair. When she wouldn't leave town, he had her framed for prostitution, and she shot him in revenge." "Case closed," Scully murmured. *Serves me right,* she thought. *Ask a man with an eidetic memory a trivia question.* "Then what *are* we doing here?" "I don't know." She stared at him. He shrugged. "It wasn't my idea." Almost imperceptibly he tipped his head toward the rental car counter. Scully caught his cue and glanced over to see Assistant Director Walter Skinner, a set of keys and a rental agreement in his hand, turning toward where she and Mulder stood. *Oh, shit,* Scully thought. *What the hell?* Scully turned toward the luggage carousel to grab her bag, her thoughts in a whirl. She would've thought it would take dynamite to blast Skinner out of D.C.--what kind of case was this, that it would take him away from bureau headquarters? Besides, she occasionally thought the only thing that saved Mulder's job was that Skinner didn't know the kind of stuff Mulder sometimes pulled when he was in the field. She didn't relish the idea of blocking for her partner. The rain had stopped, leaving a damp, sticky heat in the air. They collected the car without speaking. Skinner took the driver's seat as if by fiat, and Scully took the back seat out of charity for Mulder's longer legs. Still wreathed in silence, the A.D. handed a file folder across the front seat to Mulder. While Skinner started the car and turned out onto Loop 635, Mulder read and Scully fought the urge to squirm with impatience. From behind her partner, she couldn't tell anything about what he was thinking. Finally, he handed the file over the seat to her. He asked Skinner, "Do we need to know what it is that you owe to Bradley Dennison?" In the brief quiet that followed, Scully flipped open the file to find a missing persons report logged by the Richardson police department. One Paul A. Dennison, aged 7, had disappeared from his home during a thunderstorm. Son of a bitch, Scully thought, groaning inwardly. God, she hated working these missing-child cases--especially with Mulder, who took them personally, as only he could. Every one of them made him relive his own sister's disappearance--and that made him crazy. "What you need to concern yourself with, Agent Mulder," Skinner said tightly, "is what I'll owe you if this gets handled quickly." He didn't say *and quietly*, but he didn't have to. It was in his tone, his manner. Scully went through the thin file, looking for the clue that had tipped him off and couldn't fathom it. Maybe Skinner had said something before she arrived, something that Mulder had been able to connect. Or maybe it really was just that spooky sense of Mulder's--she'd seen it work before, seen him seemingly pull just the perfect clues out of the molecules in the air. Whatever Skinner's personal interest in the case was, good old Spooky's intuition had homed in on it like a bird dog scented a grouse. The A.D. drove without consulting a map. He knew the way to the house. Scully read the file, knowing Mulder was already chewing over the case in his head. There wasn't much in the folder. According to the report, Paul Dennison's father, Bradley Dennison, had told police he and his children had been asleep when the boy disappeared. Dennison Sr. had been awakened shortly after midnight by a loud sound. He went to investigate and found the glass in the front door was broken. But because there was a violent storm going on at the time, he assumed the wind had blown it open. He had covered the open windows with plastic, swept up the glass and gone back to bed, and he hadn't discovered his son was gone until morning. Scully glanced at the dates and did a double-take. The boy had been gone three days, but his father hadn't reported him missing until this morning. The investigation had hardly gotten under way. What kind of father would wait three days before reporting his son missing? *Maybe the same kind of father Bill Mulder was.* As far as she knew, Mulder's parents had never reported their daughter's disappearance. It had been left to her brother to do it, decades later, opening the file himself, after the forensic evidence was all gone... Jesus. Three days. She doubted there'd be any unsmeared prints left; forget hair and fiber. Oh, they'd go through the motions anyway, but nothing that remained could be trusted. What the hell did Skinner know about this that he wasn't telling? Had he brought in Mulder because he might be the only one who could find the boy, knowing he was the one agent in the bureau who wouldn't eat, sleep or breathe until he had found him? Or was there something more sinister going on? Skinner turned off the freeway and down a thoroughfare that stretched past one suburban subdivision after another. The land was so flat Scully couldn't see the reach of it into the distance for the rows of houses. He turned again, onto a winding neighborhood street, and from there into a short cul-de-sac densely packed with large, stately homes. Solidly upper-middle-class neighborhood. There were police cars parked in front of a house with a Tudor-style facade done in a nondescript gray brick. Scully wondered what Mulder was thinking. He got out of the car and took a long look around in the hard afternoon light. Scully could almost feel his senses reach out toward the house, trying to see, hear and smell what had happened here. Whatever Mulder's flaws--and by her lights, he had several--she had to admit that nobody scoped a crime scene like Mulder. Nothing significant would get by him. But then, who knew if there was anything significant left to find after three days? Out the corner of her eye, she saw a curtain move in one of the front windows. Mulder stood gazing intently at that for a moment. Then he shook himself out of whatever reverie he'd been in and followed Skinner up the sidewalk. The front door, with the plastic still covering the broken windows, was standing open despite the heat outside. Mulder stopped to have a look at the door while Scully went inside with Skinner. Skinner flashed his badge at a couple of police officers standing in the foyer and went straight into the living room toward Dennison, a short, burly middle-aged man with red hair and a pained expression wrinkling his pale, heavily freckled face. He was wearing a dark-gray suit that looked as if he'd been sleeping in it since his son's disappearance. As Skinner approached, he got up off the couch where he'd been sitting. "This is Agent Scully," Skinner said, without preamble. He gestured toward Mulder, still at the door a few feet away. "Agent Mulder." Dennison's lips went into a tight, straight line. "Goddammit, Walter, I never meant for you to make this official. There's nothing--" "Then you shouldn't have called me," Skinner said. There was steel in his tone. Scully took a step closer, taking on the role of mediator. "Mr. Dennison," she said, "all we want is to find your son. Let's worry about what's official later, shall we?" Mulder caught movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a dark-haired girl about ten years old peeking around a door frame from the kitchen. She had narrowed her eyes and her mouth as if suppressing some feeling, and there was a furtive curiosity in the way she leaned in slowly to see what was going on beyond the door. Unbidden, Mulder had a mental flash from the strange nightmares Goldstein's drugs and probing had generated--himself, peering up at the Cancer Man through a pall of cigarette smoke. *You're a little spy.* He shoved it aside. "Hi," he said to the girl, his voice gentle. She started, threw a wide-eyed glance at Bradley Dennison and then vanished down a hallway. "Your daughter?" Mulder asked. "Sandra, yes," Dennison said. "I think she's a little intimidated by all these strange people with guns." "Uh, huh," Mulder said. She hadn't seemed the least bit intimidated, except perhaps by her father. He decided he didn't much like Bradley Dennison. He took in the family photographs arrayed on the mantel- piece. Typical stuff--kids at the foot of a Christmas tree, school pictures, mother and children at a birthday party. Sandra didn't look much like her brother, who was blonde and blue-eyed. "Mr. Dennison," Scully said, "I'd be curious to know why you delayed reporting your son missing for almost seventy-two hours." Dennison glanced away and then back. "Look," he said, "I know who took him--my ex-wife, Daisy. It's not the first time, and I'm sure she'll bring him back when she's ready. It's just that...well, she's never kept him this long before. She's always brought him home after a couple of days. I wouldn't have called if she had just brought him back like usual. I don't want to make her life any harder--she's got problems enough as it is." "Is this your ex-wife?" Mulder asked, pointing at one of the photos. The adult female in the pictures had blonde hair and blue eyes, fine- featured, classically pretty. "Yeah, that's her. That's Daisy." "Her name is Dahlia," Skinner said coldly. "Everybody calls her Daisy," Dennison shot back. "I gather she doesn't have custody rights?" Scully asked, before they could really get their argument going. "Hell, no," Dennison said. "She's a nut case. I'm not letting her have custody of my kids." "But you don't mind having her run off with one of them now and then," Mulder said, holding his tone neutral. "As long as she brings him back on time." Dennison glared at him. Skinner shot him a look like a merit badge. "Your ex-wife has been diagnosed with a mental illness?" Scully said. "She spent three months in a rehab unit." "Drug rehab?" Mulder asked. "Depression was what the doctors said. But if you ask me, she's an out-and-out psycho. And the hospital didn't do her any good." "Scully, can I borrow your notebook?" Mulder said. Scully stared at him. Mulder shrugged--he knew what she was thinking. With his eidetic memory, he never took notes at a crime scene. She handed it over. He wrote, "Can you keep him busy for a couple of minutes? I want to talk to the little girl." He started to give it back to her, then added: "The lock wasn't forced." Then he returned the notebook, and took an apparently aimless couple of steps toward the hallway. She read it, then nodded. "Mr. Dennison, why don't you start from the beginning and just tell us what you know about the most recent incident." "Sure," Dennison said, and began, while Mulder deftly faded, unnoticed, down the hall. ************************************************************************ Part 2 I know he did it. You know he did it. God knows he did it. But you and I and God are all full of bullshit, because none of us can make the case. - Anonymous Harris County prosecutor May 21, 1997 Richardson, Texas Mulder wasn't sure why he wanted to talk to Sandra Dennison. He just knew that he did. Maybe something about the sadness he'd seen in her eyes--it was a grief he recognized because he'd experienced it himself. He recognized that sense of something missing, something that could never be regained. The survivor's guilt. Yeah, that was it--guilt, not the raw confusion she ought to have had if she didn't have a clue what had happened. She knew something. He had seen it in her eyes, and it had resonated in him, as if she and he were chimes sounding on the same frequency. Sandra wasn't avoiding the living room because she was afraid of guns--she had walked right by one of the local cops without casting his weapon a glance. He sensed it was her father she was avoiding, because she knew something. And Dennison didn't want her to tell what she knew, because he was hiding something. Mulder found Sandra in a pale pink bedroom overflowing with ruffled, floral-printed chintz. She sat at a small pink desk on which a sleek, black multimedia computer system looked outrageously out of place. The girl herself looked out of place--a child of the '90s wearing jeans and a Microsoft T shirt--in an interior that had been conceived in the 1950s. Straight out of Barbie's Dream House. Mulder blinked, then realized there were no dolls. Some stuffed animals had been consigned to a corner. They looked forlorn, abandoned. Sensing his presence, she turned to look at him, her dark brows knit in annoyance at the intrusion. She glared at him. "Hi," he said softly. "Can I talk to you for a minute?" She looked as if she would've liked to say no. But she shrugged and turned back to the computer. She was tall for her age, big-boned and a little awkward, and had long, straight dark hair and deep brown eyes. "That's a nice system," Mulder said, going into the room. He sat on the bed. "What are you running, a Pentium?" "Power PC," she said, sounding a little supercilious. "Two hundred megahertz." "Yeah?" A serious hacker. "How much RAM?" "Seventy-two megs." She glanced at him, and he saw in her look that she was checking him out. "It's got a six-gig hard drive, and a Sound Blaster card and an X2 modem--fifty-seven-six kay-bips. I'm the Webmaster for my school's home page. It won an award from Microsoft for best school Web site." He smiled. "The FBI's got servers that aren't that powerful," he said. He hoped her computer-ese wasn't going to get too much deeper-- what the hell was a kay-bip? "That must be some home page. Can you show it to me?" She slanted another glance at him under long, dark eyelashes. Then, point-blank, "Are you going to take my mama away to the nut house?" He felt his heart constrict. He remembered his own parents' divorce, the terror of losing yet another family member. "I don't know," he said. "That depends on whether she might hurt somebody or do something to hurt herself. Do you think she would?" "I don't know. But she didn't take Paulie." "Are you sure?" She moved the mouse aimlessly, and a muscle twitched at the corner of her mouth. "Sandra," Mulder said. "I don't want to do anything to hurt your mom. Or you. I just want to find your brother." "You can't," she breathed, barely audibly. "Why not? Do you know what happened to him?" She hesitated. She hadn't looked at him in nearly a minute, her gaze focused on the computer but not seeing it. "My Dad says it was just a dream," she said finally. "But you don't think it was, do you?" She shook her head. "Do you promise to believe me? You won't think I'm just making it up to get attention?" God, he knew that feeling. Suddenly he hurt for this little girl, all the way down to his bones. "Sandra, if you tell me the truth, I'll believe you." She weighed this. Then she turned and looked him full in the face, her expression grim, frightened. "He got sucked up by a tornado," she said, dead serious. Mulder blinked. Steadied himself. "There was a tornado?" he asked, trying to keep his tone neutral--after all, he had promised. "I didn't see it," she said, as if she knew what he was thinking. "But I heard it. It was so loud it shook the whole house, and it sounded just like the one in the movie, all roaring and growling--" Once she got going, it tumbled out in a rush. "And there was so much lightning, it was like this huge searchlight, you know, like they have at the mall. Like it was right outside the house. And then Paulie floated up into the light, and the tornado sucked him right out the front door." Mulder blinked again. Except for the tornado angle, she had just described his dream of Samantha's abduction--and thinking back on it, he decided he might have thought that was a tornado, too, if twisters had been as common in Massachusetts as they were in Texas. Was it possible Paulie Dennison hadn't been abducted by anyone human? "Sandra," he said carefully, reining in his excitement, "did you see anybody else? Did somebody come in the house?" She shrugged. "Just the Moon Man." *God almighty!* "Moon Man?" "He's my mom's friend. Moon Man's not his name--that's just what Paulie calls him." "Do you know what his real name is?" She frowned, thinking. "I don't think mama ever said. I never saw him before that night, except in my mom's pictures. But Paulie met him when mama took him to the ranch. Paulie said he was nice." "What ranch is that?" "Mama went to live on a ranch after the judge said she couldn't stay with us anymore. They grow vegetables there." "Can you show me one of the pictures of the Moon Man?" "Okay." She leaned toward him conspiratorially. "But don't tell my Dad I kept it, okay? He told me to throw mama's pictures away." *Pretty cold-blooded of him.* "I might have to tell him, Sandra. If the Moon Man knows anything about where we can find Paulie, I'd have to." She considered. "Well, OK," she said. "If it'll help Paulie get home, I don't care." She rummaged in one of the drawers in the pink desk and withdrew a floppy disk from under a stack of old homework papers. She popped the disk into a drive, then launched Netscape off the Windows desktop. "She sent you a picture in an e-mail," Mulder said. "Yeah. Watch--it's a JPEG, so Netscape displays it automatically." She dragged down to "Open file," then pointed the mail reader at the floppy disk drive. He nodded. "Is it a photo?" "No, my mama drew it. She's an artist." The message displayed. He leaned forward to read it, then got a look at the sender's e-mail address: daisy@helios.com. He recognized the domain. *Shit,* he thought. *The mother's a fucking Fusionist.* Dennison was probably right--she was probably nuts. The message was short: "I can't come up this weekend. Hope to see you soon. Love you both." It was dated the day before Paulie had disappeared. Sandra's machine was fast, and the picture had popped up at the bottom of the screen. He couldn't see it all without scrolling down. But then, he didn't have to see all of it. Just the eyes. Big, black, slanted, almond-shaped eyes in a white face. Moon Man, indeed. **** "Just who the hell do you think you are?" Dennison raged. "You can't interrogate my daughter without my permission! Look, I know what my rights are--" "I know my rights, too, Mr. Dennison," Mulder said, forcing his tone mild. He was sitting on the arm of the couch, facing Dennison, who had jumped to his feet in aggravation when Mulder had returned to the living room and showed him Sandra's e-mail message. Scully said nothing. She had learned years ago that there were days when she needed to keep Mulder on a short leash, and then there were days like this one, when the right thing to do was take the leash off and let him run. She'd been glad when he had decided to talk to Sandra--there was something about Mulder and children that worked. Just being in the same room with a child seemed to soften Mulder's sharp corners, and kids seemed to trust him instinctively. Good old Spooky at his finest. He'd gotten farther in fifteen minutes than the local cops had all day. "I also know," Mulder said coolly, "that your daughter is a witness to the disappearance of your son, and your failing to tell us that could be construed as obstruction of justice. You've already committed a crime by waiting to report the incident." He glanced up at the ranking local cop on the scene. "Do the penalties for child endangerment in this state include hard prison time?" The cop, a sergeant, nodded. "You want to start over, Mr. Dennison?" Mulder asked. Despite his even tone, Scully noticed a tension in his pose, a hardness in the set of his eyes. He was losing patience with Dennison. Dennison's features sagged. "I think I'd like to have my lawyer present," he said. "Your lawyer?" Mulder asked. Scully heard in his tone that he was ready to unleash a little moral outrage. She glanced at Skinner, but the A.D., too, seemed content to stand by and let Dennison get Mulderized. "Your son's been missing almost three days," Mulder said, "and the only thing you seem to be worried about is covering your own ass. Your daughter's worried about Paul. Hell, everybody in this room is worried about Paul, except, apparently, you. I don't think I want to go looking for your ex-wife, Mr. Dennison--you look so goddamned guilty, I'm thinking we've got a pretty good suspect right here in the room. Did you kill him? Is he buried in the garden?" "No!" Dennison yelled. "Hell, no! Of course not!" "Then you'd better start talking about what did happen!" Mulder yelled back. "All right!" Dennison sighed heavily, glanced down at his hands and then looked back at Mulder. "Look, Sandra didn't see anything. She just had a bad dream, that's all." He hesitated, then went on, "I spent the night with a...friend." "Will she vouch for you?" Scully asked. "Maybe. I guess so, but..." He shrugged. "She's married. I used my credit card for the hotel room. You could check that, if it'd help." "So the kids were here alone," Mulder said. A fine contempt coated his tone. "Yeah. I mean, I know I shouldn't, but I don't want one of them walking in on us, and hell--I'm only human. Daisy and I...well, I'm not into rape, and ever since she got religion, that's what it would've taken to get her into bed." "How long has your wife been a member of the Solar Fusion cult?" Mulder asked. "About three years. Ever since she came back from the hospital. I think she met one of them while she was in there." "Do you know the individual your son refers to as 'the Moon Man'?" "Who?" "Sandra said someone her brother met at the cult's ranch was here the night Paul disappeared. Someone he called 'the Moon Man.'" Dennison shook his head. "I don't know the guy. You say he was here? Good God, somebody from that insane cult took Paulie?" "I don't know," Mulder said. Dennison sighed heavily again. "Maybe you'd better have a look at the temple." Mulder crooked an eyebrow. "The temple?" **** The house had a greenhouse off the garage, about the size of a small bedroom, with the glass on its sides covered with what looked to Scully like black construction paper. She wondered why anyone would keep light out of a greenhouse. The sun had sunk low, now half- obscured by the house next door. Dennison unlocked the door, and Mulder pulled it open a couple of inches, but then quickly shut it again. "Jesus," Dennison said, recoiling, his voice muffled. Then Scully smelled it, too, and knew why. The stench of decaying flesh wafting out was strong. *God, let that not be the boy,* Scully thought. Mulder waved Dennison toward Skinner, who stood a few yards away. "You'd better let us handle this," Mulder said. After the other man had backed off, Mulder pulled a flashlight from his pocket, opened the door again and went in, Scully right on his heels. The greenhouse was pitch-dark inside except for their flashlights. The smell was godawful, a malaise of dead, rotting plant and animal tissue. The floor felt carpeted--Mulder noticed it, too, and shined the light downward. It was covered with some kind of artificial turf. "I found it," Mulder said. She heard relief coating his voice. "It's either a big cat or a small raccoon." *Thank God.* He bent to pull a plastic bag out from where it had been lining a trash can, then handed it to her. "Why do I have to do that?" Scully asked. "You found it." He shrugged. "It's dead," he said cheerfully. "You're the pathologist." "Asshole," she muttered, and heard him chuckle in response as he moved away, but she wasn't really annoyed--it was such a relief to hear that playful note in his voice. The dead animal was disgusting, bloated almost beyond recognition, with a scraggly striped tail. Scully sighed and put on a glove. She picked the animal up by the tail, which released a whole new category of stink, and dumped it into the bag. "Ugh," she said. As she straightened up, the small greenhouse erupted in a series of blinding, brilliant-white flashes. Scully ducked her head and closed her eyes. Whatever the flashing light was, it was painfully bright, flaring over and over again, like a flash bulb going off repeatedly. She heard a rhythmic clicking, sounding in time with the flashes. She opened her eyes, turned toward Mulder and saw him look upward, appearing to move in psychedelic strobe-light jerks. She followed his gaze and gasped. The whole ceiling had been decorated in an elaborate stained-glass representation of the Sun exploding in a ball of green flame that engulfed the Earth and the Moon. Someone had gone to a great deal of trouble with it, down to carefully piecing in Earth's major topographical features in dark brown, the craters on the Moon in gray, and wispy clouds over the Earth's surface being evaporated and blown away. Suddenly it stopped. Scully blinked to clear the spots before her eyes. Mulder stood near a desk, his finger poised on a switch he had found in the middle of an elaborate contraption on the desk. She heard him rummage for a normal light switch. And when the lights came on, out of the corner of her eye, Scully saw something at the far end of the greenhouse that looked like Darth Vader--a black, shiny humanoid figure. She bit back a yelp, reaching for her gun, then realized the thing was headless. She blinked, looked again. It was some kind of black latex suit, hanging up on the wall. "Strobe light," Mulder said, still intent on the desk. "It's on a timer, triggered by a solar cell." "What the hell's it for?" Scully asked. "Phoning home, I think," he said softly. **** Explosions also are compressions of time. Observable changes in the natural universe all are explosive to some degree and from some point of view; otherwise you would not notice them. - Frank Herbert **** While Mulder looked around the greenhouse, Scully hauled the dead raccoon's carcass out to the trash cans at the side of the garage. She glanced over the low wrought-iron fence behind the house. There was some kind of greenbelt back there. Pleasant--a creek, big trees, with a dimly lighted path winding through it. Jogging trail, maybe. She saw something shiny and looked again. What was a car doing parked on a jogging trail? There didn't appear to be a road leading back into the greenbelt. She could barely see the car behind a couple of the trees. She hesitated, then sighed. All right, it was sufficiently strange, and sufficiently near a crime scene that she could justify the five minutes it would take to have a look. She went toward the car, leading with her flashlight. Nearer to it, she noticed the trunk stood open, and then something else--streaks like smoke on the glass in the driver's side window. And a brownish smear. Blood? She couldn't see clearly through the murk on the glass, but behind it, she made out a pale, oval shape. A face. She walked around the car, fishing in a pocket for her cell phone. In the open trunk was a cardboard box full of neatly stacked paper, and a brown teddy bear. The wind had blown some of the papers out of the car; Scully picked one up off the ground nearby and scanned it as she dialed Mulder's number. "Mulder, it's me. There's a body in a car behind the house." "The plot thickens?" he asked. "Uh, huh. There's also a teddy bear in the trunk and several reams of printed flyers about being prepared 'for the Sun to explode and flames to devour the Earth.'" "Shit. I'm on my way." He hung up. Scully tried the passenger side door, hoping that there was only one body, and not that of a child, and that by going in the other side she wouldn't disturb anything. The door was unlocked. Along with the usual smells attendant any days-dead human body--decaying flesh, blood, shit and dried urine--she recognized the acrid scent of PETN explosive. A small bomb had gone off inside this car. Just the one person, thank God, and it was not Paulie Dennison. The adult woman's body--or what was left of it--had been burned and blackened in the blast. The chest cavity had been hollowed out by the explosion, the ribs standing out starkly, like broken, gore-smeared sticks. Scully sensed a shadow at her left shoulder. Mulder, peering into the car just as she was. "Ouch," he said. "What a way with words you have," she murmured. "I found this, on my way down." He held up a plastic bag containing a small metal box with a toggle switch and a red, glowing diode centered on its face. "What is it?" "Remote detonator would be my guess, though I think we'll have to dust it for prints and then take it apart to be sure." "Remote detonator? You're suggesting that somebody stood in the trees and waited, and then set off a bomb that had been placed in the car?" "Huh," he said, bending to look inside the vehicle again. "The car's not really damaged, is it? And you'd think it would be, if the bomb had been attached to the car itself. This is almost like the bomb was on her person, isn't it?" For a moment, Scully couldn't speak for sheer astonishment. But he was right--the car hardly had a scratch. There was a reason Mulder had once been the bureau's fair-haired boy--when he was really on, there was no better investigator on the planet. He was really on today. "Jesus," she said finally, "what is this cult?" "I'm not sure, but apparently we'd better find out. I'm going to go have a closer look at the 'temple.' I think you should find out whether Bradley Dennison can ID that teddy bear." He hooked a thumb inside the car. "And her. She doesn't fit Daisy's description, but maybe he knows who she is." He headed back toward the house. "I'll send down the troops," he called over his shoulder. They arrived a few minutes later, a regular phalanx of uniformed cops, along with Skinner and Dennison. Dennison said he didn't know who the woman was, but he blanched at the sight of the teddy bear. "It's Paulie's," he said, his voice hushed, sickened. "Where do you think we might find the members of this cult?" Scully asked. "They have a ranch outside of Wimberley, down near Austin," he said. "What county is that?" "Hays," Skinner said. He ignored Scully's startled look. "I'll call the sheriff," he said. "Tell them to start looking." ************************************************************************ Part 3 May 21, 1997 Richardson, Texas After the Dallas County coroner's office had removed the body and Scully had left instructions for the forensics team working on the car, she went back up to the "temple," looking for Mulder. "What do you know about this Solar Fusion cult?" she asked him. "Not all that much," Mulder said, his tone soft, abstracted. He was studying the stuff in the atrium, prying delicately into Daisy Dennison's private things with the precision of a surgeon, turning pages with the tip of a Montblanc ballpoint pen. *The psychologist is in,* Scully thought. "I met some of them once," he went on. "They're headed up by a guy named Thomas Barstow. They were active back in the early- to mid-80s, then they dropped off the radar screen. They went so far underground, they made Howard Hughes look like an extrovert. Then about eighteen months ago, they started surfacing occasionally on the Internet-- they'd post some weird shit in a massive spam on Usenet, then drop out again. The reply-to is some nonexistent address; anything you send them just bounces. I heard they have a Web page somewhere, but I never tried to hunt it down." "But you know something about them," she pressed. "I think a lot's changed in their ideas since I encountered them--the stuff on the Internet's very apocalyptic and confused. In general, they believe there's a colony of extraterrestrial beings living on a planet on the other side of the Sun. When the day comes that the Sun goes nova, those of us here who have 'measured up' to the aliens' standards will be rescued before the cataclysm. Then, somehow, they'll fuse themselves with the aliens. I think the thing with the strobe light is supposed to be a signal for the aliens to home in on. Or some such hokum." "Good Lord," Scully said. "You mean there's actually a scenario for intelligent alien life that's too far 'out there' even for you?" "I want to believe, Scully," he said, "but I want to believe something real." He scanned the titles on a bookshelf. "Based on what little I know about them, I don't think the Solar Fusionists know anything about UFOs. They appear to be your garden-variety paranoids, with a strong strain of pathological millenialism. 'The end is near,'" he intoned. He moved to a file cabinet, started flipping through manila folders. "The fusionists are nervous about the future, and they're predisposed to being fed the meaning of life by a self-proclaimed guru who happened to choose a logo off the cover of a science-fiction novel as his Buddha-figure." "You're suggesting that in the course of leading sad, pathetic little lives they went crazy from watching too much *Star Trek*?" she said. He turned and grinned at her. "I'd tell you how much *Star Trek* I've watched, Scully, but it would only serve to add data to your collection. Actually, the whole business with the aliens appears superficial to the Fusionists' belief system, which is, frankly, nothing more than ascetic-fundamentalist Christianity rehashed for the Space Age. It's a socio-psychological phenomenon. High-tech neo- Puritanism." "Ah," Scully said. "It's the religious element that puts you off. If they were garden-variety abductees, without the spiritual baggage, you'd be more interested in finding out about them." She was thinking: *He knows a lot about this...for a man who doesn't know anything about this. He might not have researched the Fusionists, but he's given them a lot of thought.* "Hell, I can't *find* them, much less find out about them," he said. "And yes, the religious element puts me off." He stared off into space for a moment, as if remembering something. He shook his head. "Barstow wasn't talking about religion back in the '80s. Basically he was just reciting the von Daniken line. You know, alien visitors making the occasional contribution to human civilization, dropping tidbits of information about how to build pyramids into the ears of Egyptian engineers and that sort of thing. But he's gone way over the top, now. I think he may have started to think *he's* an alien." He sighed. "Then again, there's always the possibility that he's been abducted since the last time I talked to him." *Oh, God. Here we go.* "Mulder, I don't see any evidence to indicate that Paulie Dennison was abducted by aliens." He looked up from the desk, and Scully saw something hooded in his expression. "I haven't ruled out anything, Scully--including the scenario where Dennison killed the kid and is trying to frame his ex- wife for the murder." Scully frowned. *No way. Too simple, too mundane an explanation--he wouldn't be this interested if he really thought so, and if he thinks it's something else, why wouldn't he just say so?* She was torn between relief and worry--if this case turned out to be simple domestic kidnapping, it would be all right with her, and she was glad to see Mulder willing to look at it just that way. But it wasn't normal behavior for him to hold a fascination for such a case. He had never shrunk from telling her his wild-eyed theories before--if he had a wild-eyed theory, why would he hide it? Then she thought she knew--he thought the Fusionists were frauds, and like anyone whose overriding goal was truth, Mulder hated frauds. Maybe he was just relishing unmasking the Fusionists. It was still strange. Mulder-the-skeptic was as immovable as Mulder- the-believer. She'd never known him to straddle the two this way. Some leftover effect of the "treatment?" "You really suspect Dennison?" she asked cautiously. "No. But I don't buy that he's been hiding this incident out of concern for Daisy's well-being. Or at any rate, that's not his only reason." "Yeah," Scully said thoughtfully. "We're on the same page there. What did Sandra tell you?" "Sandra's of the opinion that her brother got carried off by a tornado." "Seriously?" "Yeah. We should check with the National Weather Service." He turned and caught her "yeah-right" look and shrugged again. "Like I said, I haven't ruled out anything." "What's your theory about Skinner's interest? You know, when Dennison told me where the cult's ranch is, Skinner knew what county it is. And he knew the area code by heart." "'Her name is Dahlia,'" Mulder said, mimicking Skinner's way of speaking without perceptibly moving his jaw. "Daisy Dennison is a very attractive woman. We know he and his wife had problems in the past. It's not implausible. Like Dennison, our assistant director is, after all, only human. I think Sandra looks a little like him, don't you?" *God. He's right. She does.* It wasn't a picture of Skinner that Scully particularly liked. To change the subject, she hooked a thumb at the black suit hanging on the wall. She had a vague, slightly unnerving sense that she had seen one like it somewhere before, but she couldn't think where. "What do you make of that thing?" He frowned at it, then shrugged. "It's a stillsuit." "A what?" "A stillsuit. It might even be an actual prop from the movie, or a really good copy of one." "What movie?" "*Dune*. Based on the Frank Herbert novel about a desert planet full of huge, nasty worms who produce a 'spice' that becomes the most valuable substance in the universe. In the story, the residents of the planet wear stillsuits to keep from dying of dehydration in the desert." Scully blinked. She'd seen that movie, on a bad date while she was in college. "Do you think it's related?" "I don't see how. It doesn't really track with the Fusionist mythology." He thought for a moment. "Shit," he said suddenly. "What's Paulie Dennison's middle name?" Scully flipped her notebook open. She couldn't pronounce the name. "At... uh, Atree..." "Atreides," Mulder said, sounding disgusted. "Paul Atreides was the main character in the novel." He sighed heavily. "Christ. Maybe you're right, Scully--maybe Daisy Dennison did go crazy from watching too much Sci-Fi Channel." **** When Mulder returned to the house, he found Sandra waiting on the back patio, tightly clutching her brother's teddy bear with one arm. Mulder reached out to touch her hair gently. "We're going to do everything we can to bring Paulie home," he said, in a low voice. She nodded soberly. "You need this, if you want to talk to the Moon Man," she said, and she held out a CD-ROM disc in a plastic case. He took it. "What is it?" he asked. "Decryption software. You can't read the Helios page without it." Damn, this kid was smart. She knew twice as much about what was really going on as her father. "Sandra, you've been a big help." He hunkered down to look her right in the eye. "Listen," he said, "no matter what happens, I want you to remember it wasn't your fault. Nobody could have done any more to stop it than you did. You understand?" She nodded again. "I couldn't move," she whispered. Mulder remembered what it had been like. "It wasn't your fault," he repeated. "I just miss him," she said. "I know," he said. *Believe me, I know.* **** Everything runs right on time, years of practice and design Spit and polish 'til it shines (he thinks he'll keep her) Everything is so benign, the safest place you'll ever find God forbid you'd change your mind... - Mary-Chapin Carpenter **** Skinner had decided to call a halt for the night--he wanted to gather some more information and come back to have a look at the greenbelt in daylight. The Richardson police chief, Robert Warfield, had offered to take the three of them out for Tex-Mex food. Mulder figured the guy hoped to pick their brains, but that was OK. He wanted to know what the locals knew, too--what they really knew, not just what they were willing to say in front of Bradley Dennison and his daughter. Mulder figured that might come out pretty freely after a beer or two. Warfield looked more like a country-and-western singing star than a suburban cop. He was tall and lanky, ruggedly handsome, with clear blue eyes and immaculately groomed hair, and an equally neat, bushy black mustache. He wore a white straw hat and a dark-blue blazer over a crisp white shirt, jeans, and roper boots. And on him, somehow, none of it looked cliche. But he was driving a shiny, state-of-the- art cruiser, and the gun on his belt was a Sig-Sauer P228, not a six- gun. Mulder suspected the chief's glad-handing, good-ol'-boy manner was an affectation laid on over a fair amount of intelligence--behind the grin, his appraising look at the three feds had been shrewd. They drove to the Diaz Family Restaurant, a large, colorful place down the freeway a bit with oddly nautical decor inside, down to portholes cut in the partitions between booths. In the bar a mariachi band played with more enthusiasm than talent. The four of them slid into a corner booth well away from the music. "Used to be a seafood place," Warfield said. "Then it was an Italian place, but that went under, too. Best margaritas in town." Scully took him seriously and ordered a margarita when the waitress came by. Warfield went for a Tecate beer, and Mulder and Skinner followed his lead. The beer came in bright-red cans, with lime wedges set on top. Mulder watched as Warfield squeezed the lime into the hole in the top of can, did likewise and found he liked the gentle tang it laid over the fizzy, mild-flavored beer. A moment later, a Hispanic busboy delivered a basket of chips and two small bowls of a red sauce. "That stuff's hot," Warfield warned. His look at Mulder was a direct challenge. *So you want to see if I'll play chicken, do you?* Mulder thought. His favorite restaurant while at Oxford had been a Szechuan place; he doubted anything in that bowl would cause his taste buds to explode. It looked like tomatoes and onions and some herbs, with some green chunks he figured for hot peppers. He dipped a chip in the sauce, and tasted it. It was spicy, all right, but damned good--layered under the tomatoes and onions it had the kind of heat that would be cumulative if one ate too much of it. "Not bad," he said. "Some kind of salsa?" "Picante sauce," Warfield said. "So trying to set Yankees' mouths on fire is a common pastime here?" Warfield rewarded him with a grin. "Hell," he drawled, "it's practically a state-sanctioned sport." "I thought football was the official state sport." "Football's not a sport, son," Warfield said gravely. "It's a religion." The waitress returned, and they ordered, Mulder deciding he could eat whatever the police chief did and settling on the same fajita nachos Warfield selected. Scully chose chicken enchiladas, and Skinner went for a combination plate. "So," Warfield said, his beer halfway to his mouth, "y'all have some kind of theory about what happened to Paulie?" "The evidence wouldn't seem to support any conclusions as yet," Scully said. She shot Mulder a warning look. Mulder sipped beer. "A little context would probably help," he said. "For example, I know this is not a big town, but assuming Daisy Dennison really did take her son, do you go out personally on that kind of domestic case very often?" Another grin. "Only when the case involves a guy like Brad Dennison, who gave $10,000 to the mayor's campaign last year." The smile faded. "'Course, we got a dead body into the mix, now, too. That doesn't happen around here all that often, and it makes folks real nervous-- big city crime moving into the 'burbs, and that." Mulder nodded. "Did the Solar Fusionists recruit here?" "Not exactly--not recruit. About four years ago, they showed up, set up a vegetable stand down in the county right-of-way adjacent to Brad Dennison's insurance agency office. Selling fancy organic herbs and stuff and handing out their pamphlets. Brad took a dislike to them, started complaining about the traffic, said they were undesirable, they were scaring off his customers. Like that." Mulder dipped another chip and nodded again. "He wanted me to run them out of town. Trouble was, they were in the same spot where Harvey Fredericks sets up his peach stand every year. So I couldn't really give them the boot without telling Harvey he couldn't set up there, either, and I figured that'd probably raise a stink. But about that time, Daisy took up for them. First time I ever saw Daisy stand up to Brad, and she did it real public, too, in the middle of a city council meeting." Scully put in, "Was that before or after Daisy went into the hospital?" "A little bit before. She got friendly with one of the cult members-- a female member and *real* friendly, if the rumors were true. You know how this goes. Nice family, PTA members, church on Sunday, keep their grass mowed, then one day, all of a sudden, *wham*. Brad kind of freaked out. Hell, I guess I would, too, if it was my wife." Out the corner of his eye, Mulder saw Skinner shift uncomfortably and grind his teeth. *That's what he's been hiding,* Mulder thought. *His wife in a lesbian love affair.* He figured it probably explained Sandra's Barbie-doll bedroom, too. Brad Dennison was afraid his computer-geek, tomboy daughter would turn out to be just like her mother. As if changing the furniture would make some difference. "So," Warfield went on, "Brad hauled her down to the local shrink tank--" The police chief slanted a glance at Mulder and added, "no offense--" Mulder shrugged amiably. He'd been called worse things than "shrink." But he'd been right about one thing--Warfield knew his business; he had checked up on who the feds had sent into his bailiwick. "I guess it didn't work quite the way Brad meant for it to," Warfield said. "When she got released she took off after the Fusionists and never came back." "Did Brad Dennison report Paulie missing when she took him before?" Scully asked. "Not officially, no. He'd call me up and ask me off-the-record to have a friendly little chat with the Hays County sheriff, find out where Paulie was. I drove down there to Wimberley once and told Daisy to knock it off, threatened to *make* it official if she didn't quit running off with him. I thought at the time she took it to heart-- that was about six months ago, and I hadn't heard anything more about it until today." "Do you think Daisy Dennison is deranged?" Scully asked. "Is she dangerous?" Warfield chuckled. "My personal opinion, Daisy's about as dangerous as a newborn kitten. As for her being deranged, well, down here in the South we kind of cherish people who are little bit *off.* No, I think she's real confused and that led her to take up with some of the wrong people. And there's no doubt she's made one helluva mess of her life. But she's not clinically insane...in my admittedly non- medical opinion." "What about the storm?" Mulder asked. "How bad was it the night Paulie disappeared?" Warfield shrugged. "Bad enough to blow all my patio furniture into the pool--for the third time this month. It's thunderstorm season here; it's not uncommon for it to get kind of rough." "Sandra said she thought she heard a tornado." "Weather service didn't issue any warnings, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one," Warfield conceded. "Then again, like I said, it did get windy, and the kid's only ten." The food arrived, and the conversation reverted to small-talk. Mulder had already learned what he wanted to know anyway, so he didn't push it. Warfield seemed suitably impressed when Mulder ate a slice of habanero pepper--which was, in fact, exceedingly hot even by Mulder's standards--and survived the experience without bursting into flames. **** They checked in at a Days Inn not far away from the restaurant, and Mulder uncharacteristically offered to unload luggage for all three of them. Scully figured he was looking for some down-time alone with his own thoughts. Meanwhile, standing in the motel lobby waiting for the clerk to hand over the room keys, she decided to take advantage of the fact that she and Skinner were out of Mulder's earshot. "Sir, do you mind if I ask why you're here?" she asked. "If it reflects some lack of confidence in Agent Mulder or myself--" "Brad Dennison and I served in 'Nam together," Skinner said, not looking at her. "He called me personally. I gave him my word I'd handle it personally. If I weren't confident of your abilities, or Agent Mulder's, I would've selected other personnel." *Yes, but...* Scully thought. But nothing more seemed forthcoming. Then suddenly, Skinner asked, "What's Agent Mulder's theory?" "He says he hasn't ruled out anything," Scully said. "Does he think Paulie might've been abducted by aliens?" Scully drew breath for a response, then, with a shock, she realized Skinner was serious. And not because he thought Mulder was crazy. She collected her suddenly scattered wits. "Sir, it's been my experience that when Agent Mulder says he hasn't ruled out anything, he really means *anything.*" Skinner nodded. And by God, he actually looked *satisfied* with that answer. ************************************************************************ Part 4 May 21, 1997 Richardson, Texas Mulder tossed his crash bag on the bed and dragged his laptop computer out onto the desk, plugged the modem line into the phone jack, and booted the machine. He fished in a pocket for the decryption disc Sandra had given him, and dialed Scully on the cell phone. "So, Dr. Scully," he said, when she answered. "What *really* would happen if the sun went nova?" She sighed. "Don't worry about it, Mulder. By the time the Sun goes nova, it will already have swelled to several times its present size, and the heat will have killed every living thing on Earth. You and I won't know anything about it." "Huh," Mulder said, launching Netscape. "So if there really were an identical planet on the other side of the Sun, it would get fried, too?" "If it were in exactly the same orbit, exactly the same distance from the Sun, then it would be destroyed at exactly the same time." "Well, if it weren't the same distance from the sun, wouldn't we have seen it?" "Yes..." She hesitated. "Mulder, what are you doing?" He realized she could hear his modem rasp and whine in the background as the computer logged on to the Internet. "Research on the Fusionists," he said innocently. "Scully, don't you even *care* what I'm wearing? I'm crushed." He was still wearing his suit, sans the jacket. He let his voice drift into husky range. "I put on this Day-Glo-pink thong bikini just for you." "Don't stay up all night," she said, her tone long-suffering. She hung up. Mulder put the phone down, yanked off his tie and loaded Sandra's disc into the machine. But then he hesitated, his finger over the "enter" key. It had been a long time since his last encounter with Thomas Barstow and his band of Solar Fusionists, and the memory was not pleasant. Mulder got up to make a pot of coffee from the stuff the motel had laid out for its guests, to counteract the effects of the beer he'd drunk at dinner. But deep down inside, he knew he was just making excuses. He was hoping Daisy Dennison had taken Paulie. He was hoping she'd bring him back in the morning. He didn't want to know that Paulie had been taken by the same shadowy figures who had spirited Samantha away--deep down inside he was afraid of those figures and their power to inflict pain both physical and psychic. Above all, he was hoping he wouldn't have to go to Wimberley, Texas, and face Barstow again. He was hoping Scully would never have to know that he had once been recruited by the Fusionists, that in his befuddled youth, alone and disillusioned at Oxford, he had found their gentle lunacy attractive enough to undergo their grueling "purification." In the end, he had not proved crazy or dedicated enough for the Fusionists. They had slipped out of town without him, moved on to Brussels, so he had learned later. Or maybe it really had been true, as he had suspected, that he just had not been confused or lonely enough to seek redemption in Thomas Barstow's bed. Mulder was pretty sure that was why Barstow had approached him, all those years ago, at that free seminar. Barstow had never said so outright; he had never made an overt move. But the desire had been there, in the clasp of Barstow's hand, in the way he occasionally stroked Mulder's hair or let his hand brush his knee, rest on his shoulder. There'd been no seduction, not even an effort at seduction-- more like an invitation that Mulder had simply declined. It had been the summer before he turned twenty, long before he recovered the recollections that had led him to search for Samantha in the company of extraterrestrial beings. At the time, he'd had no particular opinion about the existence of life elsewhere in the universe. He had read a flyer on a bulletin board in the library announcing that "some who know of beings who dwell elsewhere" would tell their story. He had drifted there the following evening because he was vaguely curious, because he was bored and alone and had nothing better to do. And because the young woman who had been posting the flyers, Phyllis Wilding, had been pretty. Barstow had showed off some blurry, unconvincing photos of objects in the sky--images Mulder nowadays could unmask as frauds in a heartbeat. But he hadn't known that much about it, then, and the photos had seemed real enough. They had sparked an odd, unfocused anxiety in him, and he had been content to hear Barstow argue that the crews on those ships were amiable, enlightened creatures who were willing to save humans from themselves, if only the humans would straighten out their act. Barstow, of course, had claimed to know exactly *how* to get one's act straight, which Mulder had been willing to consider, inasmuch as he had not had the vaguest idea himself. Out of the thirty-or-so people who had showed up to hear what Barstow had to say about life among the stars, it had been Mulder to whom the guru had been drawn. It had been Mulder he had touched, Barstow's fingers gently lifting his chin so that he could look into his eyes. It had been Mulder who had been invited back after the seminar. Mulder remembered that touch, the fingers laid so lightly and warmly along his jaw. He had not found it arousing, but there'd been a tenderness in it that had, just for a heartbeat, seemed to fill an emptiness he had not even identified in himself. With Barstow, among the Fusionists, he had felt safe, welcome, nurtured for the first time since Samantha had disappeared. And for the last time. He had been desolate when they had left without him. Unlike Barstow, there'd been nothing subtle about Phyllis Wilding's invitation, and Mulder hadn't had any qualms about succumbing to her seduction. The relationship had been physically intimate without any particular emotional commitment, but Mulder had trusted her enough to confide in her about his lonely adolescence, his sense of being out of place with his family and with the world. He had thought at the time her attachment to Barstow was slight, but it was strong enough that she went with him to Brussels. But his grief at the Fusionists' departure had been about more than just Phyllis Wilding. He had never analyzed carefully why the Fusionists' life-style and ideology had appealed to him--he suspected now it would only make him feel like a gold-plated damnfool to discover the answer now. And he did not need another round of that, not while he was still trying to live down the gold-plated damnfoolishness of consenting to Goldstein's "treatment." Whatever Goldstein had done to him didn't appear to have any effect on him physically or intellectually, but the overpowering emotions of it had drained him. God, he felt so tired all the time. He had not said so, rarely even admitted it to himself, but his energy seemed always to be leaking right through his feet, soaking into the ground. And Scully was with him, and Skinner, and he just didn't need it. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't be that bad. Maybe the fusionists had evolved to the point where he could look at them more objectively than he thought. Judging from what little he had seen on the Internet, Barstow's teachings had changed much since Mulder's last encounter with him--the rhetoric had taken a disquieting turn toward the apocalyptic. Mulder'd had the feeling, reading it, of a clock ticking down the last few seconds before the alarm went off. The Usenet messages had been peppered with phrases like "how much time is left?" and "this could be the last chance." Barstow had not talked much, back in the 1980s, about the end of the world, except in scientific terms, explaining that naturally, some day, the sun would explode. He had not, back then, seemed to have some idea of exactly *when* the cataclysm would strike, and now it sounded as if maybe he thought he did. Mulder shook off a mental image of a cult in Apison, Tennessee, that had opted to end it all recently, to plunge into the next life before the present one had run its course. He knew he could take a pass on it. He could go through the motions of looking for Daisy, and for Paulie, without focusing on the cult at all. But he had promised Sandra he would do everything he could. He knew better than anyone what that little girl was feeling. Paulie had been left in her care, and he was gone, despite her best efforts to stop it. Mulder had been there and done that, and he had the wounds to prove it, wounds that still bled so hard he no longer even hoped they'd ever heal. Then there was "the Moon Man." That Daisy would send her daughter a picture of a face right off the cover of a Whitley Streiber book meant nothing whatever, but Sandra had said she had seen him. Mulder didn't think she was making it up. So what if, after he left Oxford, Thomas Barstow *had* made contact with extraterrestrial beings? Or the beings had found Barstow? The coffeemaker gurgled, finishing its cycle. Mulder poured. He sat down at the desk and ran the disc. **** All religion begins with the cry, "Help!" - William James **** "HELIOS IS THE KEY!" The words glared off the screen in flickering, fluorescent green and yellow as if the font on the Web page were afire. It glowed over an image of the Sun's flame licking at the Earth much like the one Daisy Dennison had constructed on the roof of the atrium at her home. Mulder blinked and resisted the temptation to turn down the brightness on his laptop. "In the sun's light, imperfections are revealed," the text went on. "In the sun's heat, the unclean can be purified. (Copyright, 1997)" *Yeah, that's a hot property,* Mulder thought. *Better file paperwork with the Library of Congress real quick.* The table of contents for the links on the page that followed was long--Mulder wished he had ready access to a printer, but he figured he could borrow one at the bureau office in the morning. He read on. "Angels are real and walk among us." "We can be saved from our dying Earth." "The ONLY WAY to walk with the angels." "What the angels demand of us." "Who are the angels, and why have they come?" Mulder stopped and clicked on the last link, curious. "Angels are not imaginary spiritual entities, as you probably have been told. They are real, physical beings who only appear to be magical because they are so much more highly evolved than human creatures. In fact, what we, with our poor perceptive powers, call angels actually are the inhabitants of another world, who live RIGHT HERE IN OUR OWN SOLAR SYSTEM! Their world, on the other side of the Sun, we share is called Helios--" *Aliens who speak Greek,* Mulder thought. "--and these angels have graciously allowed us to call them Heliosians..." They hadn't had a name when Mulder had known Barstow--maybe they just hadn't come down from on high and told Barstow their name until later. "The Heliosians," the text continued, "have the ability to change shape so that they can look like any of us. When they choose to, they can live underwater, and they have amazing healing powers that defy human belief." Mulder just stopped his mouth from dropping open. Had Barstow had an encounter with a shape-changing alien like Jeremiah Smith? "The Heliosians once came to Earth in great numbers, before it became so polluted, violent and corrupt that they no longer could stand it. They know there are those of us here who believe in the goodness of light and who will MAKE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE and yield ourselves to Heliosian ways. They have come back now because they know that the Sun soon will die. Although we are poor beasts by comparison, the Heliosians are compassionate and will try to save us...BUT ONLY THOSE OF US WHO SHOW WE DESERVE IT! "They have marked those they believe have promise with a special tag placed at the back of the neck..." *Christ!* Like Scully's implant? Mulder felt his blood turning cold. "If you have been marked, THERE ISN'T MUCH TIME! You must embrace the Heliosians and their ways, AND SOON!" Mulder clicked the "back" button and went to "What the angels demand of us." The first part was the purification process he had already experienced himself--sleep deprivation, fasting and such. Pretty mundane stuff for a religious cult. Then he read, "It is imperative that prospective angel companions prepare themselves by reducing ALL passions to nothing. You must submerge yourself in Heliosian ways and learn to care for nothing except the needs of the Angel masters--only in that way can you come to comprehend them and become one of them." *Now there's a justification for brainwashing,* Mulder thought. "At the appointed time, we will shed our animal shells, and the Heliosians will see to it that we are delivered to a place safe from the Sun's wrath and away from the corruption of our poor, bewildered world. You must be prepared to REDUCE YOUR BODY TO ATOMS--" *Like with a bomb attached to your own chest, maybe?* "--so that you can be delivered to the angels' realm, far out along the astral plane. DON'T BE AFRAID! This is the way to a new life, where spiritual perfection awaits! There will be no pain, no hunger, no thirst, no fatigue, and all souls will be equal because all are exactly the same! "What will be the right time? A time of many storms on the face of the Sun, what our scientists, in their myopic understanding of the universe, have called 'sunspots.' The angels are sure to call to us by causing great storms on the Earth, as well. One of the common methods the Heliosian angels use to take their chosen ones away with them is a whirlwind..." *A tornado?* "If you have been marked, you have already been taken to the Heliosian plane of existence! You may not remember it clearly in your animal state, but YOU KNOW WHAT AWAITS!" *Shit,* Mulder thought. Just what *had* Barstow encountered? **** Red and yellow, kill a fellow. - Mnemonic used to distinguish between coral snakes and king snakes **** May 22, 1997 While Skinner and some forensics staff resumed going over the greenbelt behind the Dennisons' house, Mulder wandered back into Daisy's "temple." He had a better idea what he was looking for now, and nobody was paying him any attention, so he figured he could do as he pleased. He was studying the texts on the bookshelf over the desk again when a light breeze at his back told him someone had come in. It was Sandra, still clutching her brother's teddy bear. Her eyes were swollen, downcast. Mulder went to her and hunkered down to meet her at own eye level. "My Dad doesn't want me to talk to you," she said, her voice low. "I know. And I don't want to get you in trouble." "Do you really shrink people's heads? Like in *Beetle Juice?* My Dad said you shrink heads." Mulder smiled gently. He remembered the scene from the film--while sitting in hell's anteroom, Bill Murray's head had been magically shrunk, right on his shoulders. "No. That's just what some people call psychologists. Do you know what a psychologist is?" She nodded, still not looking at him. "The people who took Mama to the nut house." He suppressed a sigh. "Sandra, people can get sick in their minds, just like in--" "I know what made my Mama get sick." She seemed so fragile today; he had thought last night that she was stronger. She wanted to talk--he sensed it. Mentally, he chucked what he had been thinking of telling her. Time for asking, not telling. "What was it?" "When the snake bit her. She almost died, and then...her mind got sick." "What kind of snake?" "Coral snake. I thought it was so pretty, and I was going to pick it up, but Mama reached out and pulled me away. And the snake bit her, and it was poisonous. And she and Paulie almost died." *And left you with a truckload of guilt.* "Did the snake bite Paulie, too?" Sandra shook her head. "He wasn't borned yet." The part of him that was always a working psychologist noted the baby- talk use of the word "borned"--retrogression to a younger age as a result of stress. Sandra said, "Paulie turned the poison to water to save Mama's life." *Dune* again. Paul Atreides' mother had taken poison while carrying a child, and the baby had been born with special powers of observation and a kind of clairvoyance. Christ--Daisy had thought her son was the Kwisatz Haderach, the mystical prophet of the desert planet. "Sandra, does Paulie have special powers?" Mulder asked. "He has the 'memory of the future,'" Sandra said gravely. *Jesus, she's quoting it right out of the book.* "Did you ever hear him tell the future?" "He knew there was going to be a bad storm. He was scared of the storm." Not exactly conclusive. "Any other times?" "All the time. Like he knew they were going to make me Webmaster at school, and one time he knew that our dog was going to die. Paulie always knows." Mulder nodded, thinking hard. He might not get another chance to ask her anything. He said, "Did the Moon Man say anything when he came into the house?" "He said not to be scared. He said everything would be all right, and Paulie would come home some day." Mulder held his breath, stopped himself in place to prevent Sandra from seeing him shiver as something like an icy finger ran up his spine. Softly, he said, "We're going to keep looking for him, Sandra." He knew better than to promise her anything more--it was no good for her, and worse yet for himself. "You'd better go, now," he said, "before your Dad finds out you're in here." **** Dallas County Morgue Dallas, Texas Scully sighed heavily and tucked a loose lock of hair behind her ear as she heard Mulder enter the autopsy bay. "You were right," she said, without looking up. "The bomb was hanging on a chain around her neck. I found pieces of the chain embedded in the body cavity." "Guess her atoms didn't fly high enough to get caught in the Heliosians' tractor beam," Mulder said. Not funny. Scully glared at him. He shrugged. "Do we know who she is?" Scully asked. "The car's registered to a Lauren van Hauw, formerly of Louisville, Kentucky. Her family reported her missing--for the second time--about six years ago. The first time, she was gone about six months, then suddenly reappeared in the middle of a Presbyterian church service in Orlando, Florida, where she collapsed. It seems nobody's quite sure what happened to her. She claimed she didn't remember where she'd been. The Richardson police are checking with the family, hoping for a positive ID. What else?" he asked, reading her mood. Scully handed an evidence vial across the body to him, and he took it. She didn't have to say what it was--she knew he'd recognize it immediately as the same kind of microchip implant that had been found at the back of her own neck. "And a malignant naso-pharyngeal mass," Scully said quietly. "Just like mine." He said nothing, frowning at the chip inside the vial with a dark, haunted expression. She noticed he looked tired, a little rumpled. It was all right with her if he didn't want to talk about implants or cancers; she didn't want to talk about them either. "The only other notable finding," Scully went on, "was evidence of recent anal penetration. Must have been pretty, rough, too--she was bleeding a little before she died." She had thought that might get a reaction out of him, but it didn't, not even a raised eyebrow. He wasn't surprised. "I talked to Thomas Barstow's wife," he said. "She says their six- year marriage was never consummated...vaginally. They divorced in 1978 when he lost his job as a campus police officer at the University of Central Texas. He was discovered engaging in anonymous sex with a male student through a hole cut in the wall of a bathroom stall in the Alice Agnuson Center for Humanities. It seems sodomy is illegal in Texas--both he and the object of his...affections were arrested. He got six months' probation. Before the probation was up, he was admitted to a private hospital. The diagnosis was depression." "You think Barstow's having sex with the cult members? I thought you said chastity and reducing the passions to nothing were major tenets of the Fusionists' beliefs--or does that only apply to the flock, not the shepherd?" Mulder shrugged again. "The whole sexual angle of the Fusionists' line on that Web page is a psychological morass of conflicting notions. They do emphasize chastity, but then Barstow's writings go on and on about how physical contact between individuals of either gender is neither about pleasure nor procreation--which opens up the question of just what the hell he *does* think it's about." "How long did you stay up reading all that stuff?" "Long enough to know it's going to take a lot longer to get a handle on it." He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "This is a guess, not a theory," he said. "Barstow's wife said one of the things that attracted her to him was his deep, abiding religious devotion. He indicated to her that he was a virgin when they married and very proud of it. You have to wonder if he's got a fixation on anal sex stemming from the belief that as long as it's not vaginal sex with a woman, he's still a virgin. Or that he believes sex is dirty--and that by making it literally dirty through physical contact with excrement, he's feeding some neurosis about the sex act." He paused, thinking, then sighed heavily. "Don't take any of that to the bank," he said. "I'm just throwing that together off the cuff. Could be total bullshit." Scully doubted that. Mulder was too good at profiling for it to be anything like total bullshit. She noticed he had a couple of books tucked under his arm. "So what have you got?" "Daisy Dennison's personal hard-bound copy of *Dune*--complete with her extensive marginal notations, which I haven't had time to study yet. And one of her sketchbooks." "And?" He set the novel down on a counter across the room, came back with the sketchbook. Scully removed her gloves, came around to the same side of the table and took it from him. The book was divided up into sections labeled "My visions," "My angels," and "The signs." The "visions" were much like the stained-glass pattern in the atrium, but some featured people standing on the Earth's surface wearing black "stillsuits." In the section labeled "The signs" there was a series of drawings of people being attacked by swarms of bees and left dying on the ground, their contorted faces and hands covered with gruesome, swollen boils. Scully realized, to her discomfort, that Mulder might well believe Daisy had drawn something real. Under "My angels," the drawings showed typical alien figures with gray skin, large black eyes and elongated fingers on some pages, but other pages showed human figures in the process of changing the shape and look of their faces. And Paulie Dennison, his body wreathed in a blue aura. "Okay, Mulder," Scully said, feeling suddenly very tired. "Let the other shoe drop." He reached over and turned pages. Scully gaped. The picture on the page where he had stopped was of another child wreathed in blue, floating in the air. The child looked uncannily like photos Scully had seen of Samantha Mulder. ************************************************************************ Part 5 May 21, 1997 Richardson, Texas "There are cases," Scully told Skinner, "of people who received similar implants creating a mythology around their experience. The MUFON women in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for example. Duane Barry had similar implants, although in his case, the evidence is inconclusive." She glanced at Mulder. "We have some difference of opinion about by whom...or by what these people may--I emphasize *may*--have been abducted." They had returned to the bureau's regional office in Dallas to meet up with Skinner; Mulder was printing out reams and reams of material from the Helios Web page as the two of them recapped for the A.D. what they had learned during the day. "But then," Scully went on, "there's no evidence at hand to suggest that Daisy Dennison or any of the other cult members were ever abducted at all." "Yes, there is," Skinner said, his voice low. "About eleven years ago. She said she thought it was a dream." Mulder looked up, wide-eyed, expectant. "Did she remember any of it?" *Hope springs eternal,* Scully thought. "Not much," Skinner said. "Just being in a place she didn't recognize, a vague sense of having been...examined by someone she didn't know. She was gone about a month." "No one knows where she was taken?" Mulder asked. The A.D. shook his head. Mulder said, "It could be that all these cult members have had a shared experience that drew them together." "Meaning they're abductees?" Scully asked. She knew he was avoiding the word "alien" because Skinner was there. She also knew it was what Mulder was thinking, but she couldn't argue it effectively without making him look like a damnfool in front of the boss. "Van Hauw was missing for a while," Mulder said steadily, not backing down a bit. "So was Daisy. The women in Allentown were drawn together after having been missing briefly. Why not these people?" "There's very little evidence--" "We just haven't *found* any evidence of it, yet, because we haven't been looking. It's worth checking out, Scully--all these women disappear, then they reappear with microchips in their necks? That's a helluva coincidence." *Yes, but...* "Mulder--" Skinner stopped her, breaking in. "Look, I'm willing to hear arguments that Dahlia took her son or that aliens took him or that he ran off on his own or was delivered to the Land of Oz by a twister," the A.D. said, "but none of that explains who killed Lauren van Hauw." "Fingerprints on the detonator?" Scully asked. "Or the car?" Skinner shook his head. "There aren't any readable prints on the detonator, and the only prints in the car are van Hauw's." "What did the Hays County sheriff's department say?" Mulder put in. "Nobody at the Solar Fusionist compound admits to having seen or heard from Dahlia in more than a week," Skinner said. "They say they haven't seen Paulie in months." "So now what?" Scully asked. Mulder shrugged. "We go to Wimberley and try to find Daisy. If we can't find her, we go ask Thomas Barstow about Daisy, Paulie and Lauren van Hauw, listen to what he says and see where it takes us. One of you is going to have to drive--I need to read Daisy's book." Skinner headed for the door. Mulder said, "Sir, do you know Bradley Dennison well enough to talk him into letting Sandra see a counselor?" The A.D. froze, in that ramrod way he had. Without turning to face Mulder, he said, "You think there's something wrong with her?" "I think what's happened to her brother has been very traumatic for her. She's grieving and frightened, and I don't think she feels comfortable talking about that with her father." Scully saw it, too, this time--at the word "father," Skinner's boot- camp-straight back went even stiffer. "I'll talk to him," Skinner said, and he left. Into the silence that remained, Scully said, "She really got to you, didn't she?" "Just because I don't use it every day doesn't mean I'm not still a good psychologist," Mulder said, his tone acid. For a moment she had forgotten how close to the bone these cases cut for him. "I didn't mean it like that," she said. He held a brief, hard, angry silence. Then he sighed. Mulder's temper went off like a roman candle, but he didn't stay mad. She'd always liked that about him. "Yeah," he said finally, resigned to it. "She got to me." **** Mulder had stayed at the bureau office after Scully and Skinner left; she didn't hear him come back until after nine o'clock. She waited, expecting a knock, a phone call. When none came, finally, just before eleven, she went to the connecting door and knocked. "It's not locked," he called. He was lying on the bed, pillows piled up to support his head and shoulders. "Are you okay?" she asked. "I wanted to apologize for what I said earlier." He held up a bottle of Corona beer. "I'm getting over it," he said. She knew he didn't drink much, and almost never alone in his room while on a case--well, there'd been that one time, in Comity, but she couldn't throw stones on that one. Cautiously, she said, "That's not your usual brand." "Hank's Drag-a-Bag doesn't carry Samuel Adams Lager." He took a swallow. "But this stuff's not bad." She sat on the edge of the bed. "You going to drink the whole six- pack?" "Doubtful. Four's about my limit." "Perfect--two's about mine." She reached over him for a bottle. He handed her an opener hanging on his key ring. An awkward silence fell between them while Scully opened her beer and took a drink. Finally, she said, "Do you want to tell me what's bothering you?" "Not particularly." She shrugged. "Anything I can do?" "No, thanks." Scully said, "You really think there's a connection between the Fusionists and our favorite government conspiracy?" "That's what we need to try to find out in Wimberley." He paused, then went on, "Barstow's Web page talks like he knows something about The Project, the hybrids, the clones. Shape-shifting creatures who can breathe underwater without scuba gear. Daisy's got a picture that could be my sister, and another of people being attacked by bees. Bees, Scully." "We don't know for sure that there *are* any clones or hybrids. And there've been 'killer bees' in the U.S. for years. Most of them are in Texas. We don't know that that means anything--it's probably just a manifestation of Daisy's mental instability." "We can't ignore it, either." He was right. "I suppose not," she said. "Look, Scully, I'd just as soon this stayed between us for now, OK?" *Here it comes.* "All right." "The way Sandra described what she saw the night Paulie disappeared is a helluva lot like a recurring dream I have of Samantha's abduction." His tone was flat, almost listless. "A dream is not a memory, Mulder," she said. "I know that. And, Jung notwithstanding, brain chemistry may well account for the reason why dreams are archetypal, meaning it's not at all unusual for two individuals halfway across the globe to have almost exactly the same dream, even at exactly the time. Probability theory covers that quite nicely." Dimly, an alarm bell went off in Scully's mind. She had occasionally known Mulder to be downright rational about his sister's disappearance, but he'd never been this unemotional about it. Something was wrong. "Sandra and I might've had similar dreams," Mulder went on. "Daisy might've had a similar dream and drawn Samantha's picture as a result of it. It could be just a dream," he went on. "It could be just a coincidence. But what if it's not? What if Daisy or the Fusionists know something that could lead me to my sister?" God, he was desperate--so desperate he wasn't even letting himself feel it anymore. "Mulder, you're building yourself up for another disappointment," she said. "Don't you think you've had enough?" "I've had enough to the fourth power. But I can't give up on her, Scully. Could you, if it was your sister?" "I think there's a point beyond which my sister wouldn't want me to pursue it any farther--a point at which it began to hurt me more than it could help her." "Okay," he said. "We have different views of it, then." There were times when she liked Mulder's willingness to agree to disagree with her. This was not one of them. Still, she knew better than to push him. That was more likely to harden his resolve than to win him to her viewpoint. "You know more than you're saying about the Fusionists, don't you?" she asked. A long silence. *This* was what he had not wanted to talk about. He sighed. "Would it surprise you to know that I actually care what you think of me?" She crooked an eyebrow. "In some areas, yes." "Well, I do." Another silence. He said, "Did you ever have a time in your youth when you were just...lost?" She drank some beer. "My youth was about rebellion, not confusion." "Well, I went through a period when I tried everything from transcendental meditation to Zen Buddhism to Wicca." "Solar Fusionism?" He nodded. "I didn't know what the hell I was looking for. I'm still not sure. But when I started to remember something about Samantha, I think I finally figured out what the question is." She didn't want to judge him on this--besides, it could end up being useful to solving the case. "Tell me what it was like." He shrugged. "Like a lot of other cults. Ascetic, ritualized, isolated. It wasn't anything like as Delphic back then as it is now. Just a lot of lost, hurting people, trying to atone for past mistakes or make sense out of the future. Me, I just think I needed the structure, the focus. The feeling of purpose." It was hard to imagine that Mulder had ever lacked focus. She'd seen a picture taken of him in his Oxford days, and reflecting on it, she realized he *had* had a sort of lost, waiflike look in the photo. She had assumed it was just normal teen-age angst. But then, very little about Mulder was normal. His face in the photo had been all wide, dark eyes, like an animal frozen in the glare of sudden headlights. "What purpose?" she asked. "Making ourselves worthy." "Of what?" He gave her a sad, cynical smile. "Angels. Only Barstow wasn't calling them that, back then." "And that made sense to you?" "Compared to what? Putting a little wooden pyramid under your bed? Collecting crystals? The brief success of Peter Frampton?" "Did it work?" "For a while. It was easy. I needed something easy. Something I didn't have to think about. Something that would let somebody else do the thinking and make me feel like I could just follow the recipe and everything in my life would cook up right. Hell, I could use a little of that right now." *Who couldn't?* "But you didn't stay with them?" "They left town without me. I don't know why." "Is it just me, or are you a little nervous about seeing them again?" She had a sudden thought. "Did Barstow try to--" While she searched for a way to put it diplomatically, he got it. "Thomas didn't try to fuck me," he said. "And even if I did think he'd try something, I suspect the gun would serve as a deterrent. Besides, I doubt I'm as delicately pretty as I was at nineteen." Scully heard a note of bitterness in his tone. She knew Mulder's opinion of his own appearance was just a notch above putting a bag over his head. Nevermind that the whole damned secretarial pool in the Hoover building swooned at his approach. She regarded his complete failure to notice that reaction as rather endearing. She thought of the Oxford photo again. He'd been even thinner then, gangly as a giraffe. Not bad-looking, but she preferred the adult Mulder, with his catlike, languid grace, certainty and intelligence shining in his eyes. A man who made his living playing intellectual chess with people who were lethal, and who could be lethal himself if he had to be. "Then what are you afraid of?" she asked. He thought for a minute. "I'm not sure. Maybe that the Fusionists really do know 'the way.' The mere fact that I ever found their life- style appealing--that's a little scary, don't you think?" She did, but she wasn't sure she wanted to say so. He frowned at his beer. Rather dreamily, he said, "I don't like these bottles. They don't have labels you can peel off." The alcohol was getting to him. Scully looked at the bottle in her hand. The "label" was painted on the glass. She shrugged. "You can return them for a deposit," she said, reading. "Like the old Coke bottles." He shrugged. "Scully," he said, then paused again. She waited him out. "Why don't you just tell me," he said. "Just get it out, whatever you're thinking about me, since the thing with Goldstein." She heard in his tone that this had been festering painfully, like a thorn buried in a lion's paw. It hadn't really occurred to her that he might be embarrassed about the incident and that being embarrassed about it might bother him. Humiliation had always seemed to roll right off Mulder like rain off a steep roof. "You've been dancing around it for weeks," he went on. "Like you're afraid I can't take it. Just say it, will you?" She drew a long breath to steady herself. The truth was, she *was* afraid he couldn't take it. He had seemed delicate afterward, had seemed as if he didn't want to talk about it. And she had not felt confident that she had the strength, the focus, to deal with his needs, whatever they had been. She'd been occupied with her own problems, the early signs that her cancer might be spreading. But he was probably right--not to talk things out wasn't constructive. "I think you should've known better," she said. "In fact, I think you *did* know better, but you leaped into it anyway. I don't understand that." He was waiting her out, now, silent and tense. "It was a medical procedure, Mulder. I don't understand why you didn't trust me enough to ask me about it." "What would you have said?" he asked dryly. "That it was dangerous and highly unlikely to be effective. It *was* dangerous. And it was ineffective." "You'd have put me in a straitjacket to keep me from trying it." "I just might. And I would've been right, and I wish I had." "Because you don't trust *me*." "Was I wrong about the procedure?" "That's twenty-twenty hindsight, Scully. It's not fair. And it's beside my point, anyway. The point is, now that it's done, you're using it as proof that I'm some kind of total, fucking loon." "I don't think that, Mulder. You know, I'd like to dismiss you that way. But it's just too easy an answer, and there's nothing easy about you." She sighed and reached for another beer. "We may disagree about the nature of what we're looking at--I don't know what we're onto; I never have, and I'm not sure you do, either. But it's always been clear to me that you were onto something, even before my time. The evidence is confused and circumstantial at best--" "When it doesn't just disappear," he growled. "Yeah, there's that. But there's too much of it to just shrug it off entirely." She lifted her beer and drank. "I don't think you're crazy," she said. "But I worry that you're chasing after what you want so headlong that you may end up destroying yourself before you catch up to it. And what will that serve?" "If you don't move fast, it's gone before you arrive," he murmured. *Maybe it was never there,* she thought. "It won't make any difference what's gone or what remains if you're dead before you arrive." He fell quiet again, his expression dark, haunted. Finally, he said, "Thanks, Scully." "Why don't you look any happier?" she asked. He shrugged. "Because I'm tired and well on my way to being drunk." She got up, taking her beer, then flipped the edge of the bedspread over his long legs. "Get some sleep, Mulder," she said, pseudo- sternly. He sighed heavily. "You, too." ************************************************************************ Part 6 So maybe it's better when I leave, I leave with no lies Than leave with no truth. So goodnight Dallas... --Carlene Carter May 23, 1997 The drive from Dallas to Central Texas was dull. Flat, featureless prairie land running by, punctuated by one small city after another, each nearly identical to the next. The weather didn't help--they drove under gray, lowering skies that threatened but didn't deliver rain. Even the atmosphere in the car was dreary. Skinner had gone back into Sphinx-like silence; Mulder was spread out with his feet up on the back seat, Daisy Dennison's copy of *Dune* propped on his knees, frowning over the highlighted passages and cramped scribbles in the margins. Scully had barely glanced at it. If Mulder had any idea what any of it meant, he hadn't said so and didn't appear eager to. The only slightly lighter moment was a stop for gas in a place that advertised itself as the town of Carl's Corner. The town apparently consisted only of one large Fina truck stop that had decorated its roof with gigantic, colorful statues of dancing frogs playing musical instruments. "Beats the hell out of the world's largest rubber-band ball in Oklahoma," Mulder said, squinting up at the dancing frogs. He munched on a Milky Way, leaning on the car while Skinner paid for the gas. "You actually stopped to see the world's largest rubber-band ball?" Scully asked, opening a can of Diet Coke. "Sure. Why not?" "Pressing commitments elsewhere, perhaps?" "Not at the time, no. Besides, it was the world's *largest* rubber- band ball." He chewed chocolate, swallowed, then said, "Did you know that the world headquarters of the Mutual UFO Network is located in Seguin, Texas, just a little south of Wimberley? They have a museum." A huge rubber-band ball sounded more appealing. "How nice for the good people of Seguin, Texas. Thinking of making a little side trip?" "Already seen it." "Why am I not surprised." "It's not bad, for a little roadside tourist trap." She was ready to change the subject. "What do Daisy's notes say?" Skinner was on his way back. Mulder cast him a hooded glance. "A lot of weird shit," he said, and retreated to the car without elaborating. **** There was a point beyond which Mulder didn't have to read Daisy's notes. He could just rely on his eidetic memory of having read the novel himself and put the mythology together from the jagged pieces of Daisy's delusions. He could see the words on the page in his head, could remember them exactly, more clearly than he wanted to. Beside an underlined passage referring to a "poison sniffer" that checked for toxins in the Atreides family's food, Daisy had written, "Find one of these because of the hormones in the milk. These 'additives' will kill us all." Later a note: "I must make dew collectors. There isn't enough water here. The grass is dying." The notes were a fun-house-mirror glimpse into a nightmarishly dysfunctional individual, a woman gripped by paranoia and seizing every possible nuance of a fiction in an effort to make sense out of something, *anything.* But much more frightening, the thing Mulder suspected would give him nightmares for days, were the notations Daisy had written about her son--the child she thought had transmuted a snake's poison while inside her body and acquired from the venom strange, prescient powers. Who she believed was the "Kwisatz Haderach," the god-prophet of a desert world. A passage detailing how one of the main characters had delivered a son, rather than a daughter as ordered by the sisters of a strange cult drew the note: "Yes! I knew there was something wrong! He should have been a female, and the church elders know my willfulness has done damage." Somewhat later, Daisy had written, "I, too, have a pit of blackness inside me where I cannot look, but that Paulie can see." And then finally, an actual clue emerged from the raving. Highlighted in fluorescent orange: "I'm afraid of my son; I fear his strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me." And beside it in red ballpoint: "Paulie will know, when it is TIME. I shouldn't be afraid, but I am. I must take him to see Pater, and soon." Who was Pater? Did she mean Barstow? Mulder's eyes were tired--reading in the moving car was a strain. He leaned his head back for a moment, closed his eyes, and another passage from the novel floated up out of his memory. *Great Mother! He's the Kwisatz Haderach!* It was a helluva thing for little Paulie Dennison to try to live up to. Mulder did not envy the boy. Even if Paulie had only been taken by his mother, they had to find him, and fast, before she left him so confused he would never get a grasp of his own identity. Mulder had been trying not to think about the picture of Samantha in Daisy's sketchbook. He'd been too close too many times to believe in this possible connection--so many times he had been convinced he was perched on the edge of finding her, or at least finding out what had happened to her, only to be bitterly disappointed. He'd been there again and again. He was not inclined to take this new tidbit, tantalizing though it might be, too seriously. It could be another mirage. And yet he could feel the old adrenaline trickling back into his system. The game was afoot--he could smell it. He had that sense he got, the one that told him he was close to something. Nevermind that he didn't know what he was close to; when had he ever? Whatever motor it was that drove him--he had never quite worked up the courage to ask himself any truly hard questions about the nature of it--he could feel it revving up, start to crank over. It hadn't been started in a while, but to his surprise, it still had gas in it. He supposed he ought to have felt relieved about that. But the same engine had driven him to Goldstein. God knew what it was driving him to now. That was the reason he had started swilling down beer last night--to block out thoughts of Samantha, to dull himself against his dreams and his memories. It hadn't worked. He was revving. He still wanted to find her. He wanted it desperately. The trouble was, he had lost his certainty that it was possible. Always it had been just out of his reach. The failures hurt so. And after everything he had seen, everything that had happened, even if he did find her, how would he ever know if the Samantha he found was real? He was certain he never would, and that doubt was eating him away like an acid. Mulder already knew what he was going to have to do to find Paulie Dennison, much less to find a connection to Samantha. He had to get into the Solar Fusionists' compound--and probably not just by walking through the gate with his badge in his hand. The very thought made him tired, with a penetrating fatigue that seemed to extend all the way down into his bones. But what if Daisy Dennison actually had seen Samantha? What if she or Barstow or both of them really did have a connection to forces, whether extraterrestrials or government minions, who knew where Samantha was? Forces who knew what had happened to her...and to Scully? He couldn't ignore this. No matter how bone- or soul-weary he was, it had to be pursued, and somehow, he had to find the energy, the strength, to go after it full-bore. Even if Scully fought him, even if Skinner forbade it, even if Men-in-Black with Uzis stood in his way. He just didn't know how many miles that engine had left in it. **** All organized religions face a common problem, a tender spot through which we may enter and shift them to our designs: How do they distinguish hubris from revelation? - Frank Herbert **** Their hotel was in San Marcos, a university town about fifteen miles from Wimberley with a peaceful look and an appealing river running through it. As Skinner turned off the interstate, they passed a billboard touting something called Aquarena Springs--"See Ralph, the swimming pig!" The billboard showed a glass-bottomed boat with a large, pink pig paddling along beside it. The expression "when pigs fly" popped involuntarily into Scully's mind. She was tired. She'd been bored all the way down from Dallas, and it had worn away at her energy. It struck her now, as they pulled into the drive at their hotel, that all three of them had a dangerously personal stake in this case: Mulder because of his shared experience with Sandra; Scully herself because of Lauren van Hauw's implant and cancer; Skinner because of his relationship with Bradley and/or Daisy Dennison--whatever that relationship or relationships had been. Scully had been studying the medical and police records of Daisy Dennison and Lauren van Hauw. The hell of it was, neither told her much more than what she'd already known. Van Hauw had been reported missing from her home in Kentucky in 1972; her hospital records showed she had been suffering from dehydration, exhaustion and exposure, but there was nothing to suggest *what* she had been exposed to, and it appeared nobody had thought to look for a mark at the back of her neck. After that, except for buying in 1990 the car in which she'd been found dead, she might as well have dropped off the face of the Earth. She hadn't voted, hadn't married, and her driver's license had expired five years ago. Daisy's records weren't much more revealing. She had been a nurse in Vietnam--Scully noted that she had been there about the same time as Skinner. After returning to the States she had married Brad Dennison. In 1986, she had sought the assistance of an infertility specialist in an effort to get pregnant. But then she'd never showed up for the tests that were ordered. In 1987, she had delivered Sandra, everything seeming perfectly normal, the father listed on the birth records as Brad Dennison. Three years later, Daisy had gotten pregnant again. And five months into the pregnancy, she'd been bitten by a poisonous coral snake, which had caused complications, but she and the baby both had made a complete recovery. Despite Skinner's assertion that she had been missing eleven years ago, there was nothing in any official documents to support that claim. Nothing more at all, in fact, until she had been admitted to the "shrink tank" in 1994. Contrary to Brad's statement, the hospital reported she had been admitted and treated for anxiety, not depression. The records said nothing about a lesbian love affair with a Solar Fusionist cult member but did note that she had a pathological distrust of men. And a fixation on anal sex. The only good news was that neither Daisy Dennison nor Lauren van Hauw seemed to have much in common with Dana Scully--other than having been missing for a while, not remembering where they'd been taken during that missing time, and a strange object implanted at the backs of their necks that might or might not be related to terminal cancer. Minor details like that. Assuming Pendrell's evaluation of the chip found in her own neck had been right, Scully couldn't imagine how the chip could've been a cause, even indirectly, of her cancer. But the nameless man who had spoken to her at the Hansen's disease research facility in West Virginia had darkly hinted that she might've been exposed to *something,* and depending on what that something was, that might be a cause. And she had every reason to believe that exposure would've occurred at the same time as the chip's implantation. But she still didn't know *why* the chip had been placed there. She remembered just enough of her abduction to be reasonably sure she had been subjected to some kind of medical procedure. She just didn't know whether looking at more women dying like the ones in Allentown would tell her anything she didn't already know from looking at her own X-rays, PET scans and test results. She did know that she didn't have much time left to waste--if this was a wild-goose chase, it could be a costly one. Skinner parked the car. Stiffly, Scully got out, glad to *be* somewhere instead of on the way to somewhere. She watched idly while the A.D. popped the trunk open. Mulder unreeled himself from the back seat. He stretched luxuriously, like a cat. Scully wished she could do that, but she suspected her spine just wasn't long enough to give the gesture the same effect. She was so tired of these shreds of information. She wanted a solution to the puzzle, but the pieces were so scattered, so small, so incomprehensible, it was nearly impossible to see how or where they might fit. She wished she had a wild-eyed theory. She wished Mulder would express a wild-eyed theory that she could oppose. Even that would've had a comforting solidity. Hell, they weren't even sure what they were looking for. Daisy? Samantha? Paulie? A cure for cancer? Aliens? It was frustrating. Maddening. Was there some clue here to what had happened to her? Would it lead them to some explanation of what had happened to Samantha Mulder? Even Mulder seemed uncharacteristically unsure of himself, and Skinner sure as hell hadn't been much help. Scully was relieved when no one said anything about meeting for dinner, but then, as if on some psychic cue, they all showed up at the restaurant at about the same time. Mulder glanced at her and gave an almost-imperceptible shrug of resignation that seemed to sum up how all three of them felt about having dinner together. Nevertheless, they yielded to the inevitable and sat down at the same table, ate listlessly and without saying much. It wasn't enjoyable, but it was efficient. As they came out of the restaurant, Scully spotted a shadow moving against the curtains in Mulder's room. She caught his sleeve and pointed. Just then, a figure came out of the room, moving quickly and quietly away. Scully yelled, "Halt!" and drew her gun. Mulder yelled, "Hey!" and leaped after the departing figure like a hunting cheetah. The person was small, and Mulder was a runner-- Scully figured there was no chance the intruder would out-leg him. But then the suspect disappeared around the end of the building. Scully darted down a breezeway and around the other side, just in case Mulder lost sight of him. Before she could see them again, she heard Mulder shout, "Federal agent! Come down off the fence and put your hands where I can see them!" She came out in an alley behind the hotel, Skinner hot behind her, and saw the dark figure clinging to the side of a wooden privacy fence, feet slipping on the featureless slats. Mulder stood a few feet away with his gun drawn, knees flexed, ready for anything. The person on the fence gave up, and slid down to the ground, back still to Mulder, hands up on the slats. "I have him," Scully called. "Turn around!" Mulder yelled. Slowly the figure did as ordered. Not a him. Scully felt her eyes go wide. It was Daisy Dennison, improbably dressed in a sweatsuit despite the late spring heat, her blond hair tucked up under a baseball cap. "Dahlia," Skinner said helplessly. "What the hell are you doing?" Daisy blinked in surprise. "Walter?" she said, sounding stunned. "Christ," the A.D. said. **** Where people of today dwell, I do not dwell. What people of today do, I do not do. If you clearly understand what this really means, you must be able to enter a pit of fire with your whole body. - Huang-Long ************************************************************************ Part 7 May 23, 1997 San Marcos, Texas They were back in Mulder's room, Daisy sitting primly on the bed, Mulder pacing restlessly, his adrenaline still up from the chase. Scully had perched in a chair; Skinner stood leaning up against the door, looking grim as death, his eyes and mouth set hard. Set against what, Mulder couldn't imagine. "Paulie said that if someone captured him, you'd come," Daisy said to Mulder. "Like Duncan Idaho rescued Paul and Jessica Atreides in *Dune*?" Mulder asked. He was dripping sarcasm, and it was the wrong approach, and he didn't care. He didn't want to be part of Daisy Dennison's delusions, and he didn't want to listen to any bullshit. There wasn't time for it. He didn't have the emotional strength to put up with it. And the way she was looking at him--like the Virgin Mary looking up at Jesus. It was revolting. Daisy didn't seem to notice his skepticism. "Yes!" she said eagerly. "Yes--I knew you'd understand! Paulie said you would!" "Where is Paulie?" Scully said, her tone even, steady, unaccusing. "I don't know," Daisy said. "And we have to find him before the wrong path is taken." "What wrong path?" Mulder asked. "If he goes among the believers in Arkansas, he won't be saved at the 'time.' They don't know the right path, and they'll die without transport." *Fucking bullshit,* Mulder thought. She was talking like Barstow, in riddles, in parables, intentionally vague so that it could mean anything at all. "What were you doing in my room?" he demanded. "Signaling and testing," she said. She pointed at a large brown envelope on the desk. "I brought you that, as a signal. And a test." "How do you know Agent Mulder?" Skinner asked, his voice low. "I know *of* him," Daisy said. "All the believers do." Mulder retrieved the envelope and drew out of it a photo that showed a round, flat object that glowed on the bottom as it sailed through the sky toward a clump of trees. He bit down on a cold anger. "This is the 1989 Cabo San Pedro hoax," he said flatly. "It's a pie plate and some trick photography." "Yes! Those who know and understand can recognize the truth!" Daisy's eyes glowed triumphantly. "What I know," Mulder said slowly, "is that this piece of bullshit has been shoved in my face by a hundred paranoid UFO nuts trying to see if I knew the password into their fantasies. It's not a test-- it's an insult to my intelligence. Yes, I know the password, Daisy, so quit trying to fuck with my head. Where is your son?" "They took him." "Who? Where?" "The believers who no longer follow Pater--they captured Paulie because they don't know the true time of transport, and he does. But they won't reduce themselves. They'll die, and Paulie with them, if he isn't brought back to the true companions." Scully shot Mulder a look that meant, "What the hell is she talking about?" Mulder knew, but he didn't want to. "Who's Pater?" he asked. "Thomas Barstow?" She shook her head. "He no longer has that name. He is the chosen among the companions of angels, the father of us who would start anew at their sides." Her face took on that glow again, then quickly darkened into a frown. "And though Pater doesn't believe me, Paulie is the prophet of the time." "The 'Kwisatz Haderach'?" Mulder asked dryly. She smiled. "Paulie is more than that vision. He was born with the mark. What I have heard of you is true--it's said you know more of the truth than you understand, that you have true insight you don't let yourself see." Insults from a madwoman. Mulder turned his back on her and drew a long breath for calm. "So Pater doesn't think Paulie is the prophet, but the 'false companions' in Arkansas do?" Maybe Barstow wasn't quite as crazy as he thought. "Yes. It's a sad thing, and I don't know how to remedy it. In any case, we have to find Paulie first." "Daisy," Scully said, "were you in Richardson on May 17?" "No. I was in my place here, tending the pure foods, as usual. I regret that now--I might've been able to do something to stop Paulie from being taken if I had gone." "You were planning to go, weren't you?" Scully pressed. "You wrote your daughter about it, in e-mail." "I didn't want Sandra to worry when Pater forbade me to leave the ranch that day." "Then how did you know Paulie had been taken?" "The sheriff came looking for him. So I knew." The first truly rational thing she'd said yet. "What makes you think another faction of the Solar Fusionists took him?" Mulder asked, without turning to face her again. He could see her in profile in the mirror on the wall. "They want him because their false prophet doesn't know the true time. If not I, then it must be they--who else?" Who else indeed. "But you've taken him before," Mulder said. "Show me some true insight, Daisy. Why shouldn't I believe you took him again?" "Because I didn't." Scully produced a photo of Lauren van Hauw. "Do you know this woman?" she asked Daisy. Daisy nodded. "Lurel-anka," she said. "Lurel-anka?" "That's her name among the companions. She no longer has any other." "When did you see her last?" "She went for a meeting a few days before Paulie was taken, and I haven't seen her since. She's late coming back to us." "You didn't go to Richardson with her?" Scully pressed. "No. I didn't go, and I wouldn't have gone with Lurel-anka in any case. She would have saved the room in the car for any who might wish to join us here." Suddenly Daisy seemed to catch something in Scully's manner. "Why are you asking about Lurel-anka?" Mulder faced her again, so he could study her reaction. "She's dead," he said evenly. All he saw in her expression, her manner, was genuine surprise. "No!" she said. "How could that happen?" "There was a small explosive device on a chain around her neck," Scully said. "Someone detonated it, and she was killed. Her body was found in the greenbelt behind your husband's home." Daisy seemed to sag. "They have reduced her, and at the wrong time. She must have been one of them, one of the false companions. Oh, this is terrible." "Why would the 'false companions' kill her if she was helping them kidnap Paulie?" Mulder asked. She seemed not to have heard him. She shook her head slowly, and tears welled up in her eyes. "Terrible," she repeated. "And worse yet, so unforeseen." **** "She's a nut case, isn't she?" Skinner asked, his voice low. They had sent Daisy into the next room with Scully for the night. Skinner still stood leaning on the inside of the front door to Mulder's room, looking less like the wrath of God now than a sad, tired man. Mulder opted for gentle truth. "It's my professional opinion that a psychiatric evaluation couldn't do her any harm." He bit down on a sharp desire to blurt out, "What does she *mean* to you, anyway?" It wasn't the time for that. "We'll drive her into San Antonio in the morning," the A.D. said. "Get her to a hospital." Mulder nodded. "One of us should go to Arkansas," he said. "I'll go," Skinner said. Mulder blinked. "You, sir?" The older man shrugged. "I'm a third wheel here. There's nothing I can do that you and Scully can't do better." There was nothing in his words or his tone that indicated discomfort, but Mulder could feel it in him, even from across the room. He couldn't get a sense of what was behind it. "Maybe Scully should run Dahlia into San Antonio, then," Skinner went on. "You've met Barstow--you have the best shot at knowing if he's lying." It was the A.D.'s call to make. Strange call, but if that was the way he wanted to play it... "All right," Mulder said. Skinner left. Then Mulder took a deep breath to steel himself, picked up Daisy's sketchbook and knocked on the connecting door between his room and Scully's. "I need to talk to her out of Skinner's earshot," he said, when Scully opened the door. She hesitated. Mulder read in her dark look at him that she was thinking of telling him to go to hell, let it die, get over it. But she didn't say it. She backed away to let him pass, her expression telling him clearly just how many reservations she had. Mulder shared some of them, but it had to be done. He sat on the end of the bed beside where Daisy had perched. "This is your sketchbook, isn't it?" "Yes," Daisy said, taking it from him and running one hand lightly over the vinyl cover. "I thought I had lost it." "Will you tell me about one of the pictures in it?" "If I can." He turned to the picture that looked like Samantha. "When you did draw this?" he asked. Her blond brows furrowed with the effort to recall. "Before I came to live with the companions, I think. Three years ago...maybe a little longer." He nodded to encourage her. "Have you actually seen this girl, or did you just draw her from your imagination?" "I...saw her." His heart thudded. *Steady. She's a nut case. You just said so yourself.* "Where?" he asked. "I don't...I'm not sure. She's among them, I think." "Them?" *Please, God, let her know what she's talking about. Let her be telling the truth. Please, *please*, let this be the one that leads me somewhere.* "The angels," Daisy said. "I saw her with them." He heard Scully's almost-silent sigh of annoyance and disbelief. He half-agreed with her--he didn't believe they were angels. "What was she doing there?" "Just being there. Being a companion to them." Daisy's expression softened into a wistful smile. "They took her to themselves." "But...took her *where*?" "To the stars," Daisy said. She made it sound like nirvana. Mulder stood, straightened. One more time into the breach. **** May 24, 1997 Wimberley, Texas It was attractive country, rolling hills laced with bubbling creeks and scrubby juniper trees. It had rained the night before, and the grass and trees were a brilliant green. Roadside wildflowers erupted everywhere in a profusion of colors--blood red, violet, pink, yellow and white. Mulder had always thought of Texas as almost a desert. And between the rocks and the trees and the flowers, he caught frequent glimpses of low cactus, with flat, paddle-like leaves. But it was no desert. The Solar Fusionists' ranch lay just northwest of the actual town of Wimberley. The Richardson police chief had arranged for cooperation with the Hays County sheriff's department before the three FBI agents had left Dallas, and since Scully had the car, Mulder rode out with two sheriff's deputies named Velma Micklin and Dale Hannard. Scully had taken Daisy to San Antonio and then she was going to drop Skinner off at the airport for his flight to Arkansas, leaving Mulder to interview Barstow. Under other circumstances, Mulder would've chafed at the escort, but he felt alone and exposed in such unfamiliar territory--and truth be told, he was nervous about meeting up with Barstow again. He still wasn't sure why. "They've got about a hundred acres," Micklin told Mulder on the way. "All planted with organic fruit and vegetables. Tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, peaches. Pretty nice produce, if you can stomach listening to their preaching long enough to buy anything." "What do you think of them?" Mulder asked, curious, both to make conversation and to distract himself out of his own anxiety. "They're nuts," she said bluntly, "but they've never been any trouble. There's another religious commune up the road a piece--some kind of Hindu thing. Long as they don't make trouble, we just let 'em be. This is the kind of place people come so they'll be left alone." The driveway leading to the ranch was two caliche ruts. The ranch had a sturdy-looking barbed wire fence. When the deputy caught Mulder's dark look at the fence, she said, "Just to keep the deer out. Lots of white-tailed deer in these parts, and they'll eat anything green. If you're making your living growing things, you've got to keep them out." *If you say so,* Mulder thought. It added overtones of a concentration camp to an otherwise bucolic scene. It reminded him of the Hansen's disease research center in West Virginia. That did nothing to soothe his frayed nerves. A half-mile beyond and up a hill from the fence stood a large, two- story white house with dormer windows trimmed in green and a veranda along the two sides Mulder could see. Off to the left, long neat rows of low plants seemed to be thriving; scattered here and there between the rows were people dressed in white, working, their heads covered against the sun by wide hats. A curving row of trees to the right suggested another creek. The car stopped at the front gate, and Mulder and Micklin got out. "I'll wait here by the radio," Deputy Hannard said. Mulder went to the gate and lifted a loop of wire that held the gate closed. "You'd think a deer could figure out how to get this unlatched," he muttered. "Lassie could figure it out--why not a deer?" "Deer are dumber than dogs," Micklin said, making it sound like, "Well, duh." After they went through, he latched it again, and they started toward the house, walking in the grass to keep from getting the white, chalky dust of the caliche on their shoes. From the trees along the creek, Mulder heard the peaceful, rhythmic yammering of cicadas, but there was no other sound. They got about halfway when Mulder saw a woman walking toward them carrying a long-handled hoe across her chest like a weapon, and behind her, another woman hurrying over, removing heavy gloves as she came. He fished his badge out of his pocket as the two approached. "You are not allowed," the woman with the hoe said to Mulder. Mulder could barely see her face under the hat. A pudgy, sweaty shadow of blue eyes, mouth set into deep-set, sunburned lines. "I'm a federal agent," Mulder said. "The deputy and I are conducting an investigation into the disappearance of--" "You may stay," the woman said to Micklin. "The male must go." Now Mulder knew why Hannard had been so willing to wait with the car. There'd been nothing in the material on the Fusionists' Web site suggesting men weren't allowed. Lord knew there'd been no such rule back in the old Oxford days. Micklin opened her mouth to protest, but Mulder touched her arm to stop her. He didn't think it would be constructive to do anything to offend the Fusionists on religious grounds--it wasn't worth it, at least not yet. At the moment, he figured he'd be better off enlisting their cooperation, not bulling his way in on the strength of federal authority--cults often made it a point to declare their complete contempt for governmental authority. Mulder wanted to talk to them, not trade ideological potshots. "We need to speak to Pater," he said. "Will he come down to see us if we wait outside the gate?" The other woman had caught up. "It's all right Nana-anka," the new arrival said. Mulder recognized the voice and looked over at her, blinking in surprise. It was Phyllis Wilding, still tall and pretty, her light brown hair drawn into a pony-tail, her green eyes narrowed, wary. "This one has been purified," Wilding said. "There's no need to concern yourself about cleansing the footsteps of such a one." Micklin slanted a startled glance at Mulder. He said nothing, and he held his face expressionless, but Mulder figured even Micklin, who hardly knew him, would have little trouble figuring out that he had recognized this second woman. Never in a million years had he expected to see Phyllis Wilding again. "Pater will be happy to see you," Wilding said coolly. **** ...there are always two paths to take; one back towards the comforts and security of death, the other forward to nowhere. - Henry Miller **** Ten miles southeast of Felicity, Arkansas The "false companions'" compound was hidden back in thick forest, off a well-maintained gravel road. Skinner drove up to it as a thunderstorm approached, black and bristling with lightning, promising a real downpour when it arrived. He was painfully conscious of just how far from nowhere he was and wished he had not opted to come alone. It would've been easy enough to take the time to stop at the local sheriff's office, explain his business and ask for their cooperation. Sometimes the locals had an easier time of getting information out of people who knew them, anyway. Too late now, unless he wanted to backtrack. But it was already mid- afternoon, and Paulie Dennison had been missing for days. Skinner hated this case. He wanted to get it done. And besides, he didn't believe for a moment that Daisy was right about Paulie being in Arkansas. But he'd known Mulder would insist that somebody should come here. Above all, Skinner had known that he could *not* let Scully come. Not alone. When Dahlia Dennison had disappeared eleven years ago, Brad had asked Skinner to look into it because the local police weren't getting anywhere. He hadn't found her, but he'd been there when she reappeared. She'd seemed fine when she returned--physically weak, but normal in all other respects. She'd still had that bright, soul-melting smile that had so captivated him back when he and she and Brad had been in 'Nam together. Before long their old affection for one another had rekindled. She had not started talking about angels and aliens until after she met Thomas Barstow. She had seemed just to accept her abduction and the odd implant in her neck, exactly as Scully had accepted hers. Then, Barstow had offered Dahlia a crazy explanation of what had happened to her. As if somebody had flipped a switch, she had swallowed that explanation. Dahlia had started to go mad right before Skinner's eyes. He didn't know what Barstow had done to her, but he damned sure didn't want to let the man have a chance at Scully. He didn't want to watch Scully go mad, as he had seen Dahlia slip into lunacy. Skinner understood why Mulder had opted to bring her along. If it had been his partner, Skinner knew he would've done the same. But he had to keep Scully away from the goddamned Fusionists as much as possible. Away from Thomas Barstow. He drove about half a mile up the gravel road, then he came to a sturdy-looking chain-link gate ominously topped with curls of razor wire. A large red-and-white sign warned, "KEEP OUT." Skinner got out of the rental car and went up to the gate, peered through the wire. He couldn't see much. Just the dark slant of a roof through the trees, illuminated by a flash of lightning that crackled close enough to make him jump a little. Thunder boomed, just as close. He examined the gate and found it held shut with a heavy padlock. He headed back to the car for his phone--the only way in was to call the residents and persuade them to come down and let him in. He hoped there was a cell tower nearby, though it didn't look like an area where there would be. Another flash--this one somehow not like lightning, it was too reddish in color--even closer. Another boom. And then a hot blast of wind hit him like a shock wave. Suddenly Skinner knew it wasn't thunder, hadn't been lightning. Something had exploded. Just as that thought streaked through his mind, debris began pelting him, thudding down on the car, small pieces of shattered wood and shingles and pink tufts of fiberglass insulation. Something hit him in the back--not hard, not something heavy, but just enough to be alarming. Reflexively, he threw his arms up over his head, and ducked into the trees beside the road for cover. It seemed the stuff rained down forever, though he knew it could only be a few seconds. When it finally stopped, he hurried back to the gate. The roof he had glimpsed before was gone. In its place, nothing remained but flame licking up toward the darkening sky. ************************************************************************ Part 8 May 24, 1997 Wimberley, Texas Thomas Barstow had never been dashing or handsome, and he had not aged well. His heavy, coarse features had sagged, and his eyes were even more a washed-out, watery blue than Mulder remembered them. Barstow had let his mousy brown hair, now shot through with gray, grow long, and it fell in odd, uneven waves over his shoulders. When Mulder and Micklin entered the house, Barstow was sitting at a desk in a large room with windows that faced the vegetable fields. The whole house seemed painfully neat, almost scrubbed. There was no clutter on that desk, no loose unorganized paper. He was typing something into a computer, his bushy, gray-speckled eyebrows knit in a way that formed heavy vertical lines at the point where the brows met. Mulder was already abashed at having come face-to-face with Phyllis Wilding again--she had been with Barstow at Oxford, but he hadn't expected her still to be with him. Wilding had not seemed any too pleased to see Mulder, either. He searched his memory, unsure whether he had done or said something that might've upset her, but he didn't recall anything that had seemed to offend her at the time. Instead, he remembered that she had come after him like a tiger, then turned oddly passive once he had begun making love to her in earnest. He had never figured that one out. He drew a long breath to steel himself to interviewing Barstow. He felt his blood pressure ramping up, his heart thudding heavily, his palms prickling with sweat. He was uncomfortable far beyond what the situation really seemed to warrant, and he didn't know why. *God, don't let him say anything about Oxford.* "Pater," Wilding said now, standing just outside the door. "We have visitors." Then she turned and left, headed back out to the vegetable fields. Barstow looked up, first at Micklin, and then at Mulder, who had hung back a step. Micklin swept into the room, her boot heels rapping smartly on the polished wood floor. Reluctantly, Mulder followed. Barstow stared at him like a cobra might gaze at a baby bunny. Mulder tried to remember how much he had told Barstow about himself all those years ago, but his pulse pounded so loudly in his ears he couldn't focus. God, he probably had laid his soul bare. Dimly, Mulder heard the deputy deliver the appropriate "we're-from- the-government" speech. Barstow didn't even seem to know she was there. He just kept staring, wide-eyed, at Mulder. Now Micklin held up a picture of Paulie. "Have you seen this boy since the night of May 17?" she asked. Barstow blinked and finally shifted his gaze. Mulder felt as if a weight had been lifted off his chest. He could breathe again. Barstow stood up and took the photo. He was wearing a long, white cotton robe, loosely tied at the waist, and his feet were bare. Mulder would've bet big money that he had nothing else on underneath the robe. "No," Barstow said, handing the photo back. "I haven't seen the boy Paul in a long time. I told Dalhi-anka he wasn't welcome here, and she was not to bring him again." He was still clinging to a phoney British accent he had begun affecting while in Oxford; Barstow originally was from Detroit. "By Dahli-anka, you mean Daisy Dennison? His mother?" "I don't know her by that name, but yes, she's the boy's mother. She isn't here, either. I asked her to leave a month ago. Occasionally I have to cast out those who can't meet the standards imposed by the Heliosian angels. Dahli-anka wasn't able to release her attachment to her old life, to her children. I was forced to ask her to leave us." That made no sense, or at least it didn't jibe with Daisy's statement. "Do you have any idea who might've taken Paul, or where?" Micklin asked. "None. Why would I?" Mulder's throat felt tight, but he had recovered enough to function like a federal agent again. He produced the photo of Lauren van Hauw. "Is this woman a member of your group?" he asked. "Yes, but she's not here, either. In fact, I haven't seen her in more than a week." Odd, that. Most cult leaders insisted on knowing exactly what their members were doing at all times, controlling their activities at all times. "I'm sorry to inform you that she's dead," Mulder said evenly. "Possibly murdered." Barstow's salt-and-pepper brows lifted. "Murdered? That's ridiculous. Who would want to kill Lurel-anka?" "We're not sure yet," Mulder said. "Mrs. Dennison indicated she thinks a competing faction of Solar Fusionists based in Arkansas could be involved." "There are other groups who hope to become companions of the angels. But it's hard for me to imagine any who follow the way would kill--we are committed to peace above all, as are the Heliosian angels themselves." He sighed deeply, then, and closed his eyes. "You've come here because you believe Lurel-anka tried to kidnap the boy and Dahli-anka killed her to stop her," Barstow said. "What makes you think that?" Actually, it wasn't all that bad a fit, if anybody could offer a reasonable motive explaining why Lauren van Hauw would want to kidnap Paulie. "Lurel-anka was among those who believed the boy had the gift of prophecy," Barstow said. "She spoke of trying to make sure the boy would be safe when the time came." "And you think the 'time' is very near, don't you?" Mulder asked. Barstow's look was shrewd: *So you *have* been paying attention.* "There are signs," he said. "There is a gathering of forces in the universe that all of us have felt. It will be soon." "Do you believe Paul has a gift of prophecy?" Barstow smiled. "I have known some prophets," he said. "But if that child had any special gifts, I saw no sign of them. Still, his mother's faith in him was deep. She was able to influence some here. Her insistence--his presence--had begun to disrupt our work to become as much like the Heliosian angels as possible." His smile died. "I truly was sorry to put her aside," he said. "In some ways, she was among the most devout of us and had one of the closest relationships with the angels. They took her to visit them many times." "Took her where?" Mulder asked. "To Helios, or to the angels' starcraft. Many who visit there have little recall of it, but Dahli-anka always remembered. She was aware of the mark." He reached up and touched the back of his neck. Right where Scully's scar was. Mulder suppressed a shiver. Barstow went on, "She could report to us what she had seen." "What did she see?" "Many things. The angels in their true form, and the way they changed form to walk among us. It was she who taught us to watch for angels by looking for clouds in the eyes of those who appear human. She received the gift of their internal cleansing." Mulder crooked an eyebrow. "Internal cleansing?" "Those with whom the Heliosian angels are most pleased may receive the angels inside their bodies in a physical manner." "In a physical manner?" Micklin asked. "In other words, anal intercourse." Barstow's look was patronizing. "Angels do not have intercourse," he said. "Becoming a companion to angels gives life in a way that mere fucking cannot." Mulder suddenly remembered that Daisy's sketchbook had showed morphing aliens--what if Barstow was one of them? "Are you an angel?" Mulder asked. "I am their instrument, their servant, with aspirations to become what they are." *Yeah, maybe.* "I understand there are no other men here," the deputy pressed him. "Except you." "True." "Yet Lauren van Hauw had experienced anal intercourse shortly before she died--no more than a few hours before she died. That wasn't your doing?" Mulder decided, and not for the first time, that he liked working with women cops. They couldn't afford to indulge in any bullshit, and most of the time, they didn't try. Micklin was no substitute for Scully, but she was good. Barstow shrugged, then said, "Lurel-anka and I both have experienced the angels' cleansings. I don't know on what days or times she may have received them. The angels don't need to consult me about it." If he was pranging his followers and calling it cleansing, he was smart enough not to say so, at least not to officers of the law. "Do angels come here?" Mulder asked. "Physically come to this place?" He realized he was half-expecting an alien to poke its head out from any corner of the house. Maybe that was the source of his discomfort-- God only knew how close to the conspiracy Barstow might be. He could be part of it, for all Mulder knew. "Angels come here when they wish to, yes. They are free to come and go wherever they choose." Hell, that was true of an alley cat, much less an angel. Micklin said dryly, "Can you introduce us to one?" Barstow came out from behind the desk and sat on the edge of it. He smiled at her like a professor might smile at a slow student. "No," he said. "If they wish to know you, they will come to you." "Do you mind if I have a look at the 'mark?'" Mulder asked. Barstow shrugged and lifted the long hair away so Mulder could look at it. A neat, small surgical scar. Just like Lauren van Hauw's. Just like Scully's. Barstow was an abductee, all right. Mulder took a long, shallow breath, stepped back again and asked, "Did you know that...Lurel-anka had a form of brain cancer before she died?" "Yes. As do we all, here. It is a great strain on a puny human brain to adjust to the needs of angels. Many of us have died of it, though we were comforted by the knowledge that the angels took away parts of those who would not see the time of the reduction." "What parts?" Mulder asked, thinking of harvested ova and hearing his own voice suddenly a little strident. That would explain why so many were women. *God, could it be that *all* the answers were here? His and Scully's? Could they unravel the whole mystery?* "I don't know," Barstow said. He shrugged. "They take what they wish, and we are glad to give it." "You're saying that everyone here is dying of cancer," Mulder said. *Just like Scully.* "The angels can't cure it?" "Cure it? Why would they? Every living thing is dying. And it doesn't matter now--the time of the reduction is nearly upon us." "How will you know," Mulder asked, "when the time has come?" "There will be days of great heat, and great storms." "Heat and storms occur every year in this part of the country," Mulder said. "Not like this heat, or these storms." Barstow inclined his head toward the computer. "Just today I've learned of a gigantic solar flare. Sunspots are building up in massive numbers, and their radiation is exploding toward the Earth even now." "Do you require the members of your group to wear explosive devices in order to 'reduce' themselves when the time comes?" "Nothing is required here except a sincere desire to become the companions of angels. Some of us who must travel away from the home wish to be prepared in the event that the time occurs when we are away from our usual places. Each of us has a partner who can trigger the other's deliverance, if need be." "Lauren-- Lurel-anka had a small bomb on a chain around her neck," Mulder said. "That may be," Barstow replied steadily. "Do you wear one?" Mulder asked. He shook his head. He pointed to his chest. "Mine is inside." In unison, their stunned intonations nearly identical, Mulder and Micklin said, "Inside your chest?" "How better," Barstow said, "to ensure the reduction will be complete?" How indeed. **** Ten miles southeast of Felicity, Arkansas Skinner managed to call the sheriff's office on his cell phone--the connection was scratchy and remote, but he did get across to them that there'd been an explosion at the Fusionists' compound. They managed to let him know it'd be a good fifteen minutes before they could get emergency medical services out to that location. Not a surprise, but not good news, either. Then, not knowing how else to get inside to render aid, he backed the rented Ford up and rammed the gate. *Your tax dollars at work,* he thought wryly at the metal-on-metal squeal of the front fender forcing its way past the steel pole. The airbags blew--another unpleasant development--but Skinner ground his teeth and fought the driver's side bag out of his way. He drove up to what was left of the house. It had been a large house, but all that remained was a rubble of broken red brick, blackened beams and fire, and nobody moving that he could see. The inner wooden frame of the structure burned like hell, burned hot and smoky, flames leaping above where the roof line had been. Skinner could just see the broken beams that had been the floor of the second story, hanging down at a steep angle. White shirts and slacks on a clothesline snapped forlornly in the gathering wind as the thunderstorm continued its approach, smoke just beginning to streak the fabric. The smell of burnt wood and diesel fuel was strong, stinging Skinner's nose as he got out of the car. Even at a hundred feet away, he could feel the heat drying the skin on his face. For a moment, moving through the smoke, he let himself hope that nobody'd been at home. Then he began to see them--bodies and parts of bodies, scattered in and out of the ruins. There was no safe way to get inside the house itself--he considered trying, but the bodies inside lay in a stillness he recognized as death. No point risking his own life for them. He found one intact body outside, thrown out in the blast, nude except for one shoe and sock on the left foot, the rest of the clothing sheared away in the explosion. A man, burned and bloody, eyes glassy in death. Skinner couldn't resist turning him over to look at the back of the neck, dreading what he knew he'd find but unable to turn from seeing it. The scar was there. On the dusty ground where the body lay, raindrops suddenly pattered down, leaving dark, wet spots as big around as quarters. Dimly, finally, he heard a wail of sirens in the distance. **** The "silly question" is the first intimation of some totally new development - Alfred North Whitehead **** Wimberley Micklin wanted to talk to the other cult members, and to Mulder's surprise, Barstow allowed it. Mulder thought it was a useless gesture; he didn't figure the other cult members were likely to tell them anything, so he wasn't especially enthused about going out with Micklin. On the other hand, he didn't want to be alone with Thomas Barstow, so reluctantly, he agreed. The three of them strolled out into the steamy Texas heat. *He must be pretty sure of his control over the others,* Mulder thought. Then again, a man walking around with a bomb implanted in his own chest that another member of his cult could trigger at any time had to be pretty damned sure of himself. Micklin went right to it, choosing first the woman who had tried to send Mulder away at the point of a hoe. Mulder hung back, more interested in just looking around. The women tending the vegetables had small electrical boxes on chains hanging around their necks. Barstow had hung back, too. He said softly, "I am surprised to see you in the service of evil forces, though you don't appear to have sold yourself entirely into their thrall." *Could you possibly make that sound just a tad more melodramatic?* "Which evil forces would those be?" Mulder asked coolly, watching Micklin with the others. "The same government that routinely murders Heliosian angels, steals their equipment and uses their bodies for experimentation. Do they seriously believe they can force humans and angels to cohabit in the same bodies?" *Christ, he does know about alien-human hybrids.* Mulder felt his adrenaline ramping up again. "They've done it," Mulder said. "I've seen the hybrids. The clones." "Why do you protect them? They are abominations." He had heard someone else call them abominations. He thought for a moment, then remembered--the clone who had claimed to be his sister had said the full-blooded aliens regarded the clones as a dilution of their race. "I'm not protecting them," Mulder said. "I've been trying to expose the Project." Barstow studied him. "Have you?" he said, rather dreamily. "Then why are you here?" "I'm looking for Paulie Dennison." He didn't want to tell Barstow about Samantha...yet. To begin with, he was pretty sure Barstow was lying about not knowing where Paulie was. His story didn't match up with Daisy's in any way, so one of them was lying. Mulder wasn't sure Daisy knew her own name, but he was sure she had told the truth as she knew it. And then there was the fact that telling Barstow about Samantha could leave Mulder vulnerable. Easier to manipulate. These cult masters were all about manipulation. Mulder didn't want to have his chain pulled any more than necessary. Barstow said, "Why? The boy means so much to you?" "No. Not personally. I'm just doing my job." "But that is my question," Barstow said, "what precisely is your job?" "He's a seven-year-old kid, Thomas. He's probably terrified. His family's worried sick. He belongs at home with his family. I want to see he gets back to them." Barstow shrugged. "How do you know about the Project?" *And how much do you know?* "The Heliosians told us about it, in an effort to protect us." "Protect you from what?" "The evil designs of the men who control the Project." "What are their designs?" "To save themselves. To make hybrids in the hope the Heliosians will take them at the time, too, mistaking them for the true companions. To force the angels to salvage more humans than deserve to be rescued at the time." He smiled suddenly. "You do believe they exist, don't you? Otherwise, you would have asked me the obvious question by now." "What obvious question would that be?" "'Are you nuts?'" He laughed uproariously, as if that were the funniest thing he could imagine anyone saying to him. Mulder grinned. "Are you?" "I have devoted my life to learning to think as a Heliosian, not as a man. And so, by your standards, since you still think as a human, yes, I suppose I am." "What does that mean, 'to think as a Heliosian?' In what way do they think differently from humans?" "They have none of the brutal, animal urges that plague us. They are rational, gentle. Their physical bodies do not impose savage acts on them as ours do. That's what we practice here--weaning ourselves away from our animal needs." Mulder gestured toward his neck. "How did you get the mark on your neck? Did the Heliosians put it there?" "Yes. I was taken and received the mark from the touch of angels. But some of us here were led to the fellowship of the angels through marks placed by men." Men trying to create alien-human hybrids? "What men?" Mulder asked cautiously. "You don't know? They work for the government." "What makes you think so?" "They come in uniforms, carrying guns. Or flying in craft designed to emulate those of the Heliosians." *Reverse-engineered UFOs?* "Why are you afraid of me?" Barstow asked suddenly. "I'm not," Mulder said sharply, although he knew it was a lie. And annoyingly, it was clear Barstow knew it. He didn't know why Barstow frightened him. Maybe because it wasn't clear whether he was a victim of extraterrestrial experiments or a tool of the Project or some combination of both. Maybe because he kept staring at Mulder like a starving man might look at a chocolate eclair. But the older man only shrugged and didn't push it. Micklin was heading back toward him. "I think we're finished here," Mulder said. "Thanks for your time." As he and Micklin walked toward the front gate, Micklin said, "Nobody would tell me anything. 'Pater speaks for us all.'" Mulder nodded. "He's here," he said quietly. She frowned in confusion. "Pater?" "Paulie." "How do you know?" "Because Barstow's lying. He says he hasn't seen Daisy in a week, but she said she was here when your guys came looking for Paulie. That was yesterday." "Agent Mulder, Daisy Dennison's not my idea of a credible witness." "You think Barstow is any more credible?" "Uh...no, you've got me there." "Yeah. Look, just because someone's psychotic doesn't mean they're incapable of recognizing *all* reality, or telling the truth occasionally. It was the one lucid thing she said. He's here, all right. I can feel it." "You want to try for a search warrant? That Daisy's brought him here before could be enough to get a judge to rule probable cause." "I doubt a search would find him. They're probably moving him right now." "What then?" "I don't know yet." He did know. He was going to become a Fusionist again. As they went through the gate, they saw another car parked beside the squad car. Deputy Hannard stood between the vehicles, talking with a tall, young blond woman holding a small notebook. A television truck approached as they walked over to the deputy. "What's going on?" Mulder asked. "Circus time," the deputy said. "Seems another bunch of Solar Fusionists have gone and blown themselves up." "Blown up?" Micklin asked. "In Arkansas," the blond reporter said. "They left a note that said the world was about to end and then blew the place up. There are 47 confirmed dead." *The end is near,* Mulder thought. Then he remembered. Skinner had gone out there. *Sweet Jesus.* He stepped away from the deputies and the reporters, fishing for his cell phone. Hit the speed dial. *Answer the phone.* One ring, then two. *Come on, answer the fucking phone.* "The party you are calling is not available or has moved out--" *Shit.* ************************************************************************ Part 9 The danger is that those who predict real events may overlook the polarizing effect brought about by overindulgence in their own truth. They tend to forget nothing in a polarized universe can exist without its opposite being present. - Frank Herbert May 24, 1997 San Antonio, Texas Scully sighed into the phone. "Calm down, Mulder," she said. "I've already talked to Skinner--he's okay. He had reached her at the hospital in San Antonio. She went on, "He was trying to find a way into the compound when it went up." Even over the phone, she could almost see a hard place between his shoulders slowly release. He drew a long breath. "Well," he said, "they say timing is everything." "Skinner said nine of the victims in Arkansas were children," Scully said. "Children," Mulder said, his tone abstracted. Scully knew he was working over something in his mind. "I didn't see any kids here. And no men." Scully shrugged. "Well, Daisy said it was a different faction. Anyway, the children's bodies haven't been identified yet. Some of the bodies are in pretty bad shape." She paused. "But you think Paulie's there in Wimberley?" "I'm sure of it." He explained his reasons. "But I think you should go up there, anyway." "What for?" "Because if it's true that there's a connection between what happened to the Fusionists and your abduction and/or implant, we need to know that. There could be evidence at the compound that would tell us what the implants are used for or how the Fusionists came to have them. If we don't move fast, we may not have a chance to examine that evidence." Scully wasn't optimistic that she could learn any more from dead Solar Fusionists' cancers than she had from dead MUFON members' cancers. And she heard echoes of what he had said a few nights back-- *If you don't move fast, it's gone before you arrive.* Still, at the rate their evidence tended to disappear, he was probably right. "Why not investigate it here in Texas?" Scully asked. "With live subjects?" "Ultimately, we have to do both. But I don't want to spook Barstow until we have Paulie back in one piece." He shook his head. "We've got people walking around with explosives attached to their bodies out there. One wrong move, and they could go up just like the others. And take Paulie with them." Scully considered this. Into her pause, Mulder said, "Look, it doesn't add up. If Lauren van Hauw was acting alone, then where did Paulie go after she was killed? If van Hauw had an accomplice among the 'false companions' in Arkansas, why would the accomplice set off the bomb and kill her? If it was Daisy who set off the bomb to try to stop her, then why come back here, when she knew damned well it was the first place her ex- husband would look? She may be crazy, but she doesn't strike me as stupid." She hadn't struck Scully as stupid, either. "So what do *you* think happened?" Scully asked. Mulder shook his head. "I'm not sure yet, but I'd bet my next year's pay Thomas Barstow's in it up to his ass." Scully sighed. "I'll get a flight out," she said. **** San Marcos, Texas Mulder hated waffling. It wasn't all that difficult to just make a decision, pick a direction and move. He had no patience for people who couldn't make up their minds, and he really despised it when he was doing it himself. And he was waffling. Standing out in the heat with Barstow, talking about angels and implants and emotionless aliens, Mulder knew he had started to lose focus on Paulie Dennison. The temptation to pursue his own quest had grown strong. The question was, what to do about it? Hope blindly that seeking answers about Samantha would lead to Paulie? No. Too dangerous for the boy. But if he went into the compound, could he hold his attention on the case? He would've liked to get Paulie out of the compound, out of the line of fire, ideally without the Fusionists knowing he had done it. That held dangers, too, but then he could go back and do whatever he needed to do, find out what secrets the Fusionists might hold the keys to. He was going to get into that compound and find out what they knew. Skinner could have his goddamned badge and gun, if it led him to Samantha. If need be, he'd-- *You'd do what? Bend over and let Barstow shove his dick up your ass? Hang a bomb around your neck and wait for a tornado?* The thought was nauseating. But he needed to know. And he was absolutely convinced that at least part of the answer could be found out in Wimberley. The sun was setting when Scully called. Mulder had been in the process of packing up his things to leave, but he left off when the phone rang. Thinking of the Fusionists who had died of the cancer, he asked her, "You okay?" "I'm fine." He never knew how to take that--sometimes it was true and sometimes not, and over the phone it was impossible to be sure which. She was so damned stoic about her illness. He hesitated even to bring it up with her--she wouldn't talk about it, anyway. She sounded all right. Maybe a little tired. He chickened. "What've you found?" he asked. "The Fusionists set off a fuel-oil and fertilizer bomb. It demolished a 3,000-square-foot brick house and killed the entire membership, all 47 of them." "Just one big bomb? Not a bunch of little ones?" "No, there's no evidence of any small bombs like the one that killed van Hauw." "Well, that argues against Daisy's notion that van Hauw was working with the faction in Arkansas." "Yes. I've only had time to make a cursory examination, but every one of them had an implant at the base of the neck." She paused. "You may have been right, Mulder--it might have been the implants that brought them together." He nodded. "Barstow says everybody in the cult here has them, too. And he says some of them died of cancer. I checked the county medical records. In the last five years, there've been twelve deaths among the Fusionists, all of the same type of cancer. The Centers for Disease Control even came out and had a look." "Did they find anything?" "No. Not that I can decipher from the jargon in their report, anyway. I have it here--you want me to fax it to you?" "Sure, fine, whatever." *Not very enthusiastic.* "Scully, do you know if there was a solar flare this morning?" "It was last night. I saw it on CNN at the airport. Why?" "Barstow seems to think it's some kind of portent." "Of what?" "The end of the world. How common are those things?" On the other end of the connection, she sighed. In his mind's eye, he could see her rubbing her forehead in fatigue. She said, "They're going to become a great deal more common over the next couple of years, as sunspot maximum approaches." "Sunspot maximum?" "Sunspots increase and decrease in number on an eleven-year cycle. No one's quite sure how, but solar flares are related to sunspots. They erupt from areas where there are sunspots clustered." "So when's the next maximum? Is it soon?" "In the year 2000." Mulder felt his eyebrows rise. "At the turn of the millennium?" "Oh," she said. "I see what you mean. The 'false companions' left a letter behind, Mulder. It said the time of great storms has come on the Earth and on the Sun. 'At last we will join our proper masters.' And there was a tornado." "Good Lord. Where?" "About twenty miles away from the compound." "Jesus," Mulder breathed. "They thought the tornado was the Heliosians coming for them." "Apparently so. In the morning we'll have a closer look at the area around the house, and I should be able to get some post-mortem data on the victims. We still don't have any positive IDs, and it may take dental records to be sure of some of the children. Most of the children were girls, but I'm going to start with the boys, trying to eliminate the possibility that one of them could be Paul Dennison. What are you planning?" "Skinner wants me to take a search warrant out to the compound," Mulder said. He tried to make his tone neutral, but Scully caught something in it anyway. "You don't agree?" "I don't disagree--I just don't think it'll do any good. If Paulie's there, Barstow's already seen us coming." There was a silence on the other end of the phone. "Mulder," Scully said slowly, "you're not thinking of sneaking in there tonight, are you?" "If I were, would I be here?" "Just where are you?" "At the ever-so-delightful San Marcos Faux-Hilton. At least it has air-conditioning." "Good," Scully said. "Do me a favor, will you? Stay there." "You worry too much, Scully," he said, eyeing his crash bag. **** Enter no conflict with fanatics unless you can defuse them. Oppose a religion with another religion only if your proofs (miracles) are irrefutable or if you can mesh in a way that the fanatics accept you as God-inspired. - Frank Herbert **** Wimberley, Texas Barstow wasn't stupid, any more than Daisy was, and Mulder knew that. The cult leader had been alerted to the fact that his group was under scrutiny--if Mulder's visit earlier in the day hadn't been a dead giveaway, the TV news crews certainly had. Barstow hadn't granted any interviews, but the news teams still had the front gate staked out, doing their live shots for the ten o'clock broadcasts. There'd be sentries posted among the women in the compound, especially if there were any new ones who were undergoing "purification." Mulder knew he had to get into the compound--really in, so that Barstow and the others would trust him enough to tell him what they knew about the alien-human hybrids, the abductions. But with a little luck, he hoped he might be able to find Paulie Dennison and get him out of the way first. He parked his car on the side of the narrow road leading to the compound. Then he went in from the side where the creek ran along the edge of the compound, managing to get over the barbed-wire fence without losing any blood by laying his jacket over the wire before climbing over. He would worry about what that might've done to the jacket later. The stars looked bright and large so far out in the country. But there was no moon, and that left the landscape on the ground unholy dark, except for far-away flashes of lightning to the northwest. The only sounds were the rumble of distant thunder, the rattle of cicadas and his own breathing. He didn't dare turn on his flashlight, not out in the open. He made his way quietly toward some low buildings set apart from the house. Greenhouses, potting sheds, tool sheds. He went into the nearest one and found it almost as surgically clean as the house. There was no sign of Paulie Dennison, and not even a closet where they might've hidden him--everything stood on open shelves. He checked the outbuildings one by one. No Paulie, or even a candy- bar wrapper that might've given away that he had been there. Of course, they could be keeping him in the house. Mulder had hoped not to have to get that close, but apparently, his luck was not going to be that good tonight. He circled the back side of the house and decided his luck wasn't too bad after all--he found an old-fashioned cellar door. Quietly, he pulled it open and jumped down inside. He stood very still for a moment, listening for some sound that would indicate he had been observed coming in. Nothing. He fished the flashlight out of his pocket. When he turned it on, he found he had aimed it right at Thomas Barstow's face. *Shit*. "Don't be afraid," Barstow said softly. "I knew you would come back. I'm not angry." Mulder stood still, trying to quiet his pulse, his breathing. "I'm sorry, Thomas," he said. "I wouldn't have done it, but I need your help." "To find Paul Dennison? I can't help you with that." Mulder decided it was time to come clean with the guru. Only sincerity would save this situation. "Because you didn't take him?" Mulder asked. "Did the Heliosians take him, just like they did my sister?" Barstow frowned in confusion. "Your sister?" "They took her, Thomas. Your Heliosians. And I've got to find her. I have to see her again." Barstow weighed this, as if measuring whether it was just a scheme to get inside the cult. "How do you know the angels were responsible?" Mulder told him about the dream. The bright light, the house shuddering as if racked by a whirlwind, Samantha floating away in the light, the being in the doorway who had spoken in his mind. About Sandra's story of the tornado and the "Moon Man." Mulder went on, "I didn't connect that with you until I saw Daisy's-- I mean, Dahli-anka's sketchbook. She has a picture of Samantha. You said Dahli-anka always remembered what she saw when she was with the angels." "Why didn't you tell me about your sister before?" Barstow asked. "I didn't know. I didn't remember it until later. Thomas, please--you don't know what it's been like living with this. I *know* she was abducted, Thomas, but nobody believes me." The suspicion in Barstow's eyes softened a little. "I know more of the disbelief of others than you might suspect." Mulder looked away briefly. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sure you do." "She was never returned?" "No." He was exhausted suddenly, as if the weight of emotion left by Samantha's disappearance had overwhelmed him. "It's been almost twenty-five years. Look, there's nothing I won't do to see her again. Even if it's just for five minutes." Barstow stepped toward him. "If they did not return her, they have made a companion of her. The likelihood that she would want to return to you is small." "Then tell me how I get to her," Mulder said steadily. "I mean it, Thomas--there's nothing I won't do." "Do you have the mark?" "No." "Strange," Barstow said, "that they would let you know of their presence, but not mark you as well." "I remember seeing the one who spoke to me in my mind. But they didn't take me." He lowered his head, closed his eyes. "My God, how I wish they had." "Let me see," Barstow said, sounding a little breathless. Mulder looked up--the guru's eyes were bright with suppressed excitement. What the hell? He stood still while Barstow approached, fighting down anxiety, damping the urge to flinch at the other man's touch. But Barstow only lifted his collar aside gently to peer at his neck. "I was right," Barstow said. "About you and the boy, Paul. It was *you* the angels at first rejected, not the boy." Mulder frowned in confusion. "I don't understand," he said. "It is 'the one at first rejected' who must return to us before the time, before we can experience reduction and live among the angels." He looked at Mulder with something like awe. "In my hubris, I thought it was up to me to reject the one. That's why I turned away the boy-- it's why I left you in England, because I thought--" He laughed. "How foolish. The angels themselves, of course, chose you long before I could." This was taking a weird turn. Mulder shook his head. "There's nothing special about me, Thomas," he said. "Are you sure?" Barstow nodded. He smiled. "There can be no question of it. Naturally you must come upstairs and join us." He started toward the stairs, then turned back to face Mulder. "You will not need the weapon," he said gently. The first test. Mulder unloaded his gun and handed it and the magazine over. Then he gave up his badge and his cell phone, too, unasked. Barstow smiled beatifically. "I knew you believed," he said. **** Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. - Frank Herbert **** May 25, 1997 Felicity, Arkansas Scully pushed herself away from the computer screen, feeling cold all the way to the bone. Branched DNA. Two extra gene pairs. Yet again, in the blood of the cult member who had been thrown from the building in the blast, she was looking at "Purity Control." She had, suddenly, a new understanding of the appeal the Solar Fusionists had held for Mulder--he had a kind of radar for this. He could sense it from miles away, and it drew him near like a light bulb drew a moth. Maybe even as a youth, he had been subject to that lure. Scully didn't find it fascinating. It was repulsive. It made her angry. She had no reason to believe the Fusionists had given informed consent to become subjects in "Purity Control" experiments, any more than she had. One way or another, they were dying from the after- effects of those experiments, just as she was. And nobody had asked for volunteers. Science told Scully that "Purity Control," by definition was extraterrestrial. It was an organism found nowhere on Earth--or at least that no one had *yet* found on Earth, though there clearly were strange things being discovered on their own world even now. And of course, nothing about "Purity Control" proved that there was *intelligent* life beyond the Earth. "Purity Control" was a kind of bacteria, nothing more and nothing less. Postulating from an unknown new germ to a race of Klingon warriors was quite a leap. Still, a lot of people who had been affected by "Purity Control" believed they had experienced contact with sentient beings whose home address was some other planet. What did that mean? That what the test subjects had endured was so awful they needed an outlandish explanation in order for it to make sense to them? That they had undergone some kind of brainwashing in addition to the tests, so that they wouldn't be able to say what had really happened? Scully didn't know the answers. She hadn't found them in the Fusionists' charred corpses, or in the CDC report, and she was pretty sure the formula displayed on her laptop computer wasn't going to provide them, either. Skinner hadn't slept overnight; Scully had sent him back to the hotel with as strong an admonition to get some rest as she dared give a superior. She downloaded a copy of the data onto two floppy disks and put the disks in her pocket. When she got back to the hotel, she'd mail one to the Hoover building. She had learned better than to assume she could leave her laptop in a hotel room and no one would mess with it. Then she went out to the rented Ford, its left front fender bearing the scars where the A.D. had rammed it into the fence. She drove back to the Fusionists' compound. Nevermind that it had rained most of the night. Nevermind that the sheriff's department and some of her own colleagues from the nearest regional office of the bureau had been all over the grounds. They hadn't been looking for the same thing she wanted, and maybe, just maybe, it would still be there when she arrived. By the time she drove up to the gate again, the weather looked evil. She had heard on the morning news that a slow-moving cold front had gone stationary just to the northwest, and more thunderstorms were expected along a line from Texas all the way up to Iowa. The ground remained wet from the previous day's rain. Heavy, gummy mud sucked at her hiking boots as she walked. The burned-out house reeked of death and diesel fuel; no less gruesome for the removal of the bodies the day before. The investigation had centered there, so she went looking for areas the others would have examined less thoroughly--an undamaged barn and some miscellaneous sheds standing away from the house. There were stalls in the barn, but none of the smells or gear, no halters or tools that she would have associated with animals. When she peered over one of the stall doors, she knew why--each stall held a bed of straw, literally a bed with neatly laid out blankets and pillows. They'd had people, not cows or horses, sleeping in this barn. She started when a pair of birds flapped noisily in the hay loft above her. She left the barn and found the wind outside had picked up. It carried a fresh, damp scent of impending rain. Scully sighed. Just what she needed--to get drenched. Thunder rumbled ominously in the distance. She set her teeth and went to the nearest shed. It was small and dark and held nothing but long-handled gardening implements--shovels, hoes, rakes, "Garden Weasels," "Weed Poppers." She examined a rack on which an assortment of dirty gloves hung, each hook neatly labeled. "Rici-anka." "Nota-ona." "Delur-ona." One suffix for men, one for women? The wind had gone savage as she went to the next shed, whipping leaves and small sticks off the ground. Scully thought of yesterday's tornado--surely there wouldn't be another one today? This shed, set back at the tree-line, held more cultivating tools, hand-tools like trowels and three-pronged claws, pruning shears. She noticed there were no chemicals. But then there wasn't anything much else of note, either. Nothing like what she had hoped for--beakers or lab equipment. Outside the shed, the storm broke, rain slashing against the roof. Scully debated staying inside until it passed, then remembered that yesterday's storm had lasted for hours, and decided she'd rather just get wet. As she came out, a large dark shape swept by overhead. Reflexively, Scully started and ducked away--whatever it was, it was low. She looked up, breathing hard. A cloud? Then she saw another one. It was obscured by the rain and the heavy overcast, and she couldn't really make it out--a vaguely deltoid, hard-edged object about the size of a jet fighter. She heard a hard, metallic roar in the direction the first object had gone. *God almighty,* she thought. *Who'd fly in this mess? And why here?* Through the trees, from where the two objects had disappeared, she suddenly saw a fierce, blue-white glare burn down from the sky to the ground. For a moment, she thought it was lightning. But it didn't flare and then stop--it kept glowing. And the roar intensified. Leaves on nearby trees trembled with it. She hesitated, frightened. Then she ran wildly toward the light. If they were aliens, by God, it was time to settle the debate. She wished like hell that Mulder had come here with her--if this was time for discovery, it was his discovery to make. And if they weren't aliens, she was sure he would never believe it unless he saw it for himself. ************************************************************************ Part 10 May 25, 1997 Felicity, Arkansas Scully ran and ran, heedless of how far, slowed by the mud and downed tree limbs and large rocks that appeared out of the dim light in her path, seeing little but the blue-white flare ahead of her. She was almost there. Another five-hundred yards, maybe. And then the blue-white glare went out, and in the sudden darkness, she couldn't see where she was going. She skidded blindly to a stop, panting wildly, waiting for her eyes to adjust. When they did, there was nothing before her but rain, trees and rocks and more rain, trees and rocks. The roaring had stopped. Whatever it had been, it was gone. Rage welled up in her, irresistible as the tide. "Damn you!" she shouted, furious. "Goddamn you bastards, whoever you are!" She kicked at the nearest tree, her frustration exploding. She picked up a fist-sized rock and hurled it into the distance with all her strength. "Sons of bitches!" she screamed. "Show yourselves! Come back here and fight me face to face!" But there was no answer. Just rain sluicing down through the branches overhead. Thunder booming, wind howling. Exhausted, Scully let herself fall to her knees, her head and heart pounding. She felt heat on her lip and knew her nose was bleeding again. She burst into tears. *Always so close. And then nothing. It's not fair--we've worked so hard, tried so hard, given up so much.* She huddled there, miserable and weeping, for a long time. Then finally, she got back to her feet and started numbly walking back toward the compound. She hadn't gone far before she heard something behind her. A low moan, maybe a whimper. She'd given no thought to the idea that there might be wild animals out here--coyotes, perhaps, or those wild hogs for which Arkansas was notorious. She stood still and listened. Something shuffled in the trees, then groaned again. Quietly, Scully drew her gun. Now she could see something move. Something white, low to the ground. Not a wild hog. As she watched, tensed for whatever it was, she saw a hand reach up over a downed tree. "Help me," a voice groaned pitifully. Her gun still trained on the figure in the trees, Scully approached warily. It was a woman, dressed in a long, white nightgown, soaking wet and covered with mud. If she was hurt, it wasn't immediately apparent how, or how badly. "Who are you?" Scully demanded. "What are you doing out here?" "Help me," the woman groaned. "Please." She had short, dark hair and dark eyes. Scully sighed and holstered the gun--whoever this woman was, she didn't show any outward sign of being dangerous. "Are you hurt?" Scully said, going to her. "I don't...no, I don't think so, but I feel..." She had begun to cry. "I don't know!" she wailed suddenly. "How did you get here?" Scully asked. There was no blood on the nightgown, no obvious sign of bruises or broken bones. Her eyes were dilated, but in the dim light, that might not mean anything. "I don't know," the woman sobbed. "I don't remember anything but the ship." Suddenly she gripped Scully's hand fiercely. "Oh, God--are they gone? We have to get away from them!" "Away from who?" Scully asked. "Them!" she shrieked. "Calm down," Scully said. "I'm a federal agent, and I'm armed. Nobody's going to hurt you while I'm here to protect you. Can you tell me your name?" The woman hiccupped out, "Karen. Karen Lindsay." "What's the last thing you remember, Karen?" "I...I was at home, in bed. And then...they...came for me." "Do you live here, with the Solar Fusionists?" "Who?" She looked confused and frightened. "Solar...what?" "Where do you live, Karen?" "In Lincoln." She looked around, her eyes going wide. "This...this isn't Nebraska, is it?" Tears ran down her cheeks again. Scully sighed. There probably wasn't much point in continuing to question her here, now. She was in shock, terrified. "Okay, Karen," Scully said gently, "you'd better come with me. I'll get you to a hospital and we'll try to get this all straightened out, all right?" She took the woman's arm and helped her wobble onto her feet. Then Scully froze--Karen Lindsay had a small, fresh scar at the back of her neck. *Yes, I think it would be best for you to come with me,* Scully thought. They made their way slowly back toward the compound. But just before they cleared the trees, Scully hesitated. There were men fanning into the forest--from where she stood she couldn't be sure whether they were police or soldiers. They wore black uniforms and helmets with what looked like flak jackets. Most were carrying semi- automatic rifles. Before she had decided what to do, one of them spotted her. "Halt!" he barked. Rifles came up at the ready. "Easy," Scully called back, lifting her hands. "I'm FBI. I've taken this woman into protective custody. I'm just going to get my ID-- nobody get trigger-happy, all right?" They held still while she produced her badge, then one of them approached, took it from her and looked at it. "I'm Roger Holt," the man said. "Federal marshals' service. This woman is an escapee from federal detention." "That's not true," Lindsay whispered. "What are you doing out here, Agent Scully?" Holt asked. *This guy didn't watch the news?* "I'm investigating a kidnapping that may be related to the deaths of forty-seven members of a religious cult who lived in this compound," Scully said. "Uh, huh," Holt said. "Well, my orders are to return this individual to the cell where she belongs. I do sincerely appreciate your having picked her up for us, but we can take it from here." Scully wondered if Holt even knew Karen Lindsay's name. Slowly, she said, "I think I'd like to see your ID--and the warrant you say you're holding for this woman--before I give her up." Holt shrugged. He produced his own badge, which looked official enough to Scully and did in fact identify him as Roger Holt of the federal marshals' service. Then he showed her a warrant for the arrest of Karen Eileen Lindsay. *Damn. Legitimate, the whole lot of it.* She didn't want to give up Lindsay, but she was outnumbered and outgunned. Resisting probably would just get them both shot. "Don't let them take me," Lindsay whispered. "I didn't do anything. It's not me they're looking for." "Yeah, yeah," Holt said. "We've heard that one before." "Karen," Scully said, "you have to go with them. I promise I'll look into this, but for now, there's nothing I can do." "But I didn't do anything!" Lindsay shouted. "They're the ones who did something to *me*!" Scully saw her tense to bolt away, and caught her arm. "Lady," Holt said to Lindsay, "I've got two dozen armed men out here. You're not going anywhere, so just relax." "Just cooperate for now," Scully said, "and nobody will hurt you." Two of the others came over and put handcuffs on Lindsay. She went with them, weeping quietly. Scully didn't like it, but it was out of her control until she could get Skinner to apply some of his official muscle on the marshals' service. As they led her off, Scully walked down toward her car, Holt walking along with her, casually, as if it were the natural thing to do. He asked, "You need a lift back to town, Agent Scully?" "No, thanks. My car's out front." "She tell you some wild-ass story?" "No. Not much. Where was she incarcerated?" "Leavenworth." "Long way from Arkansas," Scully said, holding her tone neutral. "Well, she's been running for almost a month." "What did she do?" "Shot her husband in the face, then ran across country with her twin girls locked up in the trunk of a Toyota. Kids suffocated. Nice lady, except for the three murders." *Sure, fine, whatever.* Scully pulled open the door to the Ford. "Thanks again for your help," Holt said cheerfully. Scully backed the car down the road. As soon as she was out of sight, she pulled her cell phone out and dialed Skinner. Before she could get a word out about Karen Lindsay, the A.D. said, "Scully, do you know where Agent Mulder is?" *Christ. Here we go." **** "Participator" is the incontrovertible new concept given by quantum mechanics. It strikes down the term "observer" of classical theory, the man who stands safely behind the thick glass wall and watches what goes on without taking part. It can't be done. - John Wheeler **** Wimberley, Texas Mulder had already begun to regret his decision to infiltrate the Fusionists, if for no other reason than that, if he didn't pee soon, he figured his back teeth were going to float away. He was in a closet about four feet square and completely empty except for a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The floor was bare concrete slab, and the walls were plastered in an odd swirling pattern. It was small and a little damp, but at least it was cool and clean. He wasn't sure how long he'd been there, but he figured it had to have been eight to twelve hours. Phyllis Wilding had insisted that Mulder should undergo the purification ritual again--Mulder didn't hear the whole discussion she had with Barstow, but it appeared she wasn't buying the "one at first rejected" story. Mulder guessed she must be the guru's main lieutenant. Then Barstow had told him to change into a pair of white hospital scrubs. The trousers were three inches too short. The guru had taken everything else, including Mulder's watch. Wilding had hung a small electrical box around Mulder's neck. He hadn't asked her if it was a bomb--without opening it, he couldn't be sure, but he decided not to take any chances with it. Mulder's task now was to clear his mind and purify his body by kneeling in this closet for a long time without falling asleep, eating or drinking. He could leave the closet when Barstow said so, whenever that might be, and not before. Mulder had no idea what had been going on outside his closet, beyond the fact that it must have rained--he had heard thunder. Before he had entered the compound, he had guessed he'd have to go through this, but that didn't make it any easier to stay awake, or to ignore the hunger pangs and the thirst. Or the fact that he really, really had to pee. Another novitiate had drawn the unenviable task of peering through a peephole periodically, to make sure he was still awake. Every twelve minutes on the dot, if they were following the same rules they had published on the Web. Twice now he had almost slipped into a doze and then snapped awake when he heard her bare feet slapping on the concrete floor as she approached. He wondered if she was as tired as he was. Probably so, but she was dutiful. He heard her coming now and shook himself into wakefulness. He wanted her to see him staring, meditating in the prescribed way. The metal plate covering the outside of the peephole scraped as the novitiate pulled it back. In his peripheral vision, Mulder could see one brown eye. Then, to his astonishment, he heard the door open. He blinked in surprise and looked up. She was short, pudgy, with close-cropped, light brown hair and a perennially annoyed expression. She thrust an empty coffee can at him. "I'll be back in two minutes," she said resentfully. He took the can. The door slammed. He didn't need two minutes. He peed into the can, peed with vigor, in a strong, luxurious stream, the release almost sexual. The sound and the smell were sharp in the tiny room. He realized that was part of the plan--to impress upon the new inductee how vile and unpleasant human bodies really were. Angels didn't fuck, and they probably didn't pee, either, and if you were human enough to shit, they'd go in there and clean it out for you. Swell folks, these angels. Before he'd arrived, he'd already been awake a good eighteen hours, and the sleep deprivation was getting to him, making him punchy--the idea of angels turning up their noses at something as harmless as a little piss in a coffee can made him want to giggle uncontrollably. *You think we smell bad now,* Mulder thought, *you should try it after we're dead.* He heard the pudgy woman coming back and forced himself sober. She didn't say anything. She just opened the door and took the can, with a look of supreme disgust, and slammed the door shut again. Silently, Mulder laughed and laughed. Then, a few minutes later, he realized that needing to pee had been pretty much the only thing keeping him awake. **** May 25, 1997 Felicity, Arkansas "There's no Roger Holt working for the federal marshals' service," Skinner said. His tone suggested the angry whack of a pneumatic nail gun. Scully felt like that, too. "Furthermore," the A.D. went on, "there's no Karen Eileen Lindsay incarcerated in the federal prison at Leavenworth. Or in the NCIC database. And as far as I can determine, the crime 'Roger Holt' described to you never occurred." He sighed heavily. "Scully, what the hell's going on here?" She was pretty sure the question was rhetorical--he knew as well as she did that she didn't know what was going on. She shook her head. "The only thing I'm certain of is that these people have been subjected to some kind of experimentation. But by whom and to what end, that I just can't say." Skinner held his silence, thinking. Then he said, "What's Mulder's theory?" It was just typical of Mulder not to be around to answer this question himself--to put her in the position of having to state it and possibly defend the indefensible. It wasn't his fault, but it was typical. Scully set herself to it. "Agent Mulder believes the U.S. government has been involved in trying to create alien-human hybrids." Skinner blinked in surprise, but he didn't laugh. "Is that possible?" he asked. Scully shrugged. "Theoretically, maybe--assuming you accept the postulate that intelligent extraterrestrials have ever visited the Earth. Sir, I have to add that, while I personally believe Agent Mulder's theory about alien-human hybrids is a stretch, there is some evidence to support it. Hardly enough to take anything into court, but it's sufficient to justify further investigation--particularly since we're already pursuing an active case that might be related." Skinner was frowning off into the distance, now. Scully asked, "What about the lock-down on the bodies?" When she had returned to Felicity, she'd found that the Fusionists' bodies had been sealed into coffins and sent off to their families. There was to be no more examination of them. "That came down from the top of the Justice Department," Skinner said wearily. "Straight from the secretary. There was nothing I could do about it." "What about Mulder?" Scully asked quietly. "I got an e-mail from him. All it said was 'I know what I'm doing.' I don't suppose you want to assure me that, in fact, he does." *I wouldn't bet my life on it.* "Sir, he was right about one thing-- none of the boys who died in Arkansas was Paulie Dennison." She had managed to snag the dental records away from the sheriff before anybody shredded, burned or removed them--she suspected whoever was behind the release of the bodies had hoped she would go away and stop asking questions if she knew that none of the victims had been Paulie. They were going away--heading back to Texas--but she was for- damned-sure not through asking questions. Skinner sighed again, a little more softly this time. Scully detected relief in it. "So what now?" she asked softly. "I've arranged for a search warrant for the compound in Wimberley," Skinner said, "but God knows what might happen to Paulie and Mulder if we go in. I don't mind telling you, Scully, I am not enthusiastic about sitting on my hands for very long." "Neither am I, sir," she said. "But I don't think Agent Mulder would have gone into the compound without some plan in mind--or without reason to believe there was something there to find." *The trouble is, he didn't bother to confide in me what his plan was, or what he thought he'd uncover.* "I think we ought to give him the chance to try whatever he's working on before we land on the Fusionists like the marines on Guadalcanal." "Then what do you suggest?" Skinner asked. "I think we ought to keep the compound under close surveillance," she said. "Watch the Fusionists carefully. Can we get a phone tap? Maybe a long-range listening post? What we need is intelligence, some information about what's going on inside. If Mulder were in a position to give us that, I'm sure he would've by now. But the material on the Helios Web page suggests that new members are subjected to intense scrutiny for at least the first few days--if the Fusionists are watching *him* carefully, he might not have had the chance to get any intelligence back out to us." Skinner nodded. Then he drew a long breath and said coldly, "Twenty-four hours. And no more. After that, the marines land." **** Wimberley, Texas The closet door wasn't locked. Mulder was so exhausted he had begun leaning up against the wall until he heard the pudgy woman coming back. Then he'd force himself back up onto his knees until she was gone. She was damned tired, too-- had to be, by now. He had no idea whether it was day or night. He had heard thunder and rain, on and off. But he didn't know how long he'd been in the closet. He only knew it had been a damned long time. He was dizzy with hunger, and his tongue had been stuck to the roof of his mouth with thirst for what seemed like days. He doubted it had been days. But it could've been. It had been a long time since the novitiate had looked in. He thought it had been more than twelve minutes. He unbent his stiff knees, then grimaced as his left calf cramped viciously. Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet. The room swayed and darkened around him. *God,* he thought. *This was a lot easier when I was nineteen.* Silently, he turned the knob, pulled the door open a crack and looked out with one eye. His novitiate was sitting in a chair across the basement, head thrown back, sound asleep. *Naughty, naughty,* Mulder thought. The clock she had been using to time her visits read 11:30 p.m. Mulder shut the door behind himself so the light wouldn't wake her, then went quietly up the stairs into the darkened house. There was only one light showing, from the second floor. Stealthily, he took a look up the stairs. Another novitiate sat reading in a chair directly underneath what looked like a pull-down attic door in the ceiling. What was this one guarding? Paulie's hiding place? He made his way to the room where he had seen Barstow working on the computer. The machine was running, a screen saver showing. Mulder found the control panel and turned the sound off on the modem, then launched Netscape without dialing, changed the sender information from Barstow's logon to his own. He wrote his message before he logged in: "Don't worry; I'm okay. No sign of Paulie yet, but they're guarding something in the attic. He might be there." He addressed it to "dkscully@fbi.gov," logged in, sent it, then deleted it from the "sent" queue and restored Barstow's mail preferences before returning the machine to its screen-saver mode. He padded back down into the basement and leaned over the novitiate. "Hey," he whispered. She snapped awake, her eyes wide. Mulder laid one finger across his lips. "I won't tell if you won't," he breathed. He had her, and she knew it. She nodded. He turned toward the closet. She caught his hand and put something round and velvety in it. When he returned to the closet, he saw she had given him a large, ripe peach. He sank his teeth into it like a ravening wolf, devouring it. It was the most delicious thing he had ever tasted, exploding with sweet juice. He sucked every morsel of pulp out of the woody pit, licked every molecule of juice off his lips and fingers. By the time he finished, he felt almost drunk with sugar and joy. Then he slid the pit under the crack in the door. He heard the novitiate pick it up and take it away. It might be great to be an angel, but every once in a while, being human wasn't bad. ************************************************************************ Part 11 There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside of them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. - Herman Hesse May 27, 1997 Wimberley, Texas The swirls in the plaster on the wall had started to move. Mulder watched them turn and bank like seagulls wheeling in the sky. *They can't be moving,* he told himself. But that was what his eyes saw--plaster swirls doing aerobatic maneuvers on the wall. Round shapes like spiral galaxies, turning and turning. He stretched his hand out to trace one of them, but the shape disappeared out of his view when he touched it. He withdrew his hand, then out of the corner of his eye, he saw another one moving. *All right then. Look, but don't touch.* He felt himself swaying on his knees. He had stopped noticing when the novitiate came to check on him, if she was still doing it. He had stopped noticing that he was hungry or thirsty. He didn't feel tired anymore. He was only aware of the swirls on the wall as they rotated and crawled around him like live things. He followed them in his peripheral vision. Then turned his head and noticed that the door was open. The swirls were there, too, in the empty space around where the novitiate stood looking at him wide-eyed. He smiled up at her. "They're flying," he said happily. "You should see them flying." Barstow stood behind her, with wall swirls zooming and twirling around him. He was smiling, too. "Can you see them?" Mulder asked. "Oh, yes," Barstow said. "Come with me, Fox. Come upstairs." Mulder's legs were so stiff he could hardly walk--Barstow had to support him as they went up from the basement to the house, then climbed the stairs to the second floor. Suddenly Mulder realized the swirls had disappeared. "Wait," he said, "where did they go?" "They'll be back," Barstow said soothingly. "Come on." The guru led him to a bathroom. Mulder heard water running. *God. Water.* Phyllis Wilding was there, too, her face impassive. She hunkered down and untied his shoes. Mulder leaned on Barstow while she removed the sneakers, one foot at a time. Then she and Barstow helped Mulder into a tub where a shower head hissed steamy water, maneuvered him into the spray. Mulder hoped the bomb cases were waterproof. When nothing exploded, he turned his mouth into the stream and drank. He would've drunk out of the toilet if he had thought they would let him. Three swallows and he felt intoxicated. Wilding pulled him away. "Not too much," she said softly. "It'll make you sick if you drink too much all at once." He wanted to drink enough to drown. He felt her pull on the hem of his shirt--he realized all three of them were still dressed, standing there getting soaked in the shower. He raised his arms for her and got a whiff of himself as she pulled the shirt off. Christ, he smelled like a locker-room full of basketball players after a game. No wonder they wanted to clean him up. He felt one of them tug at the trousers, then at his shorts. The water felt so wonderful. His head was swimming. He closed his eyes and smelled soap. He had no idea whether it was real or not, and he didn't care. Barstow and Wilding were stroking him all over with soap, turning him to rinse him off, shampooing his hair. Dimly, as if from a long way away, he recalled that there was a point to this ritual, but he wasn't sure he remembered what it was. Despite everything, there was still a psychologist in his head, and now it awakened. *Nurturing, bonding--they want you to feel they'll take such good care of you that you don't need anyone else.* It was tempting to just let himself lean on them, let them care for him. Wilding slid her hand slowly, dreamily along his thigh. The soap was slick, warm. Mulder felt himself responding to the sensuous lure of it. He remembered the confused messages about sex on the Helios Web page. He didn't want to test any psycho-sexual theories--not now. To make sure the caresses didn't affect him, Mulder made himself think of Lauren van Hauw's blasted, burned body. Its broken, bloody protruding ribs. He forced himself to remember it in gory detail. Wilding's fingers stroked upward along the inside of his thigh, the soap like satin whispering past his skin. *There'd been blood slicking van Hauw's ribs. Bits of cooked flesh splattered all over the dashboard. Smell of rotten meat, curdled blood and dried shit.* Wilding's fingertips whispered near his balls. Goddammit, she was doing that on purpose. He opened his eyes. Her look up at him was cold, calculating. She *was* doing it on purpose. "I think," Barstow said to her, next to Mulder's ear, "that you are enjoying this too much." His tone was honeyed, but the rebuke the words carried was clear. The older man's hands strayed along the curve of Mulder's buttocks, and he started out of his reverie. Any arousal Mulder had felt evaporated at that touch. He could feel himself shrivel. There were two of them--he had given his gun to Barstow, and against two opponents, in a slippery bathtub, he figured his odds were poor if he had to fight. Wilding colored--whether in anger or embarrassment, Mulder couldn't be sure--and withdrew her hands. She pulled him back under the spray to rinse him off, and after that she turned off the water. They helped him out. He stood there naked and feeling every bit of it, shivering out from under the hot water. Wilding dried him off while Barstow fed him some bits of cheese. Mulder resisted the temptation to snap at his fingers in his hunger, his impatience. Wilding helped him into a cotton robe like the one Barstow had been wearing when Mulder and Micklin had first come to the compound. Numbly, he went with them when they led him into an adjoining bedroom. "Sleep now," Barstow said. "Rest." Mulder collapsed onto the bed. A moment later, he felt the two of them settle in around him. Barstow pulled his head down onto his chest. Mulder closed his eyes. The swirls returned when he did. Sleep pulled at him like a dark vortex. He decided he didn't really care whether either of them fucked him, as long as he didn't have to be awake when it happened. He dreamed of big, green waves washing warmly around him as a gray- skinned, large-eyed alien watched from a distance. **** Religion... encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! - Frank Herbert **** Mulder woke with a sense that he hadn't been violated in the night. He didn't know what time it was, or what time it had been when he finally had been able to sleep, but he was exhausted and knew he hadn't slept long enough to make up for what he had lost. He stood up too fast, and the room swayed around him. His legs were painfully stiff from kneeling so long in the closet, even though he had tried to move around a little to keep some circulation going. He was still hungry and thirsty, but he thought he'd live. He dressed in a white coverall like the ones the others wore. The Fusionists gave him a dry, tasteless muffin for breakfast and a little bottled water. Then they sent him out with the novitiate who had been watching him in the closet, to pick up peaches that had fallen on the ground underneath several large spreading trees. "What's your name?" he asked her, as they walked toward the trees, when they got a little distant from the others. "I don't have one yet," she said. "Not until my provisional month is up. Didn't anyone tell you? You don't get a name until you've been accepted." "Nobody mentioned it. But it's okay. I always hated my name anyway." She nodded. "Me, too. Here." She handed him a pair of long-handled tongs. "You don't want to touch the peaches with your hands because there'll be ants on them." "Ants?" "Yeah. Fire ants." Mulder had never heard of them. "Do they bite?" he asked, frowning at the tongs. "Do they ever. You're not from around here, are you?" He shook his head. "I'm from Massachusetts." "I thought so. See those gray mounds in the grass? Those are the ants' nests, so don't step on them, or you'll find out about fire ants real quick. But don't say anything if you get bitten. And don't kill them. Just brush them off you as fast as you can." "All right." He watched her for a moment as she bent to grab a mushy peach with her tongs and dumped it in a bucket. "Where are you from?" he asked. "Alabama." He started picking up peaches, too. "Yeah? What made you decide to join the Solar Fusionists?" She shrugged. "All my life, I guess I just felt wrong. Like I was trapped in my body. Then I started to remember that I had been among other beings once, and I wondered if something else might be possible. After I met one of the companions, I knew I had to come. Pater has opened my eyes to what it means to be human--how far we have to go to reach our true potential and what it'll be like when we get there." She slanted a glance at him between two leafy branches. "What about you?" "The Heliosians took my sister," Mulder said. "I want to be reunited with her." "Oh." She had moved away a little distance, searching out more peaches, so the conversation fell off. With his stiff muscles, bending to pick up the fruit hurt at first, but as he worked the kinks out of his legs, it felt good to be outside, doing something. He had a feeling it wouldn't be so pleasant in a few hours--the sun was beating down hard already, and it was still early morning. He forgot about the ants after about an hour, only to find suddenly that some had run up his tongs and were clinging to his hands, biting fiercely. They were aptly named; the bites *did* feel like fire. He had forgotten the novitiate's warning, too. "Ow," he said softly. "Dammit!" The novitiate straightened up, put two fingers between her teeth and blew a piercing whistle. Startled, Mulder stared at her in bewilderment and got bitten a couple more times before he recovered and brushed off the rest of the ants on his hand. When he looked up again, Phyllis Wilding was standing beside him. "Report," she said crisply, to the novitiate. "He swore," the novitiate said, looking at the ground. Mulder opened his mouth to defend himself, then closed it, realizing it would do no good. Wilding was glaring at him with a look in her green eyes so hot it should have set his clothes ablaze. "You couldn't yield up your own nature before," she said. "I see it still troubles you." It ran through Mulder's mind that she would have liked to beat the hell out of him. Involuntarily, he tensed himself against a blow. "Angels don't care what you want," she went on, "and it's time for you to accept that, to accept what must be. You still you think you matter, fool?" She jerked her head toward the house. "Inside," she said, in a tone that brooked no refusal. "Now." He followed her up to the house and went meekly back into the basement closet. A moment later, Mulder heard Barstow's voice outside, then Wilding's, and he leaned close to the door, to hear. "He doesn't belong here," Wilding said. "He's not one of us, no matter how much you want him to be." "We have never turned down an honest seeker," Barstow said. "He's here for his own reasons--he doesn't share ours. He never did. I don't trust him." "Many have come with us for their own reasons and then learned ours. Why does this upset you so? Because he made a mistake? He's the 'one at first rejected'--you would not speak so of another who said what he did so early in his initiation." "If he is 'the one,' he's yet to prove it. And he's another male," Wilding said, her tone dripping with contempt for all manhood. "You know males can be unpredictable--those are your own words. And the others are nervous about him being here. None of us wishes to serve the needs of any but the angels...and yours, of course." Her voice was silky now. Mulder recognized an undertone of sexual lure in it. *She knows his weak spot--his sexual urges--and she's not above using that to control him. Just like she was trying it on me, last night.* They were moving away. Mulder pressed harder against the door, trying to hear them. "He can destroy us," Wilding was saying. "He's no different from the other men who are enemies of angels. He brought a gun here--*here*, among us. He came looking for the boy, and that's all he cares about." "We did nothing but offer that boy shelter when he and his mother needed it. Even if he did come here looking for Paul..." Mulder couldn't hear them any more. Something like a white-hot needle stabbed his shoulder. Under his breath, Mulder swore again and reached up under his coverall. He managed to get hold of the ant. With a grim sense of satisfaction, he crushed it between his thumb and forefinger. **** Scully had found a place up on a hill where she could hide in the trees and yet have an unobstructed view of the Fusionists' compound. She had watched all the day before but hadn't seen a sign of Mulder anywhere--he was tall enough he would've stuck out among the mostly middle-aged women in the compound. But he hadn't appeared. She had just barely managed to keep Skinner from going in--she figured if she hadn't received Mulder's e-mail the night before the A.D. would've insisted. And hell, he would've been right. Without that message, Mulder could've been hostage or dead. They'd have had no choice but to raid the place. Now she, too, was becoming impatient. And a little anxious. What was he up to? Where were they keeping him? For all she knew, they had strapped him to a table and put a microchip in his neck. She got there right at sunrise and waited. About seven, finally, she saw figures moving out of the house. She lifted her binoculars and studied them as they came out. One woman after another. She had counted twenty-three women the day before. Counting Barstow, the Fusionists numbered twenty-four. Or twenty-six, if she included Mulder and Paulie Dennison. Then, finally, a tall, lanky form appeared. Scully released a long breath she hadn't known she was holding. He was walking stiffly, slowly, but he seemed all right. He followed a short, chubby woman into a grove of trees, and they began working on something together. It looked as if they were picking small round objects up off the ground and placing them in a bucket. She zoomed the binoculars. Some kind of fruit. Scully lowered the binoculars, shaking her head with a rueful grin. Mulder as farm worker. Now *that* was a picture. Almost worth a trip out of town, just to see that. **** They didn't keep Mulder in the closet long this time. Long enough to miss lunch, that was the thing he noticed. By midafternoon, he was back out picking up peaches, this time in the kind of steamy heat that made him empathize with poached salmon. "I'm sorry," his novitiate whispered as he rejoined her. "It's okay," he whispered back. "I should've listened to you." After a couple of hours, he had concluded that Texas clearly was home to every kind of biting, stinging, blood-sucking insect known to humankind--and maybe some types humanity hadn't classified yet. Mulder had never liked bugs, and meeting new ones was only reinforcing his distaste. He also had learned to loathe the smell of rotting peaches. But he managed to hide in the low branches, where no one could see him, and eat a couple of the ripe fruit, savoring the sugary tartness of them and momentarily easing his thirst and his hunger. The work was a grueling ritual, bending to pick up the bruised fruit, much of it teeming with one kind of bug or another, and dropping it in a bucket, insects and all. Then carry the bucket a short distance away and dumping its contents into a trash bag. Periodically one of the other women came to cart the bags away, bowed under the weight. Mulder's stiff legs hurt, and he could feel a pull in his lower back from bending over repeatedly. He'd be stiff all over in the morning. He thought his brain might be boiling in its own juices in the sun. About mid-afternoon, Barstow came down. For long minutes he just stood aside, watching Mulder and the novitiate work. "Don't we sell these peaches?" Mulder asked him finally. "It seems a waste that so many are just falling on the ground." "We sell them. But there have been storms, and they're knocking the fruit off the trees." "Oh." "There's another one coming," Barstow said, casting an expectant glance at the sky. Mulder looked up. A brilliant white thunderhead stood up against the horizon to the northwest, a smudge of dark gray at its bottom. "What'll happen if it comes this way?" he asked. The guru shrugged. "It depends on what the storm brings." *Whether it brings a tornado?* "You work well," Barstow said. "That will be pleasing to the Heliosians." "Is that what they want?" Mulder asked, retrieving another mushy peach, pock-marked where bugs had chewed it. "People to work for them?" "Not like what you mean," Barstow said. "Not like slaves." He pulled a peach off the tree and studied it for a moment. "Then what do they want?" "Companions." *Great. We'll get a pizza and a six-pack and go bowling together.* "I don't know what that means." "It means what the angels want it to mean," Barstow said. He took a bite out of the fruit in his hand. "If we expect them to save us from ourselves and our dying world, then it isn't too much to learn to accept their wishes, to follow their way." "Just what is their 'way'?" "It's too soon for you to be able to comprehend that. You still have much to learn about yielding yourself up to the infinite. When the time is right, the angels themselves will show you what you need to know." Mulder straightened up, looked at Barstow. "Have you become one of them?" The guru smiled. "No, not yet. But I have something of them in me. They have shared much with me. All of us here are in the process of becoming, and soon, you will be, too--if that truly is what you want. With the Heliosians' power, even the human body can be transformed." "Transformed how?" "To be stronger, unafflicted by emotion, able to mold ourselves physically in a way that mere, mortal humans cannot. Independent of the coarse urges and bodily functions to which we are now subject. Look with real objectivity at human beings. What do you see?" Barstow shook his head. "What really separates us from the crudest of beasts?" Mulder waited a moment, while Barstow took another bite of peach, looking at him steadily. Mulder realized the guru meant for him to answer. He shrugged. "That we speak, comprehend mathematics, fly into space, preserve our songs on magnetic tape. I don't know, Thomas, it's an anthropology question--not my field." Barstow shrugged, too. "None of those things has lifted us from the level of bulls and cows. We spend so much of our time in bestial pursuits--rutting, shitting..." He hefted the peach. "Eating so that we can rut and shit again. As transformed as I am by the blessings of the angels, even I am subject to those savage compulsions." Mulder's internal psychologist noted the choice of words. *A compulsion to anal sex?* "The whole nature of the creature we are," Barstow said. "That is what must change, for anything to be different. That is what the Heliosian angels are offering. Freedom from a bestiality human beings can never escape on their own." Mulder shook his head. "How can that be accomplished? Some kind of genetic manipulation?" Barstow laughed. "You see? You're still thinking in terms of human science, and trying to apply it to a thing beyond a miracle. When one of them touches you--then you'll know." Barstow turned and drifted off toward the house again, and Mulder went back to work, his mind churning. *Change the whole nature of the creature we are.* Was that what had happened to Dr. Secare, when his friend Dr. Berube had turned his blood into a green, corrosive substance? If Dr. Berube could use alien technology to do that, what was to stop alien angels from doing it to Thomas Barstow? Or anyone? There were aliens here somewhere, Mulder was sure of it. The only question was, how long would it be before they showed themselves? He knew when the storm was near because suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, a cool gust blew over him. It felt wonderful. He realized he was drenched in sweat and light-headed with thirst. Someone whistled, from up toward the house. "Come on," the novitiate said. She picked up her bucket. "It's time to go in. The storm's almost here." ************************************************************************ Part 12 Mysticism occurs whenever a human being sees the separation between the natural and supernatural, the temporal and the eternal, as overcome. - Albert Schweitzer May 27, 1997 Wimberley, Texas The storm came slowly toward them, rumbling and prickling with lightning. Mulder followed as the Fusionists trudged wearily to the house. He was thinking how it good it would feel to get a shower--he was sticky all over with sweat and peach juice. He was pretty sure his whole body was swarming with nasty little insects. As they went in and passed Barstow's living room study, Mulder noticed the guru was on the computer, engrossed in a weather radar readout on the Internet. The rest of them milled about in the hallway. Phyllis Wilding went from one person to the next--Mulder's blood ran cold when he realized she was checking the small explosive devices to ensure they were armed. "Should someone go out?" Wilding asked. Barstow shrugged. He didn't look away from the computer screen. "I don't think this is the one," he said. "But it can't hurt to watch it. You and Nana-anka go. Each of you take one of the new ones. They need to learn." Wilding pursed her lips. She glared at Mulder. "You," she said. "Come with me." Too tired to object, Mulder followed her. She led him out the back door of the house. Nana-anka and the novitiate went out the front. Wilding walked steadily past the potting sheds, near to the tree line. The wind came in sharp, brief gusts that smelled heavy with rain. Wilding stopped, looking up at the sky. Mulder leaned on a nearby tree. "What are we doing out here?" he asked. She said nothing. She turned to face him, then suddenly reached out to get both arms around his neck. She kissed him hard. Bewildered, Mulder simply froze. Wilding withdrew her hands from around his neck and ran them down his back, caressing his buttocks. There'd been a time when he had welcomed her attentions, but not here, not now. She was using sex to try to control Barstow--was she trying to do the same to him, because she didn't trust him? Mulder wrenched his head away. "Stop it," he said. She kept right on kissing him, along his jaw, down his neck. "Phyllis, stop it!" He tried to disengage himself gently, but God, the woman was like an octopus--every direction he moved, he ran into a hand, a leg. Finally he got both his hands on her shoulders and just shoved her back. "I said, stop it! What do you think you're doing?" Wilding's face went hard with anger. "Shut up," she said. "You don't question me! You tried to get between me and Pater in England--I didn't let you then, and I won't now! Pater belongs to me!" *Jesus!* Had she slept with him at Oxford just to keep him from turning to Barstow for sex? She hadn't known him as well as she thought. "You're just like Lurel-anka," she went on, "always trying to shove yourself into my place, to be the favorite." Mulder felt something cold coil around his belly. Had Wilding killed Lauren van Hauw in a fit of jealousy? "If they're coming tonight," Wilding said, "*you're* not going to get in the way." "I don't want to get in the way," Mulder said, truthfully. "I want to see them, too." "Why?" she demanded. "So you can shoot them with your stupid little gun? Take them back to your government lab and dissect them? I've seen what your kind have done to our angels--I've seen them in the rail cars where they were gassed and buried in the desert!" "So have I," Mulder said steadily. "But I don't understand why. Phyllis, you know something about what's going on out here--tell me. I don't want to hurt them or you. I just want the truth." "Men like you have threatened my family. I had to come back here or risk losing my children, my grandchildren." Mulder blinked. He'd had no idea she had a family--she had never mentioned that. When had that happened? The Kurt Crawford clones had said women who went through the testing process and had the implants, were barren. Had Wilding had her children even before he had met her in Oxford? "Phyllis--" "There's only one way to make meaning of what I've had to give up, and that's to go with them!" She pointed up toward the sky. "Don't you think for a second, Fox Mulder, that *anything* will stop me!" "I don't want to stop you!" "Shut up!" she screamed. She turned away, facing into the wind. Then more quietly, she said, "I'm listening to the storm. You listen to the storm." *I hear it. So what?* It was growing dark. Lightning rippled above them, and thunder boomed. Mulder stood still, looking up at the sky, as rain began to pelt fiercely down on them. Wilding rounded on him abruptly, lunged at him and pounded his shoulders with her fists. Mulder flinched backward, caught off guard. "Get out of here!" she screamed at him. "You don't belong! They're coming, and I won't let you go with them! They're here for me, not you!" She lunged again, and Mulder slipped on the wet grass and fell. Then Wilding raced into the trees, running like a hare chased by dogs. **** Scully was damned tired of being wet. When the storm swept down on the hilltop where she was watching the compound, she wrapped herself in a rain slicker and huddled under it, thinking vindictive thoughts about Texas weather, the FBI, Mulder and the universe in general. She wouldn't have seen Mulder in the gathering darkness if he hadn't been dressed in white. Scully picked up her binoculars and studied the tableau before her. The view left her feeling an unfocused anxiety. She saw Mulder and a woman walking near the edge of the trees--not a good place to stand as a thunderstorm bore down, unless one really *wanted* to get struck by lightning. They went behind a tree, and she couldn't see them anymore. Raindrops had begun to blur her binoculars, and she lowered them to wipe off the lenses. Out the corner of her eye, she saw motion at the rim of a low cloud. *Christ, there it is again.* A metallic flying object like the one she had seen in Arkansas had flashed by over her head. And it had gone in the direction of the compound. For a moment, her thoughts whirled. If the bastards were after Mulder, she doubted she could get to him in time, and she had no effective backup out here. They'd been able to call in a couple of agents from San Antonio, but not enough to cover the compound--the troops were spread thin. Skinner had gone into Wimberley to get them something to eat. Not likely he'd be back in under half an hour. Scully saw a blue-white glow in the woods and made up her mind. She ran toward Mulder. **** Lightning streaked down out of the sky, so near Mulder felt the hair on his bare arms lift in the static field. He ducked, squeezing his eyes shut. He heard a sizzle and a crack like a gunshot, and a second later, thunder--louder, nearer than any he had ever heard before. He looked up again just in time to see a tree glow briefly where the lightning had struck it--its trunk had split wide open. He got to his feet. Wilding was nowhere to be seen, but she had gone into the trees. It couldn't be safe in there. "Phyllis!" he yelled. "Phyllis, come back!" Dimly, he saw something glowing, back in the woods. *Christ, what is that?* He thought of what Sandra had said about lightning that stayed on "like one of those search-lights at the mall." Wilding had said "they" were coming. He went after her, toward the glow. He couldn't go fast--it was too dark to see, and the rain came down in sheets, blinding, mixed with small hailstones. As he approached the glow, he slowed, moving carefully from tree to tree in the gloom. Then he froze, his heart pounding. A small, thin figure appeared out of the brilliant, blue-white glare. A figure with an inhumanly large head and long, thin fingers. *God, the aliens!* Behind the small figure stood someone else, taller, shrouded in the glow, but unlike the small one, identifiably human. Was it Wilding? No, too tall, too thin. Suddenly he felt a shattering pain in his head, and his vision shuddered, leaving him with a view like a bad, jerky video. *God, another seizure!* He had thought he was through with them. *Not now!* He struggled to keep control of himself, but the pain was searing. He went down on his knees, holding his head, shaking, his guts in a knot, fighting a losing battle against his own body. The blue-white glow expanded--it was all around him now. *Goddammit, not now!* He managed to look up. A woman stood over him, but not Phyllis Wilding. This one was taller, darker, with deep brown hair and bright blue eyes. She frowned at him in concern. She started to bend down to him, and he recognized her. He knew, as surely as he knew that he needed to breathe air, that she was his sister. *Samantha!* He tried to say the name aloud, but he couldn't make his mouth work. He couldn't move. And the alien was beside her now, its hand catching Samantha's arm to stop her before she could touch him. He saw her lips move, and just for a moment, before the alien pulled her away, he thought he heard her say, "Fox?" *Samantha!* God, what was wrong with his mouth? He tried to raise his arm, to touch her, signal her...anything to keep her from going! *Don't leave me! Take me with you! Samantha!* But she and the alien floated together back into the light. *Come back!* And then the light went out. Mulder let himself fall onto the muddy ground. He lay there, cold, wet and shivering, stunned beyond thought. It was a while before he could move. The rain had stopped, the storm moving off. Slowly, he sat up. His head still hurt, which was strange, because previous seizures had left him feeling wonderful. He put his hand out and touched a rock covered with something stickier, warmer than rain water. He couldn't see it in the dark, but when he lifted his fingers to his nose he could smell what it was. Blood. He hadn't had a seizure. Someone or something had cracked him in the head. Which meant that what he had seen had not been one of Goldstein's "recovered memories." It meant he really had seen his sister. She was alive. She was here. **** The sky had started to lighten again by the time Scully found him, sitting forlornly, a little wobbly, in the trees. "Mulder," she said, breathless from running after him. "Are you all right?" He lifted his head. He couldn't have looked more surprised if she had grown horns and a tail. "Scully," he said, his voice hushed. "What are you doing here?" "I've been keeping the compound under surveillance. I thought something had happened to you--and obviously I was right. You're bleeding like hell." "She was here, Scully. I saw her. I saw Samantha. She's with them. Samantha's here!" *Wonderful. Another seizure, and now he's hallucinating about his sister.* He had that wild-eyed look, and his head had bled after the "treatments," too. But when she got hold of him and took a closer look, she saw the blood was flowing from the back of his head, well away from the scar Goldstein had left. "Did you fall?" she asked. "No, I think somebody clobbered me. I'm all right--I didn't black out. Did you hear what I said--she was *here,* Scully! Didn't you see them?" She fished a handkerchief out of the pocket of her rain slicker--she was carrying them all the time now because of her nose bleeds--and used it to put some pressure on his wound. "I saw something," she conceded. "I'm not sure what it was. Hold still, will you?" As if he had not heard her, he said, "Shit--where's Phyllis?" and started to get up. She grabbed his shoulder and forced him back down. "Mulder, goddammit, sit still before you bleed to death." He sat, fidgety as a bored five-year-old. "Did you see where Phyllis went?" he asked. "The woman who came out here with me?" "No." She noticed suddenly, that there was a little electrical box hanging on a chain around his neck. She resisted the impulse to tear it off him and throw it as far into the woods as she could. "What about Paulie?" Scully asked, trying to get him focused on reality. "Is he in the attic?" "I don't know. They've been keeping me isolated; I haven't been able to get up there yet." He shook free of her, his excitement overwhelming him. "She's *here*, Scully. I *saw* her." Suddenly she heard a distant voice and went for her gun. Both of them froze, listening. The voice called, "Filsa-anka, where are you?" "It's okay," Mulder breathed to Scully. "You hide; I'll go." He started to get up again, but she caught his arm. "You don't have much time," she whispered. "Skinner's not going to hang back for much longer. We need something, Mulder, and we need it fast." She saw his eyes narrow in concern and knew that he had caught the urgency in her tone. "You've got to stop him, Scully--keep him off my back until I find out what's going on here," he said. "Until I can take Samantha back with me." "Mulder, I can't--" "Samantha's *here*," he said. "I'm not coming out, and I'm not letting Skinner get in my way." Then he jerked up onto his feet and stalked off, leaving Scully staring after him in shock. **** "I saw her!" Mulder exulted. "Thomas, she's with them!" Barstow and the other Fusionists had brought Mulder and Phyllis Wilding back to the house. They had found Wilding dazed, scraped and scratched, but Barstow insisted she was all right--she was just recovering from an encounter with the angels, the guru said. Then Barstow had led both of them to the bathroom to patch up their wounds. Wilding sat cross-legged on the floor while Mulder perched on the edge of the bathtub. She hadn't said a word. She just sat there, her dilated eyes dark, her jaw a little slack. "You saw your sister?" Barstow asked calmly, dabbing the cut on Mulder's head with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. "Yes! She knew me--I know she recognized me." He was euphoric, dizzy with happiness. The woman he had seen was no clone, no hybrid. She was Samantha, grown and strong and beautiful, and he was completely transported with the joy of having seen her. For the first time in almost twenty-five years, he could really let himself believe it, believe that he might really be rejoined with his sister. She was alive. *God. Alive, for-real, for-sure alive.* He'd been right all along. It was real. Mulder wanted to run out into the road and shout it, to dance and sing it. He had rarely thought about the possibility that Samantha might be dead. He hadn't been able to--it hurt too much. Now, God, to have that weight off his back. That guilt lifted from him. A pressure in his chest that he had not even realized was there had released. He could breathe, really breathe. It went round and round in his head. Alive...alive...alive... The alcohol Barstow was using stung. Mulder flinched. "Are you sure you're all right?" Barstow said. "You don't look quite yourself." Mulder laughed, giddy. "I feel great," he said. "God, Thomas, you can't imagine how good it feels, just to know she's not--" His throat closed up, and suddenly, without even any clear idea that it had been coming on, he was weeping. He lowered his head into his hands. "Fox," Barstow said softly. Mulder shook his head. "She won't come back to you." "That's okay," Mulder said. He sniffled and reached for a tissue, wrenching his emotions back into line. "I'll go to her." It wasn't his first choice--he'd prefer to bring her back. But if it was his only choice... "Tell me what to do--tell me how I get them to take me so I can be with her." Barstow put two fingers along Mulder's jaw and lifted his chin to look into his eyes. "I'll teach you what I can," Barstow said. "But there isn't much time." "Just tell me. There's nothing I won't do, Thomas," Mulder said. "Of course, I will," Barstow said gently. Mulder thought of what Scully had said about Skinner's impatience. He was sure Skinner's motives were pure, but he couldn't let the A.D. screw this up. *I'm too close.* "Listen, Thomas," he said. "My partner, another FBI agent. She's still out there. I've seen her watching the compound. They won't go away until they find Paulie Dennison." The older man shook his head. "He isn't here," Barstow insisted. "But that won't stop them from looking. Before I left to come here, they were getting a search warrant. They'll be here soon--maybe as soon as tomorrow." Out the corner of his eye, he saw Wilding focus on him, and a piece of the puzzle suddenly fit. Barstow was telling the truth; he didn't know where Paulie was and probably hadn't been the one who had taken him. It was Wilding. He remembered what she had said, out in the storm: *Don't you think for a second, Fox Mulder, that *anything* will stop me!* Maybe she really meant *anything*--up to and including killing Lauren van Hauw and kidnapping Paulie. "Why would you tell me this?" Barstow asked. "I want to be with my sister, Thomas." Barstow smiled. Gently, he said, "Call me Pater." **** San Marcos, Texas "You saw Mulder?" Skinner asked. "Yes, sir," Scully said. "He's okay, but the Fusionists have kept him pretty isolated. He hasn't had much opportunity to look for Paulie, or to find out what they're guarding in the attic." Skinner put his hands on his hips and paced across his hotel room. "I've had about enough of this, Scully. Believe it or not, the weather service is predicting severe thunderstorms again tomorrow. The Fusionists in Arkansas touched off their bomb in response to a tornado. Do you know of anything that guarantees the Fusionists here won't do the same in response to a tornado warning?" "No, sir," Scully said wearily. Much as she wanted to support Mulder, she knew where Skinner was going, and he was right. The A.D. sighed heavily. "I respect what Agent Mulder's trying to do, and the fact that he had the guts to try it--despite knowing that I'm going to kick his skinny butt all the way back to D.C. for doing it without authorization. But I'm not going to stand here with my thumb up my ass while twenty-six people, including one of my agents, get blown to kingdom come." "I understand, sir." He glanced at his watch. "It's six p.m. now. At noon tomorrow, if Mulder hasn't walked out of there on his own with Paul Dennison, we go in, get Mulder out and execute a search warrant for the boy." "Yes, sir." "You look tired, Scully. Why don't you get some rest?" Scully just nodded and went to her room. Hell, Skinner was right. She *was* tired. Frustration about the way the case was dragging on inconclusively, anxiety about both Mulder and Paul Dennison--they were eroding her strength. And it was just getting worse, the longer they waited. Seeing Mulder had sharpened that anxiety--Mulder had risked his job and his life more than once in his effort to find out what had happened to his sister. Scully had no doubt he would do it again in a heartbeat. And now he believed he had seen Samantha with aliens. What would he do in response? He would do anything he thought would lead him to his sister or the truth about what had happened to her. The good news was, Scully doubted Mulder would do anything that might put Paulie Dennison at risk. He had sacrificed his own quest more than once to protect others--he had given up the DAT tape so Scully could return to see Melissa before she died, he had shot John Lee Roche to prevent him from killing a little girl in Boston, he had given up the clone who claimed to be his sister to save Scully's life. If it came down to it, she was confident he would put his own needs aside to ensure Paulie came to no harm. And Mulder was not quite as irrational as he sometimes appeared. Though he had raged at Scully for questioning whether the clone really was his sister, she knew he'd had doubts himself. Maybe, on reflection, he would have doubts now, about what he'd seen. Yeah, right. She decided to have a nap and then once more sift through the reams of printouts from the Fusionists' Web site in hopes of finding something that would make sense out of what was going on in the compound. But a few minutes after she laid down, someone knocked at the door. She got her gun and took a look through the peephole. She saw a man in a light gray suit, with a brown leather portfolio tucked under his arm. "Who is it?" Scully called. "I'm looking for Agent Mulder," the man said. He spoke just loudly enough for her to hear, quietly enough not to attract attention from anybody else. Scully left the safety chain hooked and opened the door a crack. "He's not here at the moment," she said. "I'm his partner, Agent Scully--something I could help you with?" This man was scared. With the door open, she could practically smell it on him. He was young--mid-twenties, she guessed--about medium height, with light brown hair and green eyes. He shifted his weight nervously. "Uh, when do you think Agent Mulder might be back?" he asked, his voice low. "I'm not sure." *Boy, is that ever the truth.* Scully hesitated, then decided to go with her gut feeling that this man was no threat. He looked like an accountant. "Hold on a second," she said. She slipped the chain off and opened the door. "Would you like to come in, sir?" she asked. He shifted his weight again, and his eyes were wide with anxiety. "I, uh, I'm not sure that's necessary," he said. "I really wanted to talk to Agent Mulder, but..." "Sir, I'm his partner." Scully flashed her badge. "If you have something to tell Agent Mulder, you can tell it to me. I promise whatever you have to say will be held in the strictest confidence, if need be." He considered this. "You work with Mulder all the time?" *Day and night.* "Yes, sir." "Uh, okay." He stepped into the room, then stood awkwardly while she shut the door behind him. Scully gestured at an armchair. "Please," she said. "Have a seat." She sat on the bed opposite the chair. "I'm sorry to barge in on you like this," he said, settling himself in the chair. "And...I hope you understand, but I *really* don't want my name associated with any of this, you know, publicly." "All right." "See, my mother is one of the people in that compound out there by Wimberley, and when I heard what happened to the Fusionists in Arkansas, I got really scared for her. Then I heard that an FBI agent named Mulder was looking into it." Scully nodded. "Yes, we are." He paused, then, looking at the floor. "Do you...I mean, is there any possibility that someone could get her out of there before...well, before anything happens?" "I don't know," Scully said. "If she went to the Fusionists voluntarily, there's probably not much we could do to force her to leave unless she's implicated in a crime." "Isn't there some witness thing you could use, if you thought she *knew* something that would explain what happened in Arkansas?" Scully blinked. "Possibly," she said. "Why don't you just tell me your story, and then I'll see what I can do." ************************************************************************ Part 13 May 27, 1997 San Marcos, Texas Scully waited for the man in the gray suit to begin the story. He sighed, still unsure. Then earnestly, he said, "Look, I'm not into the militia thing. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, or anything like that. I'm a loan officer for a bank, a member of the Rotary Club in San Antonio. I've got a house in the suburbs and a wife and a new baby, you know? You can check that out--hell, I want you to check it out." She nodded again. "It all started when my mom disappeared." Well, that fit the pattern. "Mom was a Solar Fusionist when she was young, and then she quit them and married my dad. Later she went back to them a couple of times, but not for long--I guess you could say she was kind of a free spirit. So anyway, we had a vacation place up on Lake Travis, and one night while we were out there, this storm came up. There was a strange light off in the trees, and afterward, my mom was just gone." Hastily, he added, "Now, I didn't see a UFO. I thought it was ball lightning or something, and if you tell me that's what it was, I'll believe you. But my mom didn't think it was ball lightning, and after the cops found her in Arizona, she just wasn't the same. She kept saying it wasn't the first time she'd been 'taken.'" Scully reached for her notebook. "Where in Arizona?" "Outside of Phoenix. It was in 1986--I must've been about eighteen." "And did she say who had 'taken' her?" His look was pained, embarrassed. "Angels," he said. "Only the way she described them, it was like the things in *Close Encounters of the Third Kind,* like she meant they were aliens." "Go on." "The doctors said it was all in her head, and maybe it is. But it always seemed strange to me that she'd go psychotic overnight. And all the doctors could tell us was that sometimes it just happens that way. But I guess I never really bought it. She was, you know, so *normal* before." He shrugged. "Well, a couple of years later, she had a problem with this thing that somehow got buried in the back of her neck." Scully suddenly had a mental image of Dr. Ishimaru bending over her. She suppressed a shiver. "It started bleeding, so my dad took her to the doctor," the man went on, "and they removed this...*thing* from under her skin. Like a little piece of metal, only nobody could figure out what it was or where it came from. And then my mom said she had to leave, had to go back to the Fusionists because she'd been 'marked.' After she left, I kept the metal thing." "Do you still have it?" Scully asked. Her throat was dry and tight suddenly, and it was an effort to focus on what he was saying, what she was asking. "No, and this is why I don't want you to use my name. A couple of months after she left, I came home one day, and there were all these cop cars in front of my apartment. They had the whole place cordoned off, you know, with that yellow tape? They said they were DEA and that an anonymous source had told them I was running drug deals out of my house. But that was just bullshit--I don't even use drugs myself, much less deal them. They tore the hell out of the place. Even punched holes in the walls. All I could do was stand out there in the street." He shook his head hard. "Do you know they never even questioned me? It was like they knew all along that I was the wrong guy. And then all they had to say about it when they didn't find a drug lab was, 'Sorry. We made a mistake.' So I think you can see why I wouldn't want to go through that again." "I understand completely," Scully said. *Bastards*, she thought. "Anyway, when I got inside and checked things out, the only thing that was missing was that little piece of metal the doctor took out of my mom's neck." Okay, that was odd. "You think they trashed your house just to get that one item?" He shook his head vehemently. "I don't know--I mean, like I said, I'm the kind who believes the Warren Commission. At first, I thought they just screwed up and got the wrong house, and the metal thing got lost in the process or something. And to tell you the truth, I wasn't too upset to have it gone. But then last year, my mom sent me this." He reached into the brown portfolio, started to hand her a file folder, then hesitated again. "I haven't told anybody I have this," he said. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm not telling *you* I have it, right?" "Yes, sir," Scully said. "You were never here." He gave her the file. Scully opened it and found a letter addressed to "Andy" and a sheaf of official U.S. government documents related to something called Project Garnet, Delta Section. She started reading. After a few minutes, she looked up at him, stunned. She said, "This material suggests that our government brainwashed the Solar Fusionists into believing they have to kill themselves, as a cover-up for genetic experiments." "Yeah," he said. "That's the way it reads to me, too." "What's your mother's name?" Scully asked. "Kaufman," he said. "Phyllis Wilding Kaufman." **** Man can learn nothing except by going from the known to the unknown. - Claude Bernard **** Wimberley, Texas They gave Mulder an actual bed of his own that night, one of six small cots crammed into the same upstairs bedroom, but Mulder's mind was in a whirl. Tired as he was, he lay there with his eyes wide open, his pulse racing. Samantha alive. Maybe within his reach. The only problem was Paulie Dennison, and how to find him and get him the hell out of here before anything happened to him. Silently, Mulder slipped out of bed and peeked out in the hall. There was still someone guarding the attic. He closed the door again. There had to be some other way to get up there. *Shit.* The dormers. How stupid of him not to have thought of that right off. He went to the window and quietly slid it open. The Fusionists in the room were sound asleep, exhausted from their day toiling in the heat. Mulder stuck his head out the window and looked up. It was a pretty hairy climb, straight up the side of the house about four feet and across the roof some distance he couldn't gauge from his vantage point at the window. Maybe as much as fourteen feet to fall if he slipped--not an appealing prospect. But there was a drainpipe he could just reach with one hand. He positioned himself, sitting on the window sill with his feet hanging outside, then gripped the drainpipe. Mulder launched himself out the window and grabbed the pipe with his other hand. He hung there for a moment, to steady himself, then got his right foot braced against the wood clapboards while he hauled himself up, hand-over-hand. He was not looking forward to the climb back down, but it was too late to stop now. When he got to the edge of the roof, he hung on the gutter and reached up for a plumbing vent pipe to pull himself onto the shingles. Then he lay on the roof for a minute, breathing hard with the exertion of the climb. Finally, he got up on his hands and knees and crept toward the nearest dormer. A dim glow showed through the slats over the glass-- might be nothing more than an attic light accidentally left on. The shutters actually worked when Mulder moved them, changing the angle slightly to see better inside. But there wasn't enough light for him to recognize anything. He got a vague impression of shapes, nothing more. *There has to be a reason they're guarding it.* He looked closely at the frame holding the slats in place. It fit snugly against the window, but didn't appear to be nailed or screwed on. Mulder pulled on it carefully, then stopped cold when it made a nasty squeal of metal against wood that he figured had carried five miles in the cool night air. *Shit, shit, shit.* He pulled again, a little more gently, and the noise this time was more a quiet groan. The shutters came free, and he set them aside. He blinked, suddenly realizing the window behind the shutters stood open. But then, that only made sense if they were keeping someone in the attic--they'd need to provide some air circulation because of the heat. He stuck his head in and looked. Still nothing that remotely resembled a seven-year-old boy. The light source was hidden behind a stack of cardboard boxes. He'd have to get around those cartons. Mulder had to crawl through the window to get under the low roof line as he went inside. In the dark, he moved slowly, trying not to dislodge any of the junk piled up inside, most of it suitcases of one vintage or another. The Fusionists had stacked their earthly possessions in this attic. He noted his own flight-battered black nylon crash bag on the top of one pile--if nothing else, knowing its location was likely to be useful later. He resisted the temptation to unzip it and check for his gun and phone. But the zipper would've made a sound, and he didn't yet know who else might be in the attic. He worked his way toward the boxes, grimacing when a step made a board under his feet creak softly. Nobody came running. Surely an old house like this would just creak on its own from time to time, right? Lord knew his parents' house in Martha's Vineyard had--assuming that hadn't been some conspirator creeping around the attic just as he was doing. Not necessarily a safe assumption, and one that didn't bear thinking about now. He had gone near enough to the center of the house that he finally could stand upright. Closer now, he saw a drop light hanging over a roof joist. He crept up to the edge of the boxes. Then something grasped his shoulder from behind. Mulder started. He forced himself to turn slowly, not to whip around and make a noise. He found himself looking into big, black, almond-shaped eyes set in an inhumanly large head. He gasped and jerked backward, tripped over something and started to fall. The gray-skinned creature caught him by his upper arms before he hit the floor. Mulder was too stunned, too terrified even to try to get away. The creature held him up and just stared, unblinking. Mulder's vision went white. **** Mulder drifted toward consciousness slowly, aware only of a brightness around him and the sound of indistinct, incoherent voices. He vaguely remembered his eyes being forced open to the sight of a blinding, blue-white light, and then something liquid being dripped into them. It had stung a little, but the light had hurt so, he had hardly noticed that. His eyes were closed now, which gave a reddish cast to the light through his eyelids. He didn't want to open them again. He couldn't make out what the voices were saying, and he wasn't sure he wanted to. Was that sound the alien creature speaking? Or someone else? He felt numb, as if he were floating in a sea of Novocaine. Although his brain told him he really ought to do something, it was not being very specific about *what* he ought to do--get up? speak? try to look around?--and his body just wanted to float and rest and hope nothing painful or disturbing would happen. A shadow blocked the light. With a tremendous effort, he opened his eyes just a little. The thing again, staring down at him. It put one hand on his chest and the other on the left side of his face. Mulder couldn't quite feel the touch, just a coolness on his cheek. He knew he ought to be afraid, but he wasn't. Then again, he wasn't curious, either. It was as if he had been through this before. Very gently, with one long finger, the creature pulled on the lower lid of Mulder's left eye, and touched his eyeball. He was too muzzy to react, and although it felt a little strange, it didn't hurt. Some kind of liquid moved along the surface, as if his eye was tearing, but he knew that wasn't it. Whatever the liquid was, it was green in color, and it was coming from the creature. And then, suddenly, he could make out what the "voices" were saying to him. *We will take you to her. Come with us. When we come for you, let go.* Mulder's heart rate leaped with excitement. The green liquid swirled, fogged his vision. Some kind of chemical signal, like what ants used to communicate? It was a voice he had heard before, the voice he had heard in his dreams of Samantha, in his memories of her abduction. *Just let go. Fly to us--your friends know how--she's waiting for you there.* The green liquid eddied, and Mulder felt his thoughts whirl with it. Now he wasn't sure whether the voices he heard were his own or someone else's, whether he was hearing them or remembering another time. *Paulie calls him the Moon Man.* *Great Mother! He's the Kwisatz Haderach!* *Mulder, a dream is not a memory.* Green waves, washing up on the beach. Mulder floated away in the sunshine on warm green seas. *Is the answer to your question worth dying for? Can you die now?* *Don't be afraid. Everything will be all right. Your sister will be returned to you.* *Let go.* Float away. *Soon. You can die soon. You can go soon. She's waiting.* The brightness returned, and he closed his eyes. Something green still swirled in his vision, but it no longer spoke to him. He slept. **** San Marcos, Texas Project Garnet didn't exist. Scully had spent hours on the computer searching the FBI database. And she'd found nothing. Hell, she'd *half-expected* to find nothing, so it was no big surprise, but it was still aggravating. The people named in the file Andy Kaufman had given her didn't exist, either--except for Andy himself, who checked out just as normal as he had said he would. And Phyllis Wilding Kaufman, whose missing persons case had been opened and closed in 1986. The case was consistent with those of the other Fusionists. A woman had suddenly disappeared, then just as suddenly reappeared somewhere far from home--weak, ill and with a strange object embedded in the back of her neck. None of it could be verified, but so much of it was consistent with so much other evidence she knew of. The mass grave at the Hansen's disease facility in West Virginia demonstrated that whoever was conducting these experiments was not above killing to keep the project quiet. All the MUFON women in Pennsylvania--they'd been, in effect, set to self-destruct, albeit even more automatically than this file suggested the Fusionists would. As Scully herself was slowly self-destructing. The file in her hands seemed a missing link between the two; although hardly conclusive, it echoed so much that she had seen, experienced. "...the subjects have isolated themselves in several small groups whose statements, if any, will be easy to discredit..." Lepers--isolated. Members of a religious cult--isolated and easy to discredit, just like MUFON members. "...all were appropriately prepped with the required doses of Nembutal for a sufficient length of time to become addicted, after which the drug was abruptly stopped to produce withdrawal effects of hallucinations, confusion, nightmares and sleeping difficulties. This confusion and tendency to hallucination eased the induction of the desired suggestion, which can be easily converted to the appropriate psychosis at a later time..." Scully picked up Phyllis Kaufman's letter to her son and read it again. "This is to let you know why you mustn't ever try to come after me. If they'd do this, do you think they'd stop at anything? Think of your own family, Andy." Scully wondered if *she* had been dosed with Nembutal, had some hypnotic suggestion placed in her mind while she underwent withdrawal from the highly addictive drug. Did that explain what she had seen in the forest? In the tunnel full of files in West Virginia? Was it the reason Mulder still clung to the idiotic notion that his sister had been abducted by aliens? It could be that they'd both been "prepped" to prevent them from knowing what really had happened, whatever that was. It could be that they were just waiting for the right thing to trigger the suggestion and send them completely over the edge. The thought made her sick to her stomach. What had been done--if the documents in her hands were real--was so horrifying that Scully's definition of "crime" didn't cover it. It was something even more gruesome than homicide because it turned the victims' own minds against them. But, God, trying to get the bastards who had done it was like trying to grab a handful of smoke. And it didn't help anything that the only person willing to help her get them thought they weren't human and kept looking in the wrong places. She and Mulder were walking on the same interstate, but when she wanted to get up on the main lanes, he was hitch-hiking down on the frontage road. She thought of Mulder, who had valiantly--if damnfoolishly--gone right into the lion's mouth. Skinner was right. It was high time to get him out of that compound, while they still could. If they still could. If he hadn't become so convinced that Samantha was there that he *would* still come out. **** Wimberley, Texas Mulder woke in the dark, to different voices. One was Barstow. The other was feminine--Phyllis Wilding? Yes, probably. "You're the one who's brought destruction down on us," the guru said angrily. "How dare you keep the boy here without my knowledge? Those government men--they won't leave without Paul. They'll have us all in jail, *now* when the time is so near." "*He* brought them here," Wilding shot back. Dimly Mulder realized she meant him. "Not me. And when they get here, they won't find anything. Not Paul or their spy." "We should let the boy go," Barstow was whispering. "He's of no importance to us. We have 'the one at first rejected,' and the angels have made him one of us now, no matter what his purpose was when he arrived." Mulder still felt numb, as if his limbs were so heavy even the thought of moving them was just too much for him. He lay with his eyes closed and let the voices carry over him, hardly caring what they were saying. "You know my regard for you, Pater," Wilding whispered back. "But you're mistaken. The boy *knows*. The storm tomorrow, it's the one. It's already forming in the sky, as the radiation from the solar flare approaches the Earth and drives it toward us. The next eruption will destroy the Sun. The boy said so. Your own formulas predict it." "He has made no prophecy," Barstow hissed. "What you hear is the fantasy of a small boy who listened too well to his mother's raving, not the command of the angels. What they have spoken to *me*, that is the truth--and you know if I could've stopped you from taking this child, I would have." "By putting me aside, the way you did Dahli-anka? By sending that cow Lurel-anka after me?" There was a pause. "What have you done?" Barstow asked, his voice hushed. "Nothing," Wilding said resentfully. "I was gone before Lurel-anka arrived. Dahli-anka must've been the one who killed her." A third voice, small and young, suddenly piped up. "I want to go home," it whimpered. "I want my mama." "Quiet, child," Wilding said harshly. Then, more kindly, "Your mother told you to stay here and behave yourself until she comes home." "I'm scared," the boy's voice said. Mulder heard a rustle. "Of course, you are," Wilding cooed. "But it's all right. Nothing can hurt you here, and soon there'll be nothing to fear." "Both of you be quiet," Barstow said. "Let's don't wake him. It's almost daybreak. Paul, it's time for you to go to sleep, too. Be a good boy, and lie down now." "I want to go home," Paulie sniffled. "We all do, dear," Wilding said. "And soon we will really go home." The rustling sound again. "He has the mark, Pater--how can we leave him on this filthy world, when he's clearly been chosen? It's up to the angels to decide whether to take him or not--and if they choose not to, we will have spared him the cataclysm." It grew silent then, and Mulder let himself drift back to sleep. He dreamed of swimming naked in a green pool, with strange pale-skinned creatures floating all around him. **** May 28, 1997 When he finally woke again, Mulder opened his eyes in the bright morning light and realized he was not in the attic. He'd been moved during the night. He had no idea when or how--all he remembered was climbing in the window. Now he lay in a small cave, the rock over his head an off-white streaked with yellow. Directly above his head was a huge spider web--right in the middle of the web hung a spider with a body as big as his thumbprint, its abdomen criss-crossed in beige and white with an attractive basketweave pattern. And across the cave was a young blond boy, his blue eyes wide with confusion. Paulie Dennison sat with his knees drawn up near his chin. He wore dusty jeans and a T-shirt and mud-spattered sneakers. Something prodded Mulder in the ribs. It was Phyllis Wilding, next to him, wielding a long stick to wake him. "Your friends are here," she said icily. Mulder squinted into the brightness at the mouth of the cave. In the distance, at the house, he saw Skinner standing on the front porch, recognizable from the ramrod stance even with his back turned toward Mulder. Barstow was with him, and Mulder just glimpsed Scully standing between the two, almost hidden behind the A.D.'s bulk. In the drive, he counted three patrol cars. Maybe as many as six sheriff's deputies. "I tried to warn Pater," Mulder said steadily. "You were there. All you had to do was let the kid go." "They won't find us," Wilding said. "You can't be sure of that, Phyllis." She nodded. "Yes, I can. Because you're going to lead them away from us." Mulder sat up, shaking his head. "I can't do that." "Then I'm going to send him, unprepared, to the Heliosians." She turned toward Paulie. "Show him, child," she said, her tone honeyed. "Stand up and show him how you'll fly up to the angels." Paulie stood up. Mulder thought he looked healthy enough, if a little dirty. The boy had one of those bombs on a chain around his neck, just as Mulder had guessed that he would. Paulie cupped his hands around the small bomb, then thrust his arms out and up, over his head. "Boom," he said solemnly. Mulder's heart clenched in his chest. *God, she was crazy enough to do it, too.* Slowly, he said, "I don't want to get between you and Pater, Phyllis. I just want to see my sister." "For all the times I had to let that pig of a creature thrust himself into me..." Wilding started. Her voice caught. Mulder heard in her choked, outraged tone that she was utterly consumed with hatred for what had been done to her, for the people who had done it--including Barstow. "I deserve to get what they promised--I deserve to go among the angels, after what I've given up!" "I'm not going to stop you. And neither is Paulie. If you need a hostage, I'll stay. But let Paulie go." "You're no better than the others," she spat. "You didn't mind fucking me, not until it stopped suiting your purpose." "That's not true, Phyllis. I thought you wanted to make love to me. You said that was what you wanted. If I'd known you didn't want to, I wouldn't have tried to make you--I would've left you alone." "That's easy enough for you to say now." She pointed out the mouth of the cave, toward the house. "Go," Wilding said harshly. "Go and tell them what they want isn't here." "What will it accomplish for you to kill him, Phyllis? What does that get you?" "The question is, Fox Mulder, what will it get *you*? You want the boy, but all you'll be left with is a corpse." "I want to go with you to the angels," Mulder said steadily. "I want to go to my sister." "You haven't yet earned the right. Go and preserve for us Paul's prophecy, the prophecy of the one Pater rejected." Mulder drew a long breath. He got up, stiffly. "All right," he said. "But they'll be back. You know that, don't you?" "By that time, we'll all be gone. We'll be where we belong." He slipped out of the cave. From inside it, she called softly, "Talk to the woman. If one of those men takes a single step this way, the boy is gone." *Yeah, I got it,* Mulder thought bitterly. He walked toward the house. ************************************************************************ Part 14 May 28, 1997 Wimberley, Texas Mulder got about halfway to the house when he saw Skinner turn to look at him. *Scully,* Mulder thought. *Send Scully, for Christ's sake, don't come running over here yourself.* He could breathe again when he saw his partner step around the A.D. and come toward him. "Are you okay?" she murmured, when she drew near. "Swell," Mulder said, his voice low. He kept walking toward the house, taking Scully back with him. "This is really cramping my style, you know. There's a cave back there behind us. I was trying to check it on the sly, but now you've blown my cover. I was getting somewhere, Scully--at least I know where he's *not*. But now they'll probably throw me back in that closet. You haven't found anything, have you?" "No. He's not in the attic." "I know. I checked it last night. For Christ's sake, how stupid does Skinner think I am?" "That's not the point, Mulder," she said, exasperated. "No, the point is, if Paulie Dennison has one of those bombs hanging around his neck and we go tromping in like storm troopers, he'll be field-dressed and roasted before we get near him." They went up onto the porch. Barstow smiled conspiratorially at Mulder. "I have been trying to explain to your friends that you prefer to stay here with us," the guru said sweetly. "Yes," Mulder said. "I belong here now." Skinner's look was appraising. Coolly, the A.D. said, "I'll want your badge and your gun, if so." Mulder shrugged. "I don't know where they are." He was hoping they were in his crash bag, somewhere in the house, but he couldn't be sure. "I cast them into the creek," Barstow said. "I could not abide such things here." Deputy Micklin came out of the house, followed by several other deputies. She frowned at Mulder, then turned to Skinner and shook her head. "You see?" Barstow said. "There is nothing here but a group of honest seekers looking to become worthy of a better existence." A muscle flexed along Skinner's jaw. "Right," he said. His glance at Mulder would've fried a water buffalo in its tracks. Mulder held his face expressionless. "All right, let's go, people," Skinner said crisply. "Move out." Scully looked a question at Mulder as they all got back in the cars. He ignored that, too. As they drove away, Barstow murmured, "Filsa-anka may yet kill us all." "Where's my gun, Thomas?" The guru shook his head. "I gave it to Filsa-anka to dispose of it," he said. "I don't know what she has done with it. Most of our novitiates' things are placed in the attic." "I'm going upstairs to look for it." He went into the house and climbed up into the attic to fetch his crash bag. But when he got there, he found Nana-anka standing beside the bag. "I need that," Mulder said, pointing. As he stood there, she changed. For a moment she looked as if she were melting. God. She was a shape-changing alien. **** San Antonio General Hospital San Antonio, Texas Scully wasn't sure what she hoped to learn by examining Daisy's medical tests. What would she find by looking at Daisy's records that she hadn't seen in her own? Evidence that things weren't as bad as she thought? They were that bad. Subtly, she could feel it in herself, as she had felt it when she had looked at Penny Northern and the other women in Allentown. Or maybe it was just that she couldn't face another day of sitting on the hilltop waiting for something to happen. Not that she didn't trust Mulder to do the right thing--however he happened to be defining that concept at the moment--it was just that her timeline didn't leave her the luxury of waiting for something to happen. What Mulder had said to her privately had been reassuringly rational, in the face of his refusal to leave the compound. She couldn't fathom what he was up to, but she was reasonably confident he was up to something. As long as his reasons were at least partly related to getting Paulie Dennison back home safely, she was willing to go with it. But then, if he really had taken the opportunity to search quietly for the boy and hadn't found him, why stay? In some wild hope of finding Samantha? It was perplexing as hell, and Scully didn't like being perplexed. Reading Daisy's hospital records only heightened her frustration. They were just more paper--they didn't tell Scully anything she hadn't already known. The psychological evaluation was more grave than the one Daisy'd had in Dallas three years ago. This one didn't pussyfoot around with words like "anxiety" or "fixation." It used words like "delusional," and listed the diagnosis as schizophrenia. Medically, Daisy had the same naso-pharyngeal mass as Lauren van Hauw and Scully herself. But again, that was no surprise, and it didn't add much to the database. That left only one option. She had to try talk to Daisy. She had hoped to avoid that, both because it seemed like a waste of time to sit through a lot of rambling about angels and aliens, and because, deep down inside, Scully feared seeing evidence that the psychosis that had befallen the Solar Fusionists might be lying around the corner for her, too. Daisy's "abduction," as Skinner had reported it, had been eleven years ago. *Maybe the only reason I'm not seeing aliens is that nobody's said the right thing to trigger the suggestion, the psychosis.* Had someone triggered a suggestion for Mulder? Scully waited for Daisy in a conference room that seemed designed to dull the senses--no windows, everything done in shades of gray and beige, as if the mere drabness of the decor could soothe over the most serious emotional upheaval. Daisy came in wearing a coverall just like her "companions" in Wimberley. It seemed blindingly white in the bland surroundings. Scully knew the doctors were giving Daisy Haldol for her illness. That might mean she'd actually make sense. She did look considerably less manic than she had that night in Mulder's hotel room. "I'm sorry to tell you that we still haven't been able to locate your son," Scully started. "But our investigation is ongoing." "Walter told me you're sure that he wasn't with the false companions in Arkansas," Daisy said. "Yes. I'm sure of that." "Then there's still time to save him." "I hope so, yes. We're doing everything we can to find him." Daisy nodded. "But that's not what you've come here for today, is it?" "No." Scully glanced away and sighed. "I wanted to ask you...about your abduction." "Abductions," Daisy said matter-of-factly. "It should be plural." "You've been abducted more than once?" "Yes. Six times, actually. Only the first was for a long time. Sometimes they returned me the same night, before anyone knew I was gone. Once they took me out of my bed, with Brad sleeping right beside me, and never even woke him up." She smiled. "They are very clever, very subtle." "And they were..." God, she hated even to say it. "They were... extraterrestrial creatures?" Daisy nodded, still smiling, happy as a puppy. "They were angels," she said. "Please understand that I have to ask this, and I don't mean to offend you. But does anyone in the Fusionists' compound use any kind of drugs?" She hadn't found anything in the tox screens on the bodies in Arkansas, but one never knew. Daisy's smile was condescending now. "No. And there is no programming, or 'brainwashing.' No torture or force." "What about the angels? When they took you, do you remember any injections or medical procedures?" She frowned, remembering. "They are always very curious about us, but there were no needles or knives." "What about the mark they put on your neck? How did that get there?" Daisy shrugged again. "That was just a touch." She extended her forefinger and touched the tabletop, as if demonstrating. "Did it ever bleed?" "Not mine, though I know others whose marks did bleed--especially those who had marks put there by men." Scully froze. "Men? What men?" "The men who want to make themselves into angels." "How could men make themselves into angels?" "It's--" She frowned, biting her lip. "I can't think of the word. Like...cross-pollinating a plant." "You mean they're trying to create a hybrid species?" "That's what I've been told, yes." "Do you know who these men are?" "No. I have never met them, and they weren't the ones who took me." "But how do you know that? Did they tell you they were angels?" "Oh, no." Daisy shook her head, hard. "That's not their word for themselves. I didn't know what to call them until I met Pater, and he explained everything to me. But it was as if I'd known all along--I just didn't have the right words to fit what had happened to me." Because something had triggered that "knowledge"? Scully's hands felt cold. She asked, "You didn't realize they were angels at the time?" Daisy shrugged. "Well, they don't have wings or halos, the way they're depicted here in our literature." "What do they look like?" "You've seen my sketchbook--that's the best description I can give you." "So Thomas Bar-- I mean, Pater, told you that they were angels, and you believed him, just on the strength of his word?" "No, of course not. Not as if I were to tell you that something moving in a lake is a sea monster and expect that you'd just take my word for it. There was something inside me that *knew* he was right. It was as if I'd had the knowledge all along and was just waiting for someone or something to release it. That's really not so strange, is it? It happens all the time--you fail to understand something, until suddenly one day, someone says something, and you think, 'Aha!'" No, that wasn't strange, in and of itself. Unless, of course, it was a matter of triggering a psychosis planted years before. "Do you know anyone who could tell me about the men you mentioned--the men who want to 'turn themselves into angels'?" Scully asked. "Filsa-anka said she was one taken and marked by those men. I don't know what she could tell you, but she once said to me that the angels saved her from them." "Filsa-anka," Scully said. It was the name she had heard the Fusionists calling in the forest when she went to Mulder. "Do you remember what Filsa-anka's name was before?" Daisy shook her head. "She was Filsa-anka when I came here to the ranch with Pater." Suddenly it occurred to Scully that the Fusionists' adopted names usually resembled their actual names. Dahlia Dennison had become "Dahli-anka." Lauren van Hauw had become "Lurel-anka." Slowly, Scully said, "Could her name have been Phyllis?" "I don't know." She nodded. "I want to thank you for your cooper--" Her cell phone rang. "Excuse me," she said, withdrawing it from her pocket to answer it. It was Skinner. There was a line of severe thunderstorms moving into the area. The storms had already spawned one tornado. **** Wimberley, Texas Mulder woke with his vision swimming green, still in the attic, but now with Paulie looking down at him. "It's coming," the boy said. "Can you hear it?" Mulder couldn't hear anything. "What's coming?" he whispered back. "The storm," Paulie said. "The biggest storm in the world." Mulder looked around and realized he was lying on a cot, with his hands tied at his sides. It was daylight, late afternoon, from the look of it. God, how long had he slept? He looked at Paulie. "How did you get here?" he asked. The tow-headed boy shrugged. "Filsa-anka," he said. "Are you the Kwisatz Haderach?" he asked solemnly. At last, a question for which there was actually an answer Mulder was sure of. "No. I'm an FBI agent. Do you know what that is? It's a kind of policeman. I'm going to take you home to your dad and your sister, Paulie, but I need you to help me a little bit. Do you think you could try to untie my hands?" Paulie considered this. Then he nodded. "I learned about knots in Boy Scouts," he said proudly. "That's great, but I need you to be very quiet while you're doing it, okay?" He looked around. His cell phone was...somewhere. He had seen it recently, but the memory slid away just as he grasped for it. Jesus, what was wrong with him? He never forgot anything. Paulie struggled at the tight knots, sweating and panting in the heat. Mulder heard thunder in the distance. One hand came free, and Mulder helped the boy with the other one. Mulder got up, looked around. Suitcases everywhere, and on top of one of the piles in the back, his crash bag. *Christ, let my phone be in there.* He yanked the zipper open--the phone was right on top, along with his badge. Barstow must have just stuffed them into the top of it. *Shit, where's my gun?* Someone...had it. Why couldn't he remember? "It's coming," Paulie said. "Look, a wall-cloud." Mulder bent to look through one of the dormer windows. He saw a low cloud with a shallow, cylindrical, whirling protrusion on the bottom of it. *Jesus fucking Christ.* Mulder had never seen a wall-cloud or a twister, but it didn't take much imagination to visualize that cloud extending itself toward the ground, becoming a funnel, then a tornado. It couldn't have been more than half a mile away. Mulder hit the speed dial. *Answer the phone, Scully. If I ever needed you to answer the fucking phone, the time is now. Pick up, pick up, pick up, please...* A click and then her voice. "Scully, it's me. I need a ride out of here, fast. Where are you?" "I'm already on my way, and so are Skinner and a whole lot of cops-- you know there's a storm?" *No shit.* "Yeah, I can see it." "It's already torn up another small town north of you. Where in the compound are you?" "In the house, up in the attic." "Is Paulie with you?" Something hit him, hard, and he dropped the phone as he fell and slammed into the wall. When he looked up, he saw Phyllis Wilding standing over him, her face suffused with angry red, her fists on her hips. Four or five other women stood behind her. "I knew you came to destroy us," Wilding growled. **** What I sought was the rapture of vertigo...the relapse...to nothingness. - Samuel Beckett **** Scully was about five miles from the compound when she saw the twister in her rear-view mirror, like a gigantic light-gray cobra coiled and slithering along the ground. Even in the distance, she could see it throwing debris hundreds of feet into the air--pieces of trees and building materials sent flying. She had always heard that it wasn't a good idea to try to run away from a tornado--what did that say about someone driving *toward* the same place it was headed? But Mulder had said he was in the attic. That and the fact that their conversation had been cut off suddenly suggested that he couldn't get out, and an attic was not a good place to hide from a twister, either. If she didn't beat the tornado to him, he and Paulie might not have a chance. She was on her own out here--Skinner had wanted to come in with choppers, but they'd been grounded by the weather, and he'd had to regroup with patrol cars. The twister looked as if it might be gaining on her. How fast could a tornado move? Twenty miles an hour? Thirty? She didn't know. She jammed the gas pedal to the floor. **** Nana-anka had Mulder's gun trained on him. To Paulie, Wilding said, "Come to me, boy." He took one step toward her, but when she reached for him, the boy had a sudden change of heart. He launched himself at Mulder, and wound his arms and legs around the FBI agent like a boa constrictor wrapped itself around a mouse. Mulder just managed to stay on his feet at the impact. "I WANNA GO HOME!" Paulie shrieked. Wilding advanced on them with murder in her eyes. "You belong with us!" she roared. "Phyllis, leave him alone!" Mulder yelled back. "He's just a little boy! You want to take it out on somebody, come for me, damn you!" She stopped, but her rage was unabated. "You'll both die here," she said coldly. "Look outside, Fox--even if you ran now, there's nowhere to go! The time of deliverance is right now! I might save the boy. He's been marked. But you're a dead man, Fox Mulder; I can smell your rotting carcass now!" "Where's Pater?" Mulder demanded. Deep down inside, he didn't think Barstow would've consented to what she was doing--had she killed him, too? "We no longer have any need of the stinking, sexual half-angel Barstow," Wilding said. She spat on the floor. "And for that matter, if it comforts you, you keep the boy--we no longer need him, either." "You took him, didn't you? You weren't sure of Barstow--you needed Paulie as insurance, and you killed Lauren van Hauw to get him!" "That knowledge won't do you any good, or me any harm. It's too late. I told you before, there's nothing I won't do. They took me from my family, and they would've killed me--me and my family, to protect their secrets! This is all I have, the only future I have, and I won't let you take it from me!" "I'm not going to try to stop you! Just let us go, Phyllis. You said yourself you don't need us." "I don't believe you," she said coldly. "You're no different from the other government goons who've tried to stop us from getting what we've earned." She gestured, and Mulder's novitiate snapped his own handcuffs on his right arm, then fastened the other cuff around a pipe over his head. Mulder didn't put up a fight. Nana-anka--if it was her--still had his Sig-Sauer, her grip on it just unsteady enough that he figured if she fired at him she'd hit Paulie by mistake. Then the Fusionists trooped off down the stairs. The boy wept forlornly against Mulder's shoulder. "Paulie," Mulder said. "Paulie, let go, you're hurting me." Slowly, the boy released his grip and slid down onto his own feet. "Are you okay?" Mulder asked. *I have got to get this kid out of here. Scully, where are you?* Paulie nodded, sniffling. Mulder reached down to wipe a tear off the boy's cheek with his free hand. He took the bomb from around Paulie's neck and tossed it to the other end of the attic, as far away as possible. Then he did the same with the bomb around his own neck. "Listen to me, Paulie. I'm going to make sure you get home, okay? But you're going to have to do something for me." He nodded again. "I want you to run as fast as you can down the stairs and out the front door. There's another police officer coming to help. She's a lady named Dana, and she has red hair, and she's going to be driving a blue car--" The car they'd rented was blue. Mulder had no idea whether Skinner would've sprung for another one that might be a different color, but there was no way to find out now. "I know it's storming," he went on, "and it's going to be scary. But you run to that car and tell Dana: 'Agent Mulder said to get the hell out of here.' She'll take care of you, and everything's going to be all right. Can you do that?" He nodded uncertainly. "Okay," Mulder said patiently, "tell me what you're going to do." He parroted it back. The wind was roaring, howling. Mulder could barely hear Paulie. "That's great," Mulder said. "You go, now, okay? Run fast as you can!" Paulie dashed to the attic door and down the stairs. Mulder glanced out the window. He could see the twister, a mile or two away, so big he couldn't really be sure how far. It was huge, malevolent--like a maddened, raging monster destroying everything it touched. He saw a house's entire roof fly through the sky. *My God.* He didn't think he had ever been so frightened. Then he remembered that he had been once. When he had seen Samantha fly through the air. ************************************************************************ Part 15 May 28, 1997 Wimberley, Texas The road curved and wound through the hilly terrain, and the twister had cut across country where Scully couldn't. The rain was blinding, and hail pummeled the rented Taurus. She didn't think she was going to make it. And then, suddenly, the twister was right beside her, running parallel to the road, close enough for mud from uprooted trees to splash onto her windshield. *Hail Mary, Mother of God...* She drove faster, skidding in the turns on the wet asphalt, and slowly pulled ahead of it, out where the road was still dry. Finally, she saw the gate, just as a gust tore it off its hinges and blew it away, tumbling end-over-end across the pasture to the south. *God almighty.* She drove like a madwoman, up to the house. When she got out of the car, she saw something hanging in the air over her head. She looked up--it was a book. Just hanging there, its pages fanned out, not moving at all. Suddenly it snapped shut and flew up against the side of the house with a loud smack. The rain hit her like a whip. Scully ducked her head and ran up onto the porch. She stopped just long enough to draw her gun, then tried the door knob. Unlocked, thank God. She went in. On her left, the Fusionists were seated in a circle around a large metal container with a clock blinking red, counting down. They were holding hands, their eyes closed, murmuring something, chanting. Barstow lay on the floor beside the container. She could see some of them still were wearing the small bombs, the red diodes blinking in time with the clock on the larger bomb. Were they using both kinds to make sure? *Shit,* Scully thought. She looked up to the second story and saw an attic door standing open, the wooden folding ladder already extended to the floor. Hiding behind the ladder, Paulie Dennison, frozen in terror, looked out a window as the twister approached. She went to him. "Stay right here," she shouted, over the hammering of the wind. "I'll be right back." She climbed into the attic and found Mulder working furiously at a pair of handcuffs, trying desperately to squeeze his big hand small enough to pull it through, his efforts now lubricated with his own blood. "Hold still," she said, fishing her key out of a pocket. "Hurry," he said breathlessly, "it's almost here. Did you find Paulie?" "Yes." The cuffs came free. "Go!" Mulder yelled. "We've got to get to the car--it's our only chance!" She hurried back down the attic ladder and called to Paulie while Mulder climbed down, too. "I'll get him," Mulder said. "You head for the car and be ready to floor it!" She got to the top of the stairs, then glanced back. Mulder, holding Paulie, had stopped dead and was staring at something in the living room. She couldn't see anything but the Fusionists. **** Samantha was with them. She stood right in the center of them and smiled up at Mulder. *Let go.* Mulder felt as if something shifted in his mind. *Is the answer to your question worth dying for?* It was. God, it was, if it really was the answer. Samantha was standing right there--how much more proof did he need? He had only to go down the stairs and embrace her. God, just to touch her again. To ask her forgiveness for having let her go. To tell her how desperately he had missed her. *Come with us. Fly with us.* He had to go to her. It could be his only chance. *Come. Let go.* Something was tugging at him. Slowly, as if waking from a dream, he looked. Paulie, sobbing, his little hands jerking wildly at the collar of Mulder's white coverall. Over the wind, Mulder couldn't hear what he was saying. He thought of Sandra, clutching her brother's teddy bear forlornly. He had promised Sandra he would do everything he could to return Paulie to her. He looked downstairs again, and Samantha was there, smiling. She would forgive him, as he had never forgiven himself. God almighty, how he needed that. How had he lived all this time without it? How could he ever live without it? "Scully," he shouted, over the roar of the storm. "Take Paulie. I have to go with her." Scully had reached the stairs. Her blue eyes had gone wide with fear and confusion. She shouted, "What? Mulder, come on!" He looked back at Samantha, still smiling. He couldn't let her go without him, not again. But Paulie. Scully. He couldn't take them with him. He moved toward the stairs. And then the world shifted and fell out from under him. **** Scully had seen the tornado through the window, blowing debris up against the glass. A larger object hit the glass and broke it. She screamed, "MULDER!" and ducked behind a wall. The roof ripped away at exactly the same moment the bomb went off. She saw Mulder and Paulie Dennison go flying out the window. Scully screamed Mulder's name again. Then she ducked away from a brilliant blue-white flash--a long, blinding glare more like a huge laser beam than a bolt of lightning. She could *hear* the light, like the power whine off a high-tension electrical line. She could feel static raise the hair at the back of her neck. Even through her closed eyes, it was so bright it hurt. Then it was gone, and there was nothing but dust and smoke, rain pounding, wind shrieking. The wall Scully had ducked behind had sheltered her from the blast. But with the roof gone, golf-ball-size hail battered her. The damaged house shuddered with the force of the storm, and the floor under her feet didn't feel stable. She worked her way gingerly along the hallway to the window. "Mulder," she called. "Where are you? Are you all right?" She looked out through the broken window and saw him hanging by one hand from a bent shutter, Paulie dangling from the other hand, paralyzed with fear, his blue eyes huge. Mulder's eyes were closed tight. "Mulder," she called. "I'm here." "Take him," he said hoarsely. "Scully...take him..." She heard pain, exhaustion in his tone. She reached as Mulder tried to lift Paulie. She grasped the boy's collar. "I have him," she said. "Mulder, I have him--let go." God, he seemed so out of it. Scully heaved the boy up into the house, then leaned out again. "Give me your hand," she called. "Mulder, let me help you." He didn't look up at her. "Mulder, give me your hand." Feebly, he lifted his hand a few inches. Then he fell. "NO!" Scully screamed. Stunned, she watched him hit the ground, limp, nerveless. He looked dead. Scully scooped Paulie up and raced down the stairs. The twister had moved off--it had only side-swiped the house. The bomb had left a gaping hole in one outside wall. Smoke curled up from downstairs as flame fought a losing battle with the wind and the rain. She ran to Mulder. He lay on the wet ground, not moving. When she touched him, he wasn't breathing. "Oh, God," Scully moaned. "Mulder, don't do this to me." She pulled his head back, meaning to start mouth-to-mouth. "He isn't dead," Paulie said. As if Paulie's words were a signal, Mulder coughed suddenly and jerked away. *How had Paulie known?* Mulder writhed onto his side, and groaned. "It's okay," Scully soothed, stroking his wet hair. "Help's on the way. Easy. Lie still." She heard tires scrape on gravel and looked up. Skinner had arrived, with two patrol cars following, their lights blinking like heartbeats. "We need EMS!" Scully yelled. "They're right behind us," the A.D. said, breathlessly. "How bad is he?" "I don't know. He got caught in the blast and fell from the second story. The Fusionists set off their bomb--there could be a lot of injuries." He headed off. Mulder groaned again. "I know it hurts," Scully said. "Lie still." She stayed with him until the paramedics jogged up. Then Scully hurried after Skinner, to help with the Fusionists. The room was total devastation, the furniture splintered, the walls blackened, the floor splattered with broken glass and shreds of paper and wood. But there were no bodies. No mangled organs or blood or even bits of clothing. "Scully," Skinner said. "Where are they?" "I don't know," she said, shaking her head. The Fusionists were gone. **** May 29, 1997 San Antonio General Hospital San Antonio, Texas Scully sat through the night with Mulder, though she knew it wasn't really necessary. He'd been unconscious before he hit the ground-- that limp senselessness that had frightened her so at the time actually had worked in his favor. His injuries were painful, but not life-threatening--a couple of broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and some nasty bruises. It really wasn't the bumps and broken bones she was worried about. What concerned her was what his state of mind might be when he came out from under the painkillers. What had he seen that had made him think, even for a moment, that he should stay and die with the Fusionists? She dozed on and off, sitting in an armchair beside his bed, alert to his slightest movement. He didn't move very much. Even his breathing was shallow, with his broken ribs taped. Then, just after sunrise, Scully heard the door open and looked up to see Sandra Dennison, wide-eyed, standing in the doorway. "Sandra," Scully said softly. "What are you doing here?" "My Dad and I came down to get Paulie," Sandra whispered. "I wanted to thank Agent Mulder." "He's asleep, honey--" "No'm not," Mulder said thickly. Scully turned and saw that he had extended his hand toward the girl. She stepped out of Sandra's way and let her go to him. "Paulie's okay?" he asked. She nodded, shyly took his hand. "He said you saved him." "No. He saved me." "Are you going to be okay?" she asked. "Yeah. I'm all right. You two take care of each other, okay?" She nodded. Then she bent at the waist awkwardly to press her lips against his hand. She mumbled, "I love you," and hurried out. When Scully turned to look at Mulder again, he had shut his eyes, and his mouth was drawn tight in pain. *Deep down inside we both know you were the best big brother in the world,* she thought. She went to him, took his hand in hers. As he wept she leaned down to whisper into his hair. "Shh. Hush." **** Standing outside Daisy Dennison's hospital room, Walter Skinner hesitated, then took a deep breath and went in. She was sitting up in bed, and when she saw him, she smiled like sunshine. She held both her hands out to him. Numbly, he took them. He wondered if the doctors had told her yet that her cancer had taken a turn for the worse--the prognosis was that she wouldn't last another year. "They told me you found Paulie, and that he's safe," she said. "Oh, how can I thank you?" "I didn't do it," Skinner said. "It was Agent Mulder. He's the one you ought to thank." "Paulie said Agent Mulder would save him, if anything happened. I would like to thank him. Where is he?" "Sleeping," Skinner said. He didn't want to tell her what had happened at the compound. She'd learn it eventually, and he expected she had few enough happy moments coming--he didn't want to spoil this one. "I'll tell him for you. How are you feeling?" "Wonderful," she said, with that brilliant smile. It was that smile that had captivated him, all those years ago, when she and Brad and he had been in 'Nam together. He had wanted to marry her. Brad had beaten him to it. "Dahlia," he said. "I wanted to tell you--" She shook her head. "Please. Let's don't go back over the past. I told you before, Walter, I'm not sorry for what I did. How can I look at Sandra and be sorry?" "That's what I wanted to tell you. Now that I've seen her, I'm not sorry, either. What we did was wrong, but there's nothing wrong about Sandra." The words felt bitter in his throat--Mulder had spent more time with his daughter than he had. The smile again. Skinner felt it melting him, just as it always had. He drew a card out of his jacket and pressed it into her hand. "If you ever need anything--" "I won't." *You might.* "Just take it, Dahlia. And call me, if you need to." He went back out into the hall, feeling a painful emptiness expand in his chest. She was dying, just like Scully, and for the same reason. He looked at Scully and he could see Dahlia dying, just as he could see Scully almost-imperceptibly growing more frail by the moment. Scully had an inner ruggedness Dahlia'd never had, and she was hanging tough as Dahlia never could. But Skinner thought he could see her growing paler, thinner, in tiny increments, day by day. What still tormented Skinner was that because of what he'd known about Dahlia's abduction, he should've guessed what was in store for Scully. The only thing he *hadn't* known about was the cancer, not until after it had been too late. But he had known there were terrible risks, and he hadn't done anything to stop it. He didn't know whether it would've been possible for him to stop it, but the fact was, he hadn't tried. He hadn't tried anything until he had learned about Scully's cancer--and now it was almost certainly too late. After the incident with the bees in the post office, he doubted the Smoking Man would or could do anything to help. He hadn't wanted Scully to come to Texas with them because he hadn't wanted to make things worse. Things were bad enough. **** June 3, 1997 FBI Headquarters Washington, D.C. Scully dabbed at yet another nose bleed with her handkerchief and studied her own face in the mirror, checking to make she was removing all the evidence of the bleeding. She had to be quick, she knew-- someone else might walk into the ladies room at any moment. And at last it had started to sink in that she couldn't keep this up forever--she didn't know how much longer her strength would hold. With every passing day, it seemed more likely she would not be able to stay on at work long enough to find the answers she needed, either for herself or for Mulder. She had ended up just filing what she had brought back from Texas: The file folder Andy Kaufman had given her, the disk she had mailed to herself showing another copy of the structure of "Purity Control." She had found Karen Eileen Lindsay in Lincoln, Nebraska--comfortably at home, physically weak, but with no memory of being abducted, or of being discovered by an FBI agent in Felicity, Arkansas. Almost as if she'd never been gone. Hopeless. It all added up to nothing. Again. Scully gave her upper lip a last pass with the handkerchief and headed back to the basement office she shared with Mulder. When she pulled open the door, she nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of someone sitting at Mulder's desk. But it was only Mulder--except that he was still on sick leave and wasn't supposed to be there. "You scared the hell out of me," she said. "What are you doing here? You're supposed to be at home, resting." "Reading this file is not my idea of major physical exertion," he said, without looking up. His tone was hard, angry. His glasses reflected the desk lamp--she couldn't see his eyes. She didn't have to go closer to know what file he was reading. "I would've brought it to you if you'd asked me," she said evenly. "The bomb didn't destroy the house, Scully," he said. "It didn't kill us. Do you seriously expect me to believe that it was powerful enough that there'd be no bodies left, no body parts, no shreds of clothing, no...residue? How the fucking hell does physics explain *that*?" Slowly, steadily, she said, "I'm not a demolitions expert--" "That's not what I asked you, goddammit!" Scully drew a long breath for calm. There was no point in shouting back; that would just inflame him all the more. "You're the section chief, Mulder," she said. "The report's not going anyplace without your signature. If you want to rewrite it--" He jerked forward, grabbed a pen and slashed his name across a page. Then he flung the file against the wall. He lurched up out of the chair, awkwardly, limping on the side where he'd broken the ribs. "This is not about the report," Scully said. "Talk to me, Mulder." He leaned on a file cabinet, breathing hard, enraged. "I know you're tired of explaining yourself," she said. "I'm not tired of explaining myself--hell, I'd like a *chance* to explain myself. What I'm tired of is *defending* myself, especially to you. Just what *did* you see that night, out in the woods? You said you saw something." "A bright light. Movement. It could've been anything." "Even aliens?" he said acidly. "Look, I can't prove it *wasn't* aliens, all right? I--" "No, it's not all right! It's not enough! You bitch at me when I don't blindly trust you, but that rule doesn't work both ways, does it?" "All right, Mulder--what did *you* see?" "Oh, what do you care?" Suddenly she knew he wasn't angry with her--he was in pain, and lashing out at her like a wounded animal would bite someone trying to touch it, even someone it had reason to know only wanted to help. Scully said, "In the forest that night, you said you saw your sister. Is that what you saw that made you want to go to the Fusionists?" "Go on and say it, Scully--'is that what you saw that made you want to die with the Fusionists like the fucking loon you are?'" "That's not fair, Mulder. I didn't say that." "Fine. Yes, I saw Samantha down there with them. And don't give me any bullshit about Nembutal." She didn't think he had been with them long enough to become addicted to Nembutal and go through withdrawal, suffer the confusion and the hallucinations. She didn't know what to say. "I let her go again," he said miserably. "They took her again, and I just let her go." "That's not true. You tried to save Paulie, instead. You knew you had to save Paulie." For a moment, he looked unstable on his feet, and Scully tensed to move forward and catch him if he fell. But he steadied himself. "I was thinking of Sandra," he murmured. "I was thinking she'd never know what happened to him, and how she'd feel, if she never--" He was sobbing suddenly, and Scully went to him, wrapped her arms around him. Gently to avoid squeezing his sore ribs. "You did the right thing," she whispered, as he wept into her hair. "You did the right thing, Mulder." But she knew it wasn't enough, not for him. He drew a sharp breath and pulled away from her. "I'm okay," he said, as if he were trying to reassure himself. "I'll get over this." She doubted it. Not until he knew what happened to Samantha. But she let it go. "Let me take you home," she said. He shook his head. "No." He wiped his eyes. "Thanks, but I need to work through this myself. I'll call if you if I get too deep in it." He wouldn't. He'd wallow in it, obsess over it, bury himself in it. He was out of control, and there wasn't anything she could do to stop it. She had arrived at the point where she didn't have enough left for him, and they both knew it. She squeezed his arm. "I'll call you," she said. "Try to get some rest." **** Mulder woke suddenly, drenched in cold sweat, shivering and breathing hard. He had been dreaming of Samantha, standing in the house in Wimberley, smiling at him, holding her hand out to him, beckoning. He had dreamt of watching her burned away in a fierce, blue-white light. He sat up on the couch, buried his face in his hands and wept. The phone rang. He ignored it, let it ring, let the machine pick up. "This is Fox Mulder. Leave a message." *Beep.* "Agent Mulder, this is Dr. Arlenski at the Smithsonian Institution. Please call me back as soon as you can. I think I've found something you'll be interested in, something really extraordinary... I don't want to talk about it in detail over the phone, but..." Mulder stayed where he was, bent over, racked with sobs. God, how could anybody think he'd go on like this? Pick up the weight and carry it another mile? He couldn't. *No more.* But Arlenski was a forensic archeologist with an interest in exobiology, a real-no-kidding scientist who actually could seriously entertain the idea of extraterrestrial life. What had he found? *God, no more.* Arlenski had left his number and hung up. Mulder had exhausted himself, and he sat there, just breathing. *What had Arlenski found?* He had to know. Aching with fatigue, Mulder forced himself onto his feet. He went to the desk and picked up the phone. **** If you wish to drown, do not torture yourself with shallow water. - Bulgarian proverb The End ********************************************************************** Afterword What's described here is the real, true, strange and wonderful Texas as I know and love it--evil weather, caves, colorful spiders, dancing frog statues on Fina truck stops, fire ants and all--with one exception: Ralph the Swimming Pig. Not that Ralph's not real--he is. But Aquarena Springs was sold to Southwest Texas State University a couple of years back, and in keeping with its mission, the university has turned it into more of an educational attraction than the kitschy, American-Gothic tourist spot it used to be. At that time, Ralph was retired--to a farm, not a skillet, I hasten to add. Consequently, Scully could not have seen the billboard described herein in 1997. Although Aquarena Springs remains a wonderful place to visit, it'll never be the same without Ralph. I thought he--and country-style kitsch in general, for that matter--was worth memorializing.