>From the author of "Don't Do Anything I Wouldn't Do," this is a crossover between "The X-Files" and "Homicide: Life on the Street." Familiarity with both shows would definitely be a bonus, but isn't absolutely necessary; the casefile can stand on its own merits. Apologies to Chris Carter and Paul Attanasio for copyright infringement. Rated R for language and violence. If you have trouble finding parts of this story, check the Gossamer archives at http://gossamer.eng.ohio-state.edu. Enjoy and e-mail me at lonegunguy@aol.com * * * April is the Cruelest Month (1/12)--The Burial of the Dead * * * Tim Bayliss is roasted. The conflagration erupts hotly out onto the street. Two fires, two burning buildings. The air bakes. The dead lie cauterized into burning lumps of flesh on the cement. He stares at the ground. There is too much blood, too much debris. Shards of glass cover the concrete like heartbreak of psoriasis, powdery bits of silica adhering to the ankles of his trousers. It's a dermatitis. The pavement peels like a leper's skin, pimpled with metal, with shreds of plastic, with pustules, stigmata. Bayliss squints up at the smoke and fire, those licking tongues of flame set halfway between the curdled Baltimore sky and the lacerated Baltimore sidewalk--flames like flowers, like tigerlilies--stamens, sepals, carpels and petals a burning red, convulsing against the grayness of the April afternoon. His hair stands dryly on end as he enters the taped-off scene, carefully sidestepping a rivulet of blood that has oozed out onto the cement like an aneurysm. Alongside him, Frank Pembleton lights a cigarette. "Christ, Frank," Bayliss says, sweating and looking out at the blaze, "how can you smoke at a time like this?" The acrid stench of charcoal in the air makes his eyes water. Pembleton slides the softpack back into his breast pocket. "I think of it as homeopathy," he says, the shaft of his Marlboro bobbing as he speaks. "This small ember provides some measure of psychological protection against the substantially larger flames coursing along the buildings above us." "So you prefer to control the fire rather than be controlled by it." "Of course." He pauses for a moment. "Or maybe I'm just addicted." Bayliss rubs his eyes with the heel of his hand. "There's Page," he says, pointing toward the heavyset fire lieutenant who stands squarely in the center of the confusion, barking orders, his large frame quivering beneath helmet and insulated overcoat. Jamie Page--leaning heavily on crutches, his left leg in a brace, clutching a bullhorn in one hamfisted hand. He stands beneath those great engines, one red, one green, their fat firehoses snaking alongside his feet, clamped onto the hydrants like plump moray eels, water shooting from brass nozzles clenched in the whiteknuckled fingers of fire fighters. The fire sparks, sputters. There is a faint explosion as one window bursts from the pressure. Whether either building will survive is still uncertain, and Page's red, gleaming face reflects that uncertainty. "We'll need to talk to him first." A sizzling gout of steam rises from one rooftop, accompanied by a rapidfire sound like popping corn. "Feel like being the primary?" Pembleton asks, pulling out a notebook. "On a stone whodunit like this?" Bayliss laughs. "Sure, go ahead, nail me up. It'll probably end up being another peashooter, anyway." "You believe that there's a connection between this and the veggie bombings?" Bayliss sighs. "If there is, you and I are staring down the barrel of a major-league red ball." "Congratulations, Tim," Pembleton says, snuffing and pocketing his mostly unburnt cigarette. "You just mixed three distinct metaphors in a single sentence." His shaven pate is lightly beaded with perspiration as he begins to walk toward the lieutenant; he too feels the force of the fire. They walk and slowly take in the extent of the devastation. The scene is a flurry of activity. At least eight or nine victims lie on the sidewalk or in the middle of the street, two obviously dead, somber human-shaped packages wrapped in plastic. Bayliss either smells or imagines he smells the odor of burning hair. Halfway to Page, the two detectives pass a group of kneeling bluejacketed paramedics as they frantically attempt to resuscitate a young woman, lying motionless on a tarp, deep burns zigzagging raggedly across her body, the stunning whites of her eyes bulging up from a blackened face. Pembleton's own eyes cloud momentarily with what may be compassion. A small hard grain of anger is set deeply into his pupils. "Count the corpses," he says. "I see two." "Two red names." Glancing over his shoulder at the woman in cardiac arrest, Pembleton adds, "Maybe more." "Good enough. I thought the board could use a spot of color or two." Bayliss shakes his head. "All innocent victims. On their lunch hour." He sees a brown paper bag lying on the sidewalk, sitting limply alongside one of the dead, an apple and carton of milk spilling out onto the pavement next to the body. "Brownbaggers. Whoever set this bomb off timed it to kill the maximum number of people." He kneels, picks up the apple, puts it down again contemplatively. Standing, he and Pembleton hear a shout go up from the throngs of firemen and onlookers crowded around the scene: one of the blazes has been extinguished, the building on the left steaming and sizzling like a Porterhouse steak but no longer in actual flame. Its upper two stories are emaciated, skeletal. Jigsaws of gray sky can be seen between the smoking rafters. Bayliss sees a scorched office chair hanging halfway through one crumbling window. "This wasn't a professional job," he says softly. "No ransom, no warning, no threat... Someone's doing this for fun." He gazes down at the body, masked in blue plastic, nose, lips, chin outlined against the thin membrane. A woman. "For fun..." he muses. "Makes you wish this psycho'd taken up a healthy hobby," Pembleton says. "Stamp collecting. Or model trains." He steps over a thin puddle of slowly coagulating blood. "Or autoeroticism." "Preferably of the asphyxiatory variety." Bayliss' restless eyes scan the serpentine crowd of rubberneckers that has coiled itself around the police boundary, at least one hundred, two hundred, three hundred people, all gawking and pointing and yammering away at anyone who will listen, voices merging together into one homogenous reptilian burble. Most are evidently employees of either flaming building who escaped injury. Bayliss marks off the types. An ashen-faced clerk stares at the devastation, clutching a cardboard carton. A quartet of secretaries, mouths and eyes outlined in red. Men in business suits. Cups of coffee moldering away in their hands. Then there are the tourists. Onlookers. Bored children contemplating a sneak beneath the yellow tape. Gaping at the blood. Taking in the sights and sounds of scenic downtown Baltimore. The air is hotter here. They finally reach Lt. Page, who stands, more calmly now, with both crutches tucked under his left armpit, the better to gesture and wave the bullhorn with his free hand. He is a heavy but muscular man, his face grimed with soot, his alarmingly large and hairless nostrils clamped together with a small noseplug, giving his voice a nasal tone. Surreal. He sounds like a surly iguana. They exchange greetings. "How's the leg, Jamie?" Bayliss asks. "Hurts like fuckin' hell." "Getting better, huh?" "You know it." Page turns away and narrows his eyes, looking up at the second flaming building, shouting an almost incomprehensible order through the bullhorn, laced with static. He mutters, "At least we managed to get one of them out." "Both buildings were--" Before Bayliss can complete his sentence, he sneezes violently. He makes another attempt: "Both buildings were--" He sneezes again, his entire body spasming from the force of it. Spots of red dance before his eyes. Pembleton pulls out a handkerchief and Bayliss quickly takes it by one corner, holding it over his mouth and nose. "Jesus," he says shakily, sniffling. "What's the pollen count here?" "Pretty damned high, I'd expect." Page points to the area between the two buildings. The edifices--brick and stucco respectively, with wooden roofs--stand thirty feet apart. A mad jumble of broken glass and twisted metal struts covers the area immediately before them, some buried in the walls of the buildings themselves, shattered and broken and pulverized into rubble, gleaming and sparkling dully in the gray light. The glass...there's too much glass. Only six windows directly overlook the site of the explosion. They can't account for all the shards that cover the ground. Not nearly. "A greenhouse full of ragweed exploded," Page explains. "_Ragweed_?" Bayliss asks through the handkerchief, amazed. "Who grows a greenhouse full of ragweed?" "More to the point," Pembleton says, "who builds a greenhouse in downtown Baltimore?" "Even more to the point," Bayliss asks, "who blows one up? And why?" "In answer to each of your questions: no one does, they do, someone did, and because they can." The fire lieutenant transfers bullhorn to his left hand, a crutch to his right, and begins to hobble toward the ruins. He looks over curiously at Pembleton. "How come you're not sneezing?" "I don't have allergies." "Not a one?" "Not to pollen, anyway." "Certain varieties of people, however," Bayliss interjects quietly, "give Frank hives." "Look," Pembleton says impatiently, "can we just get to business? What started the blaze?" "Gasoline--mostly." Page limps over to the now entirely unrecognizable carcass of the greenhouse, gesturing here and there to various areas of the ruins with his rosewood crutch, apparently oblivious to the flames that still writhe on the roof of the building above him. Sandwiched between burning brick and smoldering stucco, the alley smells and feels like a pottery kiln. Bayliss' skin prickles, the hairs on the back of his neck quivering hotly. "This greenhouse wasn't functional at the time of the bombing, but it was the property of that building over there," Page says, pointing to the large steaming stucco walls on the right. "They did some biochemical research in there, strictly small-time, botany mostly--herbicides, something like that. The greenhouse had been closed for repairs since September." "Repairs?" "Yeah--it was an old structure, shaky, small, two thousand square feet; it still used plain unpolarized glass, which is almost unheard of in greenhouses nowadays. The plan was to totally strip and refurbish it." Page scrapes aside a lesion of crushed glass with the rubber tip of his crutch, looking at the blackened and misshapen concrete beneath. "They'd emptied the greenhouse of all plants and draped it in opaque plastic, supposedly in preparation for fumigation and other maintenance that needed to take place before the glass was removed. But budget concerns delayed the restoration for over a month. The greenhouse just sat there, wrapped like an empty Christmas present; nobody'd even glanced inside it for weeks." "But you said it was full of ragweed," Bayliss objects. Page nods. "Someone filled it up when nobody was looking. Crate after crate of potting soil and ragweed, brought in under dead of night." Pembleton raises his eyebrows. "Why would someone want to do that?" "To blow up the greenhouse. Listen, ragweed releases pollen, right?" "I can testify to that," Bayliss says, the handkerchief still held in front of his face. The white cloth puckers in and out over his mouth as he speaks. "Tons of the stuff," Page agrees. "The greenhouse was sealed tight with the ragweed inside, and after a week or so, the air within was completely saturated with pollen." The lieutenant looks down at the ground. A few mangled stalks, burnt to cinders, lie impaled on the pavement, crucified on bits of glass, scorched stems hanging brittlely. He says reflectively, "Most people don't realize it, but pollen is as inflammable as gunpowder. Ignites like _that_." He snaps his fingers. "Our bomber rigged up one hell of a dust bomb." "You mean like in the Midwest?" Bayliss asks. "Where farm silos full of wheat blow up when the suspended grain dust is detonated by sunlight?" "Something like that, except it was obviously intentional in this case. Our boys are piecing together the nature of the bomb from the rubble. So far, they think that our bomber packed a tunafish can with homemade plastic explosive and a blasting cap, then stuck a few cartons of gasoline on top; when it blew, the entire greenhouse was destroyed; the two adjacent buildings were set on fire; shrapnel instantly killed two passers-by and wounded five others. A few were burnt badly. The gas and plastique alone couldn't have produced that kind of annihilation. The ragweed was the crucial part--the pollen was what really exploded. It was a pollen bomb. Someone planned this out ahead of time." "Strikes me as a bit ridiculous," Bayliss says. He leans back, handkerchief still pressed to nose, looking up at the dancing needles of fire that frame the sullen sky. The flames are more muted now, dusky and diminished, a sickly yellow, more smoke than anything else. A curving jet of pressurized water arcs over them like the wings of an angel. Skittering along the brick, the last glowing embers are swept away. A hyperventilating blaze. Suffocating. The inferno shudders and collapses, vanquished, into a seizure of steam: extinguished, finally extinguished. Bayliss smiles beneath the cotton, then looks down, sees the two bodies in the street, sees the blood, the pink-toned whirl of ambulance sirens, listens to the faint agonized screaming, the sickly sweet stench of smoke and charcoal and flesh and burning hair. His smile disappears. He repeats, "Ridiculous. To go through all this trouble to kill a random group of people." "Never assume randomness," Pembleton says. "For all we know, this killer had the victims picked out ahead of time." "I doubt it," Bayliss disagrees. "I think that randomness is precisely what it is--it's the bomber's particular love. Randomness. Random murders. Each bomb is a...a random murder generator. The bomber gets off on it." "Along with an additional fetish: each bomb involves plants. Pollen here, and ragweed, and the greenhouse, plus the peashooters, and maybe that cactus incident in Arizona..." "Assuming that there's a connection between this one and the veggie bombings." "Listen," Page says, "there's a definite connection. Look--this is why I brought you two down here." He pulls a tattered and yellowing piece of paper from his pocket, encased in a polyethylene evidence envelope, a small hole punched into the sheet near the upper edge. "We found this nailed to a telephone pole about twenty yards from here. A note. Left by the bomber." He holds it up for the detectives to see. Pembleton reads what it says, and his eyebrows rise. "Goddamn. It _is_ the same one. This is like a goddamned signed confession--she's admitting that she did the curare killings in Phoenix." "We'll need to bring in the FBI," Bayliss says, looking intently at the handwritten note, thinking of the two dead here, five wounded, the blood and glass on the street--and of the other bombings, three killed, twelve injured--and of that poisoning, a single victim chemically suffocated in broad daylight--a litany of murder stretching back seven blood- and chlorophyll-soaked years, from Annapolis to Baltimore to Arizona and back. There, in calligraphic script, written plainly in scarlet, in maroon ink as red as arterial blood: "Ambrosia this time, not Opuntia. From the Hyacinth Girl." * * * "Think of this as a demonstration," Mulder says. An assortment of seemingly unrelated paraphernalia sits atop the FBI agent's desk--a bag of dried lentils, an empty mayonnaise jar, a pitcher of water (without ice), a circular piece of wood (with two screws drilled into it), a disk of metal (cut from a tin can), and a thick dossier. Carefully, Mulder fills the jar with lentils, two-thirds of the way to the top. Taking the pitcher, he pours in just enough water to cover the seeds completely. He then drops the disk inside--it lies flat on the beans--and fits the wooden circle snugly into the mouth of the jar, the tips of the screws protruding an inch above the metal. He slides the jar over to Scully. "Okay," he says. "You've got this contraption here. What will happen to it in an hour?" Scully takes the gadget. "Well, add some onions, some spices, and you'd probably get a nice vegetarian dahl, not too heavy, with that charming East Indian flavor..." "I meant besides that." Mulder smiles. "Seriously? Well, the lentils should absorb moisture from the water." "Go on." "They'll rehydrate. They'll expand." "And...?" "The metal disk will slowly rise until it touches the two screws." "Good. Now, what if I attached the positive and negative electrodes of a 12 volt battery to this gizmo, one screw for the anode, the other for the cathode?" "Well, as soon as the metal disk rose high enough, buoyed by the expansion of the lentils, the circuit would be completed." "Right. And what if I rigged it so that the resultant surge of electricity would ignite a wad of cotton, soaked in diesel fuel, suspended over a large canister of gunpowder?" "It'd blow up," Scully says simply, a bemused smile dancing on her lips. "They'd tote us to the morgue in a bucket." "Good answer. Someone has been doing exactly that in Maryland, exploding the hell out of sites in Annapolis and Baltimore. Four bombings, three of them pea-related, with five dead so far. Here's the casefile." He tosses Scully the folder. Within are dozens of photos depicting bleeding bodies, headless and amputated, surrounded by rubble, brick, countless shards of glass, with bits of linoleum and insulation and wallpaper peppering the destruction. "Peas were used in the first bomb, back in '93. Last year, adzuki beans. Then lentils." "Apparently the bomber has a green thumb." She looks up at Mulder. "I don't understand why this should necessitate FBI involvement, though." "Neither did I, until I talked with a Baltimore Homicide detective named Pembleton over the phone. He thinks it's the same killer who was responsible for the Solanki killing in '89. Remember that?" "Afraid I don't." Mulder leans back in his chair, eyes on the ceiling. "It was a damned peculiar crime. The victim worked in an Arizona greenhouse, taking care of cacti. She died under mysterious circumstances, to say the least; when they discovered the corpse in the underbrush, her entire body--her lips, her skin, the flesh beneath her fingernails--was blue." "Blue?" Scully sets the jar of lentils back onto Mulder's desk. "As if she'd been drowned or slowly asphyxiated. An investigation found that every single needle on every single cactus had been saturated in curare. Blowgun poison, the kind that South American Indians use. You get a drop of that stuff in your veins, and you're dead within minutes. It paralyzes your ribcage and suffocates you. Apparently she just pricked her finger on one of the spines. The poison had been there for more than a week--the killer just bided his time, waiting for the botanist to stick herself. Eventually, she did." "And you think that these bombs are being planted by this same individual?" "What can I say? She's a botanophile." Mulder continues, apparently oblivious to Scully's surprise at his use of the feminine pronoun. "All of her targets--greenhouses, arboretums, the botanical lab of Johns Hopkins University--have been related to plants in some way, as have her methods of killing; she goes out of her way to incorporate them. It would have been child's play to kill that Arizona woman using conventional means, but she went through the trouble of coating thousands and thousands of those needles with the poison." Scully's tone is incredulous. "You refer to the killer as 'she.' This is a woman?" "Well, maybe. For years, police thought of the bomber as a male--virtually all serial bombers are, of course. You can't blame them for the assumption; they knew virtually nothing about who was behind the explosions. No motive, no fingerprints, no name, no face, no pattern to the selection of targets, no demands, no ransom, no explanations--nothing. Just periodic blasts, and another handful of people dead or injured." Mulder chuckles. "For a while, police referred to the bomber with a vaguely masculine nickname of their own devising." "What nickname was that?" "It's a doozy." He grins. "Here's a hint: the cactus that the botanist pricked herself on--the one saturated with poison, the one that killed her--was a jointed tropical Jamaican prickly pear of the genus Opuntia, commonly known (drumroll, please) as a tuna cactus." "Oh, no," Scully groans. "Oh, yes." Mulder smiles more broadly in spite of himself. "They used to call our killer the Tunabomber." He shifts in his chair, gazing thoughtfully out into the distance, as if suddenly struck by some faraway convergence of parallel lines. "But now, in the past two blasts--the lentil one and the most recent explosion, three days ago, which involved a pollen bomb--our Tunabomber has taken to leaving notes at the scene. Signed with a feminine sobriquet." From the dossier, he pulls two sheets of fax paper, grainy black-and-white copies of handwritten notes, metric rulers laid alongside them. Evidence. Scully takes the copies, examines them. "'More to come. Signed, the Hyacinth Girl,'" she reads from the lentil bombing note. Then the other: "'Ambrosia this time...'" She hands them back to her partner. "Any thoughts on what these mean?" "Well, 'Ambrosia' is the genus of ragweed, and 'Opuntia,' as I mentioned already, refers to the tuna cactus. 'The Hyacinth Girl' is apparently some kind of poetic quotation--T.S. Eliot, I believe." Mulder stands and grabs his coat. "We'd better get going," he says, glancing at his watch. "We're supposed to meet the detectives at Baltimore PD within the hour." Scully rises, sliding the dossier into her briefcase. They exit the office, flicking off the light. They leave the mayonnaise jar sitting on Mulder's desk. Forgotten. In the darkness. One hour, seventeen minutes and fifty-three seconds later, gleaming in the dim light, the lentils have rehydrated just enough to buoy the metal disk up to the level of the screws, lightly touching the threaded tips, making contact with a small _plink_, completing a nonexistent electrical circuit. Nothing explodes. * * * End of (1/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (2/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:28:50 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (2/12)--A Game of Chess * * * The Fishbowl. Departmental slang for the waiting room that lies attached like a parasite to the main body of the Homicide floor. Five feet by twelve, furnished with peeling obese white vinyl couches, squalid and depressing, more often than not populated by a constantly shifting group of druggies, yos, south-side hillbillies, nervous lower-middle-class mothers, teenage girls, young hoods, pyromaniacs, manslaughterers, necrophiliacs and black widows, all awaiting their turn in the Box. Square white tiles cover the floor. Most people forced to spend any amount of time in the Fishbowl stare at these tiles with fixed concentration, meditating on that monochrome mandala in lieu of any other sources of entertainment. No magazines. No piped-in music. Just four transparent walls fitted with wide cloudy Plexiglas windows. Any detective--or visiting FBI agent--can peek into the room and observe whoever sits there. Case in point: Scully sees a white male with thinning blonde hair and badly-fitting dentures, fists clenched, sitting in the Bowl. A finely detailed purplish-black tattoo covers most of his face, his skin crisscrossed with alternating dark and light squares like the surface of a chessboard. His eyes peer out from folds of checkered flesh. The tessellating pattern goes down most of his neck and disappears beneath a well-starched collar. He wears a tuxedo. A pink carnation blossoms from the lapel, the stem broken and hanging. "What's his story?" Scully wonders out loud, standing in the middle of the Homicide floor. "Who, that guy?" says a voice behind her. "That's just the precinct captain. Don't pay any attention to him." She glances over her shoulder. A detective--hair peppered with gray, face pockmarked and deeply lined--sits smugly behind his desk, smirking. "Okay, I'm kidding," he says. "We picked that sad fuck up in a dungeon on the east side." "A dungeon?" she asks, facing him. "An S&M joint," another detective--a woman, a good-looking blonde--says. "One of those fine establishments where people pay to get tied to bedposts and be whipped by mistresses wearing leather Stormtrooper gear." "Fun for the whole family," says Scully. She sneaks a covert peek at her watch. "Yeah. _That_ guy, on the other hand," the grayhaired detective continues, indicating the man in the Fishbowl with a nod of his head, "had a more creative request. He showed up at the dungeon with three hundred dollars, a fancy tux and a single wish: to be beaten in chess--by a woman--in exactly four moves. The shortest possible game." "An intellectual masochist," Scully offers. "Of course, his opponent had to be wearing fishnet stockings and spike heels at the moment of checkmate. Just to give it that certain...ambiance, I suppose." "Try picturing Kasparov in that getup," the female detective smiles. "Unfortunately, this sorry chess-loving SOB had the bad luck to be in the dungeon at the exact time that another, even sorrier Neanderthal decided to unload his nervous tension in a different manner. Pumped three bullets into a dominatrix's abdomen. Bobby Fischer over there is our best witness." "Good luck catching the killer." Scully turns away. "Oh, we already caught the guy," the detective says. "I just need some tips on my endgame." Scully is pondering how to respond when a stentorian voice booms from across the gray-toned Homicide floor. "Don't let Munch bother you," it says in fine-tuned inner city locution, its owner rising and walking to meet her. "He's paid to be a smartass." She turns. The man's features are black and compelling, his head smoothly shaven. Sensitive hands. She takes one, shakes it, recognizing him from the crime scene photographs, those pictures of him kneeling alongside evidence--corpses, glass, twisted threads of steel, puddles of blood--to provide a spatial reference, those large hooded eyes staring up from the concrete with a gaze penetrating in its clarity, a gaze now fixed to hers with palpable magnetism: Frank Pembleton. More introductions are made. The graying detective is John Munch, peering at her from behind a pair of smoked glasses. The woman is Megan Russert. Pembleton says, "This, I believe, is Special Agent Dana Scully, of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." Munch purses his parroty lips in impressed deference. "Bringing out the big guns, eh, Frank?" He turns to Scully, looking at her with renewed appreciation. "So you're a Fed, huh?" "Yes. Surprised?" "Certainly not. I'm an enlightened fellow." At this statement, Detective Russert snorts laughter. Munch glances at her, annoyed. "On the other hand, Baltimore is no place for beautiful women. Which explains why Megan here does so well." Cheerfully indignant, Russert lobs a balled-up piece of paper at Munch's head, which glances off his left temple and falls to the floor. "I rest my case," he says. "Well, Detective Munch," Scully says, kneeling and tossing the paper into the trash, "the Bureau was not so enlightened as to send me here alone: my partner is currently busying himself in Evidence Control. He should be here soon." Pembleton interrupts. "Speaking of partners, there's Bayliss now." "Looks like he's made a friend," comments Munch. Scully looks up, sees Mulder approaching from across the floor, chatting amiably with another man as they step out of a brass-fitted elevator into Homicide. His companion--Tim Bayliss, she assumes--is good-looking in a manner that alternates between boyishness and weariness, sporting an easy, self-depreciating smile and short haircut straight out of Catholic school, his soft, well-featured face breaking into a grin over some Mulderism. He walks with a slightly unsteady gait, his right hand resting lightly on his hip--a back problem, Scully assumes, shifting her gaze to her partner, seeing that Mulder gestures with a tagged evidence envelope as he speaks to Bayliss, a faded sheet of paper sealed within the polyethylene: the note from the bomber. They draw near. "Frank, you wouldn't believe some of the stories this guy tells," Bayliss says, flinging his coat over the back of his chair. "Did you know that...Hello," he breaks off, eyes alighting on Scully. She extends her hand, introducing herself. "I see you've already met Agent Mulder." They shake, Bayliss marveling at Scully's eyes, her translucently oceanic eyes. "Yeah--bumped into him on the way out of EC. He has some interesting ideas about the Hyacinth Girl's eyes--note, I mean," he corrects himself, half-flinching at the Freudian slip. "The Hyacinth Girl's note." Munch looks sardonically at the two of them, tempted to tweak Bayliss' geeky high school charm; instead he says, "Three's a crowd--or, in this case, six. I think I'll go drag that chess-playing fool into the Box now; he's waited long enough. Should be nice and soft." He stands, offers Scully a small bow. "Megan?" he asks. "I'll join you," Russert replies. The two detectives leave for the Fishbowl, dragging the tessellated masochist out from his perch on the vinyl couch and leaving the veggie quorum alone to confer: Scully, Mulder, Bayliss, Pembleton. Bayliss can't stop looking at the female agent; he pretends to check the time on the clock over her shoulder as an excuse to more closely examine her cinnamon hair, recently cut. Nice. The kind of hair that makes a man wonder. Mulder nods to Pembleton, Scully. They stand alongside the desks for an awkward moment before Pembleton, then Bayliss, then the FBI agents sit, decisively getting to business. As they begin to speak, Scully examines the Homicide floor more closely, keeping one eye on the conversing detectives and the other on the bustling murder checkpoint in the midst of which they sit. Phones do not ring here but bleat like electronic lambs, the uncertain result of the Baltimore Police Department's attempt to save money by installing its own phone exchange. The ringers are permanently set on plaintive wails, burbles, each announcing another death or complication of a previous death: deaths which are chronicled on the broad white easel standing against one wall of the floor, divided with black lines into nine sectors, two empty, each of the others stenciled with the name of a resident detective and inscribed with victims, black and red. There are five red names in Bayliss' column. Two of them are near the top, dating from last year, with three others clustered at the bottom, one after another, a questioning catechism of death without answers: DECASTRO HORESJI LEE SMITH JORDAN. Victims. Two dead from the University bomb. One in the arboretum bombing. Two from ragweed. Five dead by the Hyacinth Girl. In addition to the woman slain in the Arizona curare killing. Six in all. "The first one I covered," Bayliss says, almost dreamily, "was the one in the botanical lab of Johns Hopkins. A little under a year ago. Two people were killed. Graduate students on scholarships." "DeCastro and Horesji," Scully says. "Yes. One man, one woman, working in the lab when the peashooter went off. The bomber made it look like just another labeled specimen sitting on the shelf behind the Bunsen burners; not a very powerful blast, but she--the Hyacinth Girl--glued lead shot to the outside of the coffee can where the explosive itself was kept, and when it detonated, the little lead spheres--ball bearings, I suppose--shattered into shrapnel, razor-sharp, shredding Alicia Horesji's aorta, penetrating Albert DeCastro's left eye and brain. They both died fairly instantly, sitting there, working on their doctoral theses." Bayliss rubs the bridge of his nose with one finger. "They died quick. That's the nicest thing one can say about the entire sorry business." He folds his hands, tucking them under his chin, his elbows resting on his knees. "Frank and I arrived there about half an hour after the detonation. You know, the Johns Hopkins Hospital is right there by the campus, a heartbeat away, but it was still too late. All they could do was wrap up the bodies. Three other people were wounded, minor cuts and scratches. Structural damage was minimal. But those two, Horesji and DeCastro--they were the Hyacinth Girl's first victims on the East coast." "Besides the curare incident," Pembleton says, balancing a No. 2 pencil along his knuckles, "there had been one additional bombing up to that point--an arboretum in Annapolis. 1993. No deaths, some damage. We think she was just testing her capacity for violence, playing with her toys." "Last month, though," Bayliss adds, "she struck in Baltimore again, at another arboretum. Beautiful place, along the seashore. Popular on weekends. People tour it, bring the kids, look at the trees. Wholesome entertainment." He pulls a photo from the midst of the stack of pictures on his desk, trained fingers finding it instantly. Holds it up for them to see. An image of destruction, webs of blood, one corpse, a teenage boy whose mangled Walkman headset dangles askew from his head. One of his ears has been sliced cleanly off. Shirt shredded to rags. Bayliss puts the picture down. "Up until this point, we had no leads." "The jars used in the pea bombs were from jars of Hellmann's brand Real Mayonnaise," says Pembleton. "The batteries were Duracell twelve-volts." "The peas were just...peas. There were some indications that they had been grown and dried by the bomber herself." "Otherwise, nothing," Bayliss says. "Until the second arboretum--where she left her first note. Goodbye, Tunabomber; hello, Hyacinth Girl." "Which reminds me," says Mulder. Reaching into the inside pocket of his jacket, he pulls out a folded sheet of paper, which he opens, reading: "'"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; they called me the hyacinth girl."' T.S. Eliot," he says. "'The Waste Land.'" "'April is the cruelest month,'" Scully says simply. "I've noticed," Pembleton replies. "Three days ago came the pollen bomb, which resulted in more casualties and damage than any other incident so far. Two dead, many injured, one greenhouse completely annihilated from the face of the earth, two buildings ruined by fire." "But we also received some suggestive leads," adds Bayliss. He looks at Agent Mulder. "Tell them what you found." Mulder brings out the second Hyacinth Girl note--"Ambrosia this time, not Opuntia"--still sealed in plastic. Yellowing, apparently very old, as if it had lain unused in a desk or bookshelf or closet for years in the darkness before being used, gone brittle and oxidized. He flips it over, taps the page with one finger. "There's a faint impression on this piece of paper," he says. "Of what?" Scully asks. "Look for yourself." He hands her the note. She takes it, examining the reverse side, and immediately sees a very light, straw-colored image that appears to have been superimposed directly onto the page: the negative, sepia-toned image of a leaf. A long, lobe-shaped leaf. There are shadowy hints of a stem, blossoms. Puzzled, she asks, "A Volckringer pattern?" "Yep. One guess as to what type of flower that leaf comes from." "A hyacinth." "Nice job." "We noticed the image before," Bayliss says, "but we didn't have any idea as to its significance or origin. Until Agent Mulder arrived." "It's a Volckringer pattern," Mulder explains. Pembleton takes the page, examining the leaf impression carefully. "They're usually observed in botanical collections that have been around for decades. Some scientists discovered that when plant specimens are kept pressed between sheets of paper, faint images will sometimes form on the pages--or even on a second undersheet--over the course of many years. Like a photographic negative." "Scientists aren't quite sure what causes the Volckringer patterns," Scully says, "but they probably have to do with free radicals--unstable atoms--given off by plants and reacting with lignin polymers present in the paper. But nobody really knows." "The unusual thing," Mulder adds, "is that the patterns only appear after six or seven years, or even longer, but they depict the plant as it was at the moment of pressing, even if it later shrivels up over intervening time--as if the image had been captured early on, although not manifested for years to come." "So you're saying that the bomber kept a hyacinth specimen pressed between this sheet and another," Pembleton says, "for years upon years, and then used this sheet of paper to write us a note?" "It certainly seems that way," Bayliss says. "The image could have appeared at any time, even after it and the original leaf parted ways. There is no need for the leaf to be in constant contact with paper after a certain number of years. The paper could have been sitting, apparently blank, in the bomber's house for a great deal of time. The image could have even appeared _after_ she wrote the note." "A rather unlikely coincidence." "Actually," Mulder says, "the image may have appeared at the bombing scene itself, where you say it was nailed to a telephone pole. Two buildings caught fire, right? Well, some believe that there is an empirical connection between heat and the belated appearance of Volckringer patterns. The fire from the bomb may have triggered the image, like developing a photograph." "In any case," Pembleton says, a tone of finality creeping into his voice, "this provides a definite piece of physical evidence that may help identify the bomber. Good enough." He sets down the sheet of paper, pulls back the cuff of his shirtsleeve to check his watch, kept strapped to the inside of his left wrist. "Listen," he says, standing, "we need to go to Johns Hopkins." Scully asks, "The university?" "No, the hospital. A victim of the most recent bombing, the ragweed explosion, is in the burn ward--she wants to talk with us. She says she saw someone suspicious lingering around the scene just before the greenhouse detonated. It may be our bomber." "What's the description?" "She wouldn't say. Wants us to talk to her in person." Mulder and Scully exchange glances. "All right," Mulder says. "Let's go." "Good. Bayliss and I will meet you there." * * * In the car, poring over the black and white crime scene photos with a magnifying glass--and cultivating a splitting headache from such close scrutiny--Scully makes a discovery. "Mulder," she says, "I think that the same man appears in at least two of these photographs. The same bystander at two separate bombings." "Are you sure?" Mulder asks doubtfully, looking down at the pictures in her lap. "Maybe he's just a member of Baltimore PD." "I don't think so. Look." She holds up the first photograph. "This was taken at the Annapolis arboretum, where the teenager was killed." Mulder takes his eyes off the road, follows Scully's pointing finger. There--in a photo of the demolished remains of the eucalyptus tree where the bomb was concealed--a man is faintly visible in the distance, milling in the crowd of onlookers, wearing jeans and a longsleeved shirt. His features are Caucasian but otherwise indistinguishable. Blurred. He carries a small cardboard box beneath one arm, standing near the entrance to the arboretum--just another visage in an ocean of faces, holding that box and watching the commotion. "Then, in this photo..." The pollen bombing. A shot of Detective Pembleton standing with a metric ruler, holding it against a convoluted piece of greenhouse framework that twists crazily up from the ground. At least two dozen yards behind him, standing behind the crime scene tape, is another man. He wears an overcoat and baseball cap, and his features are still somewhat blurred--but he also carries a cardboard box. "I think that these two are the same individual," Scully says. "Can you be positive?" "Not completely. But look at the way he holds the box. If you were to tuck a box that size--roughly a foot on each side--under your arm, you'd probably support its weight with your palm, resting your hand on the bottom, right?" "I suppose." "But this man is holding it with his palm on the _side_ of the box, pressing it against his body instead of supporting it from beneath. And the box is held in the same unusual manner in both pictures." "What do you think is in the box?" "Same thing you're thinking. A detonator." "Suggestive. We'll tell Pembleton and Bayliss when we get to the hospital. Maybe our Hyacinth Girl is a Hyacinth Boy." * * * "I think I'm in love," Bayliss says. He leans back, reclining in the front seat of a Chevy Cavalier--blue in color, with a six-foot antenna jutting up from the rear, the standard Baltimore PD undercover vehicle--listening to the tinny radio play the Four Seasons. Pembleton drives, keeping his eyes on the road. "With who?" "That FBI agent." "Which one?" Bayliss laughs once. "The woman--all right, Frank?" Pembleton signals at the corner, makes the turn and quietly invokes the memory that he knows troubles both of them: "Remember the last time you fell in love?" "Yeah." Nothing more need be said about the incident. He looks out the window, watching Baltimore squirm and creep in gray pastel shades, laid down in concrete along the road as they pass. "Seriously, though," he says. "How many women like that are there in the world?" "Women like what?" "You were there. You saw Agent Scully. Beautiful, intelligent, professional, et cetera, et cetera." "There aren't many, I admit." Pembleton makes a left turn, spinning the wheel with one hand, his other arm draped along the sill of his open window. "I'm not surprised. Evolutionarily speaking, natural selection decides against them." "That's a depressing thought," Bayliss says. "And rather retroactive." "Hey, my consciousness is raised. But it's a simple fact. Look back in biological time. Look at the physiological precedent. You see that nature selects for women with wide hips, with large mammary glands, staying at home and quietly propagating and incubating and maintaining the species. Not for these feminists like Agent Scully who go out, get jobs, compete with men and conquer the world." "So you believe that the entire feminist movement is a historical glitch?" "Exactly. A blip. It's a noble idea, but ten million years down the line...well, things will have returned to their natural order. Even the existence of two separate sexes is doomed." "Ouch." "I mean, look at a flower. All flowers are essentially hermaphroditic, with both male and female organs. Pistil and stamen. And it _works_. Flowers can survive anywhere. The sexual organs of a flower are a thousand times more efficient than the human equivalent." "If not nearly so fetching in a bathing suit." "Perhaps not," Pembleton says, easing the Cavalier through the gate into the Johns Hopkins parking lot. "But that's evolution for you." * * * End of (2/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (3/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:30:56 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (3/12)--The Fire Sermon (I) * * * Her eyelids are covered with antibiotic ointment to soothe the burns. The ointment is white against her peeling flesh, white in her sockets, white and _gleaming_ in her sockets--as if her eyes never close, those two white circles peering out from the hollows of her skull like unblinking scleras, blind woman's eyes, staring unseeingly from the folds of skin around her burnt nose, her burnt cheeks, wrapped in bandages and Vaseline. Eyes like pearls. Most of her scalp has been shaved. Intravenous plasma and saline solution drip into her veins from suspended rubber tubing, held to her wrists with masking tape. She sits partly upright in bed, those green sheets gathered around her waist and belly, eyes closed and staring, listening as the two detectives and two FBI agents speak quietly to her, coaxing her story out in tattered bits of recollection: fire, gasoline, pavement, noise and burning-- "--burning burning burning," she says, half-delirious. Mulder leans over, whispers to Pembleton. "Was she this incoherent when she spoke to you over the phone?" "No," the detective mutters back. "Doctors say she's taken a turn for the worse. They're treating the overt trauma as best they can, but she's also suffering from spherocytic red blood cells. Common side effect of massive burn injuries. They're giving her transfusions, but..." He shrugs, looking at her with carefully veiled emotion--she's the woman he and Bayliss had seen splayed on the concrete near the greenhouse, being resuscitated by the paramedics, her face blackened and terrified. "The hospital staff will probably kick us out in a few minutes," he says, "so she'd better snap out of it fast." Which seems doubtful. While he waits, Mulder pulls two photographs from his briefcase--the pictures of the man Scully claims was at two separate bombing scenes--and examines them carefully. He sees no reason to doubt her conclusion. Same cardboard box, same stance, manner of holding, general body type and description: it's the same man. Upon arrival at the hospital, the photos had immediately triggered a wave of recognition in Bayliss: "I _remember_ that guy," the detective had said, "at the pollen explosion site--I assumed he was a shipping clerk or something, based on the package he was carrying..." "He was no shipping clerk," Pembleton had replied. Speaking to Scully with subtle appreciation, he'd asked, slipping back into use of the male nickname, "You believe that this guy is the Tunabomber?" "He certainly fits the standard FBI psych profile for serial bombers. Male, white, fairly young, anal-retentive--even in the photo, you can see that the legs of his jeans are sharply creased--lingering at the scene to admire his handiwork. He's a definite suspect." Now, in the hospital room, Mulder looks back and forth between the blurry printed face of the suspected bomber and the gauze-swathed face of the victim on the bed. Those eyes, painted white. The IV tubes. Mulder has seen the doctor's report. The victim--her name is Sibyl Kantorek--will probably survive, but extensive skin grafts and cosmetic surgery will be required to erase the marks of the burns. She is anemic. Three fingers from her right hand--now thickly bandaged--may need to be amputated. She may lose the use of one arm, depending on the extent of muscle damage. The report notes that she is married and has one child. "Sibyl," Scully probes gently, "you told Detective Pembleton that you think you saw the bomber. Do you still remember? Do you recall talking to Detective Pembleton?" Kantorek opens her eyes. The heavy coat of ointment on her lids is partially dry, a thin paste, and it cracks in places as she opens them and turns her head toward Scully. Small dabs of the antibiotic adhere to the burnt remains of her eyelashes. She smiles around the bandages. "I...I'm all right." Her voice is surprisingly light and sweet. Looking upon her ruined visage, one would expect a hollow creak older than the burnt remains of petrified forests, older than the smoldering remains of Pompeii; but the sounds that waft up from her Vesuvius of a throat are almost conversational after their delirium has been shed. "Just...I can't feel anything anymore. It feels like my heart is on ice." Scully asks again, "Do you remember?" The woman nods, slowly and painfully. "I was there. I work in the Breymer Research lab..." "One of the buildings that caught fire." "Yes." She sighs, closes her eyes again. The whiteness of the antibiotic on the lids is now crossed with fine hairlines. Pink threads of her flesh are visible through the cracks. Deliberately, with studied care, she brings one bandaged hand to her cheek, gently patting the gauze--a means, Scully assumes, of ameliorating the maddening throb of healing tissue, the ceaseless itch. It doesn't seem to work; a pained look drifts across the woman's face. "It was lunchtime," she says, segueing abruptly into recollection. "I'd ducked out fifteen minutes before usual because Hoffman--my supervisor, he's a real discip...ip..." Her blistered lips falter over the word. "Disciplinarian," she finally manages. "He's a real disciplinarian. But he'd gone home early. He said it was because of his migraines, but everyone in the lab knows that he's having an affair during the afternoon." She smiles again. The surgical tape crinkles. "So he was gone, no one was left to watch over us, and I sneaked out of the lab before anyone else." "And you saw someone," Pembleton says flatly. "Someone suspicious. Unusual. He was hanging outside the building, near the greenhouse." "Can you describe him?" asks Bayliss. Kantorek reopens her eyes. "I don't know. He wasn't very remarkable, not very good-looking...he was wearing a baseball cap, the Orioles..." Mulder fumbles out the pictures, holds them up for the woman to see. "Is this the man?" She squints, nods. "Yes. That's him." "Did you notice whether he was carrying anything?" Scully asks, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice. "A box," Kantorek says. "A little box with wires coming out the side. There were little holes punched along the upper edge, like airholes"--Mulder looks back at the photographs and verifies this--"and I remember that he had plastic stretched along the top of the box, held there with duct tape. Clear plastic, like Saran wrap. And the wires were coming out of one of the holes. They trailed up out of the box and disappeared up his sleeve--he was wearing a nice woolen overcoat, looked like cashmere. That's another thing I remember, the cashmere overcoat. Seemed expensive..." Her voice trails off; she blinks twice, eyelids fluttering. Listening to her testimony, Bayliss suddenly feels a vibration thrum against his breastbone. His pager. He pulls the small oblong object from his pocket, glances at the number displayed. "Excuse me," he says quietly, standing and exiting the room. Pembleton watches idly as he leaves, knowing that both of them dread the worst. When he turns back to Kantorek a few seconds later, he sees to his chagrin that she has lapsed again into exhaustion; she had been lucid for less than two minutes. She answers their questions with murmurs, with small movements of her head that could denote either yes or no. Did the man act in an usual manner? Mm-mm. Was he carrying anything else besides the box? Mm-mm. Did you see him enter any vehicle? Did he have any companions? Did he speak to anyone? When did you lose sight of him? Where were you when the explosion occurred? Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Mulder puts the photos back into his valise. It seems that the interrogation has already yielded whatever information it had to offer. Scully bends her head to his. "I'm going to walk over to the University," she says in a low voice. "Maybe I can find someone who can identify the species of the leaf in the Volckringer pattern." "All right. Call me when you're done." His eyes flit over to the unmoving shape of the woman on the bed, to the bags of blood and saline suspended above her. "I'm going to stay here for a while," he says after a moment. "See if Mrs. Kantorek has anything more to give us." "Good luck," Scully says, leaving. So the two remaining men sit and wait. Neither of them speak, neither of them bother to further question Kantorek, whose consciousness seems to have abruptly departed in that transience of lucidity as common to the immolated as spherocytic blood. She sleeps fitfully. Motionless. The rise and fall of her chest, the feathery whisper of her burnt nasal passages. Her folded hands. They concentrate on small details. Pembleton inhales deeply, savoring that unmistakable hospital smell: the ghosts of ether, cotton, adhesive, iodine, blood, alcohol, chloroform; the sweet, sickly odor of knitting bone and cartilage, of tired skin and hyperelastic muscle. He cranes his neck back, looking at the ceiling. Acoustic tiles. A square ventilator grate, set slightly askew. A fine bit of yellow dust trickling down from the perforations. Three more minutes pass. Mrs. Kantorek lies there, cocooned, like a chrysalis in a bottle. Then: the sound of rapid footsteps approaching down the hall. Bayliss bursts into the room, his face pale, voice tense and hurried: "Frank, Agent Mulder, there's been another explosion." His gaze darts around the room. "Where's Agent Scully?" "The University," Pembleton says, rising quickly. "Chasing down a leaf." Mulder pulls out his cellular phone, punching in Scully's number. "Where was the bomb?" "An open-air restaurant, downtown. Happened five minutes ago. A small fire, one dead, several injured. They found another note." Pembleton throws on his jacket, tossing a business card onto the counter next to the unconscious Mrs. Kantorek. "Do they know what caused the blast?" he asks, following Bayliss out the door and through the hall. Mulder hurriedly grabs his briefcase and brings up the rear, waiting for Scully to pick up her end of the connection. Bayliss calls over his shoulder, "Page isn't sure--but he thinks it was a Venus flytrap." They leave. The room lies empty--and the air rattles in Sibyl Kantorek's blasted throat. Her wrapped hands fold and unfold. Her eyes move rapidly behind seared conjunctiva as she dreams uneasy dreams, visions of smoldering flowers, burning asphalt, smiling children, rivers of dust... * * * "Yes," says Professor Meinekker, holding the Volckringer pattern up to the light, "I do most certainly recognize this species." With one gnarled, methylene blue-stained finger, he indicates a series of swirling markings faintly visible on the image of the leaf. "They're very light, but do you see these lines? These curving loops?" Scully nods. "Rather serpentine, aren't they? That's where the species name comes from--_Hyacinthus dracunculus_. Literally, it's the 'little dragon hyacinth.'" "Charming," Scully says. She stands in a gray-toned Johns Hopkins botanical lab, the same one bombed nearly a year by the Hyacinth Girl. Only faint scars of the explosion are still visible. Erwin Meinekker, who had been a professor and doctoral advisor--"A 'doktorvader,'" he says in German--for eight years by the time the bomb detonated, gleefully points out to her the small puckered holes--little scabules the size of a pencil eraser--that pepper the surface of the dissection table, holes formed when the lead shrapnel from the bomb tore through the air and buried themselves into the wood. Two framed brass plaques are mounted on the wall immediately above the door, engraved _memento mori_ of Alicia Horesji and Albert DeCastro. Meinekker flips through a thick looseleaf binder pasted full of glistening four-color reproductions of flowers. "Here you go," he says. "Page two hundred seventeen." Scully peers over his shoulder. There: the little dragon hyacinth. A spike of bell-shaped flowers is clustered on the apex of a fat stem. The blossoms are a bright reddish-orange, shot through with flames of crimson and maroon. Curlicues of dark green twist down each lobe-shaped leaf. "Quite lovely," she comments. "I know. It's a pity," Meinekker says, removing his thick glasses, tucking them absently away. "Flowers are such perfect, beautiful things. Such symmetry. Near-mathematical perfection, without sterility: the Fibonnaci sequence; the golden ratio of the petal spiral; the geometric correspondences with the hexagon, the dodecahedron, the golden rectangle. Remarkable. Nature's last laugh over entropy. But here"--he taps the Hyacinth Girl's note sharply--"here, this person who uses flowers, who uses plants, to maim and kill and destroy and mutilate--reprehensible, simply reprehensible. To use such natural beauty to explode things into oblivion." "Perhaps that's the bomber's point," Scully replies mildly. "That even flowers can kill." Meinekker clucks his tongue. "Are you familiar with the mythological origin of the hyacinth?" he asks. "A jealous Greek god once murdered a youth named Hyacinthus, using a discus to bash in his brains, and a flower sprang from the spot where the kid's blood fell. That's where the Greeks thought the hyacinth came from: blood and brains." The professor turns away, shuffling papers on his desk. "The legend arises from the fact that every hyacinth has two red marks on its petals, resembling an 'A' and an 'I'--Hyacinthus' Greek initials, and a universal sound of pain and suffering: aieee!" He smiles grimly. "So perhaps it isn't too asinine to kill using that particular flower." "Were you in the lab when the bomb went off?" Scully asks gently. "Me?" He sounds surprised. "No, no, of course not. I was coming out of the bathroom when I first heard the news, truth be told. See, the bomb was situated _here_, on the sample shelf, right where we're standing now." He gestures toward the rows and rows of bottled specimens that sit less than two feet behind them. "I spend ninety percent of my time in the lab at this very spot. If I'd been in here when it detonated..." His voice trails off, and he shrugs. Scully imagines it. Standing there, one's back to the shelf, the sound of the blast rippling across one's eardrums--but no, one would see the light first--would there be a flash from a gunpowder bomb?--the light spreading across the wall before you, a moment of sharp clarity, shadows of terrified onlookers standing out like paper cutouts against glass, then, faster than sound, the pain of shrapnel digging into flesh, tearing apart muscle: "There'd be three plaques up above the door instead of two," she says. "Or maybe there'd only be one. Maybe my body would've blocked the blast. Maybe Albert DeCastro and Alicia Horesji would still be alive, if I hadn't chosen that moment to leave the lab." Scully tries to steer the professor away from self-condemnation. "It must be a difficult thing, to lose students like that." He sighs. "It'd happened to me before. You see, regarding this little dragon hyacinth, the reason I was able to identify it for you so quickly was because it was originally classified by an expedition sponsored by this very department." "Really? To where?" "South America. A four-month overview of rainforest and grasslands along the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers. It must have been six or seven years ago, at the very least..." "But isn't the hyacinth a Mediterranean flower?" "Not exclusively. They're prevalent in Africa and survive well in tropical climates--although discovering a completely new species in Venezuela was a pleasant surprise." "So this species of hyacinth has only been identified since 1989?" Scully asks. "For all that I know, yes. It still hasn't been widely introduced into this country." "But Volckringer patterns take years and years to develop," she objects. "The image of the leaf couldn't have been made any sooner than five or six years ago. That means that this pattern must have been 'set' almost immediately after the species itself was discovered." Meinekker nods. "So it would seem." He pauses for a moment. "Anyway," he continues, "getting back to the subject at hand, the reason that I remember that particular expedition is because one of my former students died there, in the jungle." "What happened?" "She drowned in the Rio Negro River. Beautiful, intelligent girl; her name was Dolorosa Chi. Died researching for her doctorate; she was studying ebene, the hallucinogenic drug of the Yanomamo tribe of Venezuela." He rubs the back of his neck with one weary hand. "You know, everyone insists that Dolorosa could swim just fine--but she drowned anyway. They'd been traveling with some native Indians, and some members were of the opinion that she had been accidentally pricked with a curare arrow a few moments before falling into the water, which paralyzed her and kept her from saving herself. Dolorosa sank like a stone. They never found the body." Scully's mind whirls. The pieces seem to fly together with shocking suddenness: curare...South America...hyacinths...the cacti killing... "Professor Meinekker," she says excitedly, "do you have a list of the individuals who went on that expedition? Anyone who might still live in the Baltimore area?" "I suppose so. Is it important?" "I can't say for certain, but it may be. You said yourself that the little dragon hyacinth has only been known in this country for the past few years, and it would have taken at least that long for a Volckringer pattern to develop--which points to someone close to the original expedition as having sent the note. And then there's the curare connection..." She doesn't bother to explain the details. "Yes, I believe I have a list here somewhere," the professor mutters, fumbling in his desk, sifting through stacks of papers, finally drawing out a long computer printout dating from several years back. Small photos, yearbook size, are glued to the sheet, smiling faces pasted alongside names and vital statistics: perhaps twenty pictures in all. One of the photographs is covered by a scrap of yellow paper. "There's Dolorosa," Meinekker says quietly, peeling the paper partway up to reveal a mugshot of a pretty Asian girl, her hair drawn back from a flawless forehead. But Scully doesn't notice--she doesn't even hear him. Her eyes are locked on one photograph that sits near the middle of the page, a photograph of a Caucasian with dark hair, dark eyes, labeled as "Orex, Paul K." in fading dot matrix type, grinning faintly, staring out at her from an uncertain past of seven years ago. He wears a Baltimore Orioles cap. * * * End of (3/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (4/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:31:43 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (4/12)--The Fire Sermon (II) * * * Restaurante Esperanza, specializing in la comida mexicana, sits poutingly on the corner of one of Baltimore's smaller sub-sub-arteries, a little slice of asphalt that passes through a few pink-frosted rows of shops, markets, bookstores and multicultural latte bars: a funky ethnic ley-line. Thin trails of smoke still snake across the sky. A large brick patio sits in the midst of the plaza, round covered tables sprouting here and there like gaudy mushrooms, their umbrellas and baskets of breadsticks now covered with a middlingly thick layer of gray ash, a fine powdery ash that has settled all along the street, dusting everything in charcoal hues and grainy cigarette shades. The restaurant canopy burned; three umbrellas burned; one person was torn to pieces by shrapnel while dining on a large chicken burrito, his companion--and several others--sent to the Sinai emergency room with burns, scrapes, and at least one broken femur that had been punched straight through by a splinter of metal, drilled directly into the bone. Bayliss stares at the charred candystriped remains of the canopy, thin metal struts visible like tendons through the holes. There's white powder scattered all over the ground. The restaurant's owner had attempted to extinguish his flaming customers by tossing baking soda onto their burning bodies. "Ge is going to have our asses on a platter for this," Pembleton says, sifting through the rubble. "Good. We deserve it." Bayliss looks down at the evidence envelopes he holds in his hands. Within one plastic bag are sealed two stems, somewhat mangled and burnt but still remarkably intact, apparently thrown clear by the force of the blast--small green jaws jutting out from each, toothy protrusions lining the lips, mouths filmed with red nectar: Venus flytrap. Then, the other envelope. Another note, this time on clean unbleached 8.5 x 11 recycled typing paper, written in the same crimson ink: "I will return in one day. From the Hyacinth Girl." He hands the evidence back to Fire Lieutenant Page, who stands next to him with his crutches scraping in the grit. Coughs once from the dusty air. "If we don't catch this guy soon," Bayliss says quietly, half to himself, "we're going to get demoted. We'll end up walking a beat by next Friday." He groans. "Why the hell does he--or she--keep using plants anyway?" "It could be worse," Page says, hobbling over to one of the charred tables and sitting down heavily. "The most pathetic case I ever saw was back in '76. The guy rigged up an incendiary device--mostly naphtha--that ignited when you yanked a cord attached to the apparatus. He caught a stray cat, knocked it unconscious with nitrous oxide, and tied its collar to the trigger. When the cat awoke several hours later, it stood and walked unsteadily for a few feet, tugging at the collar and pulling the cord, which ignited the works and torched the poor kitty--as well as most of the surrounding neighborhood--to cinders. Nailed that son of a bitch with arson _and_ cruelty to animals." The fire lieutenant gazes thoughtfully out onto the noisy street, that milling bouquet of a crowd tied behind crime scene tape. "Maybe your bomber is just a compulsive punster," Page continues. "A 'plant' is an arson investigator's term for any device that ignites combustible material sometime after the initiating action--a time-delay trigger, in other words. Maybe the Hyacinth Girl just feels like using plants as, well, plants." "Well, according to _my_ dictionary," says Pembleton, listening in, "a plant is also 'a person or object put into place in order to mislead or deceive.' Maybe this use of green herbage is just a red herring." "Elegant, though," Page says, examining the evidence bags. "This Venus flytrap makes a beautiful dead man's trigger. Attach battery wires to each lobe, anode and cathode, introduce an insect into the immediate environment--plenty of them in an open-air food joint like this--and the jaws snap shut, the circuit is completed. You have to admire thinking like that." "Personally," Pembleton retorts, "I'd prefer a little less creative problem-solving on the part of this bomber. Give me an old-fashioned drug shooting dunker with murder weapon and fingerprints any day." Mulder stands a few feet away from them, hands in his pockets, allowing his mind to wander. Looking up at the sky: gray cumulus clouds, dark, prophesizing a much-needed rain. An uneasy sky. The air holds its breath, vacuous, like the emptiness that followed the firestorms of the Battle of Britain: flame sucks oxygen from the atmosphere, leaves a vacuum, so the sound of silence resounds echoingly throughout the ruins. Acoustics are bad. Sound is muffled, as if through cotton. He'd called Scully when news of the blast came. She'd opted to stay at the University, get the Volckringer pattern identified first, then meet up with them later. He waits for a return call, brooding. Eyes searching the crowd. Listening to the detectives' conversation. Bayliss: "You know, when I look at scenes like the arboretum or the pollen bomb or this place, sometimes I wonder whether what we call 'intelligence' is anything more than a sham. Whether murder is the rule, not the exception." "The truth is even worse," Pembleton says. "Killings like this are an inevitable side effect of intelligence." "You don't mean that." "Think about it. What's the Hyacinth Girl doing, anyway? What's the motive? Why does _any_ bomber do what they do? In this case, at least, the answer is obvious: to demonstrate their cleverness. Bombers care more about ingenuity than efficiency; they want to be original, to outsmart everyone else. Look at the Hyacinth Girl's pattern. First it was curare on cactus needles. Then peas. Then pollen. Now flytraps. Trying to top the previous bomb. Trying to become even more clever, even more creative. It's a sickness of the mind. It's _because_ of intelligence, not despite it." "Technological know-how gone amok." "It's a universal law: no matter how innocuous-seeming an object may be, someone has devoted their entire life to discovering ways of killing people with it. Why? Because they can. They don't need any other reason, any other purpose: it's an exercise. That's the glorious peak to which intelligence has brought us. That's--" Pembleton breaks off. When he speaks again, his voice is kept deliberately calm. "There he is." Mulder looks up, following Pembleton's gaze. It takes a moment before he is able to isolate the lone figure in the crowd. At least two hundred people stand at the periphery of the scene, many of them twentysomething male Caucasians--not unlike Mulder himself at an earlier age--wearing the indistinguishable clothes and facial expressions that result from the near-uniformity of Baltimore honky culture. But when he sees the man in question, there is no doubt--that palefaced young man with the cardboard box held stiffly and awkwardly beneath his right arm, blue jeans neatly pressed, wearing not a cashmere overcoat but-- "Sunglasses and gray hooded sweatshirt," Bayliss says, amused. "Apparently the Tunabomber has been getting fashion tips from his more famous counterpart." Pembleton reaches casually beneath his jacket, undoing the clasp on his holster. "Let's take him quietly." Mulder quickly walks over to Pembleton--his feet scuffing in the baking soda, dusting his shoes with granulated bicarbonate--and places a light hand on the detective's shoulder, staying him. He leans close. Neither man takes his eyes off the suspect. "We don't know what's in that carton," Mulder cautions quietly, indicating the man's package with a slight nod of his head. "Could be anything." Pembleton glances at him coolly. "Another bomb, you mean." All of them now speak in whispers, murmurs, as if the suspect--fifty yards distant--might overhear them and infer their plans. "Could be a detonator," mutters Bayliss. "Damn," Pembleton says beneath his breath. "And the son of a bitch is standing right in the middle of things." The detective shades his eyes from the gray glare of the clouds and studies the suspect's calm and unlined face--almost bored--as the man bobs on his heels and shifts the package slightly beneath his right arm. Holding the box carefully, self-consciously. At least two dozen people--women, children, businessmen, passers-by, a necropolis in the making--stand within fifty feet of the suspect, an easy radius for a blast. Even a small charge might be deadly. Ignited by a spark. Dynamite. Blasting powder. An M-80, given enough accelerant. A bottle of gasohol, chlorine tablet popped inside. "Would he blow himself to bits, do you think?" Bayliss asks, realizing that, although the man's wardrobe changes dramatically from scene to scene, one thing always remains the same: long sleeves. He remembers what Sibyl Kantorek said. Wires. Running up from the box into his cashmere coat, connected to some apparatus hidden beneath his clothing, perhaps taped or strapped close to his chest. "Maybe he doesn't have to," says Lieutenant Page, standing up carefully and limping over to the three of them. "He could have a remote-control trigger concealed in there. Theoretically, he could blow up any spot in the city." "Theoretically," Pembleton says. "If that thing _is_ a bomb." "We can't assume otherwise," Mulder says, drifting a few yards closer to the taped boundary. The man still stands there, slouchingly rooted to that one spot. He yawns, checks his watch. Drawing nearer, Mulder can faintly see the coin-sized holes punched into the box, the plastic membrane stretched over the top with duct tape, the rigidness of the man's arm against the carton. The crowd of bystanders. "There's definitely something strange about that package," he says softly to Bayliss. "We need to get him out of that crowd." The three of them begin to move closer to the man, their strides forcedly nonchalant. A casual stroll through the ashes. "Maybe we should wait," Bayliss replies. "Let him leave the crowd on his own, then nab him on the way out." Pembleton shakes his head. "No. We can't bide our time; we have no idea what he'll do next." "Do you have a better suggestion?" Within thirty yards of the suspect. "We need to catch him off guard." "Which means that neither of us can approach him," Bayliss says to his partner. "He knows us. He's been at most of our bombing scenes. He's watched us work, knows that we're investigating the case. If either one of us gets too close to him, he'll get suspicious. He'll panic." Bayliss turns to Mulder. "He might not recognize you, though." "I'm not sure that--" Mulder is distracted as a throaty electronic warble chirps up from his jacket pocket. He plucks the cell phone from within and punches the button, keeping an eye on the figure at the edge of the yellow tape as he speaks: "Mulder." "It's me. I've got a name and face for your bomber." "Let's hear it." He comes to a stop, standing within twenty yards of the man. Pembleton and Bayliss continue onward for a few steps, listening to Mulder's side of the conversation. "His name is Paul Orex," Scully says, her voice fuzzy through the earpiece. "He works here in Baltimore, at a medical supply house. He transferred to Johns Hopkins from UC Berkeley in 1985, studying in the same lab that was later bombed by the Hyacinth Girl, although his major was medicine. In the summer of 1989, working toward his degree, he participated in a four-month taxonomic expedition through the South American rainforest, studying Dengue virus in Brazil and Venezuela." "Curare country." "Exactly. A woman named Dolorosa Chi was killed during that journey. The man I spoke to--Professor Meinekker, in the botany lab--believes that she drowned in the Rio Negro after being paralyzed--accidentally or not--with blowgun poison." "Do you have a picture of Orex?" "Right in front of me. One and the same--he's our mystery man." Mulder hesitates, thinking; a plan begins to form in his mind. Distracted, he says, "Thanks, Scully...I'll call you back." "But--" Click. Mulder repockets the phone, spins on his heels and walks toward the opposite side of the scene, ducking under the tape and plunging into the crowd. He glances over his shoulder. Pembleton and Bayliss look back at him, slightly concerned--but, more importantly, the suspect (Paul Orex, it seems) is gazing in a different direction altogether: at a bloody mark smeared across the pavement before him. Blood from the flytrap bomb's only victim. Orex's face is pale. Mulder sees him take a step closer to the line. Another. He keeps his eyes on the ground. Best to act now. The FBI agent thrusts his way through the crowd, muttering excuses, attempting to move upon Orex at as oblique an angle as possible. Drawing closer, he approaches his suspect from the side, concentrating on the gray sweatshirt hood. His entire attention is focused on what he must do next. Distract. Disarm. Displace. He sees a broad sheltered area between two brick buildings, less than one hundred feet from where Orex stands, a well-reinforced metal buttress--etched with the words "Maryland Parcel Service"--arching above the concrete. Some kind of loading bay. Currently unoccupied. Good protection for the crowd in case a bomb detonates. He sidesteps a cluster of little old ladies who gawp at the blast site, their mouths open, and suddenly finds himself directly across from Orex, only ten yards away. Mulder can see the man's face clearly now--not entirely unhandsome, parchment-white, smooth and strangely androgynous--and, for a moment, allows himself to size up the situation. Carton beneath right arm. Left arm hanging loosely by his side, partially hidden by his body. Pullover, jeans, sunglasses, running shoes. Almost a caricature: the Tunabomber. Looking more closely at the box--and the clammy-looking hand pressed against it--Mulder thinks he sees a hint of wiring snaking through one of the holes punched into the cardboard, a hairline flash of red, mostly covered by Orex's elbow. There is a pen clipped to the cloth pouch of his sweatshirt. Here: three feet away from the bomber. Mulder takes a deep breath and jumps into the role with abandon. Flashing a broad smile, he taps Orex lightly on the shoulder. "Excuse me...Paul?" Mulder asks, injecting a generous dose of good-natured disbelief into his voice, grinning like an idiot: "Paul Orex?" Orex turns, carefully pivoting his entire body around so that the box remains pressed to his torso. "Yes?" His voice is carefully veiled, distant. Mulder spreads his arms wide, pantomiming the stance of the reunited college buddy. "Eh?" he asks, feeling his facial muscles buckle beneath this display of orthodontic enthusiasm. "Eh? Johns Hopkins, class of '89?" Paul Orex's light eyebrows slowly inch their way up his forehead. "Ummm..." "C'mon! We worked in the same botany lab! I haven't seen you since you went to South America!" Mulder can see the confusion pulsating beneath Orex's thin skin. "Um, I _seem_ to remember you...I can't quite place your name..." Orex's eyes dart right, left. Now is the time to move in. Stepping quickly behind his newfound fraternity brother, Mulder claps a hand on his shoulder, taking his left elbow and steering him carefully toward the loading dock, slowly, subtly. Orex doesn't seem to notice. Mulder continues his rambling monologue, showing his gums. "You old kidder," he says. "It's me, Fox Mulder--you know, from Professor Meinekker's lab!" They move toward the cargo bay, the overhanging steel buttress only seventy-five feet distant. Mulder dares a glance back over Orex's shoulder, toward Pembleton and Bayliss. The two detectives seem to have caught on to his intentions, following parallel to him and the bomber as they head toward the bay, Pembleton looking at him intensely. Their eyes parry unspoken conversation back and forth. You'd better know what you're doing, Pembleton seems to say. Yes, Mulder sends back. I'd better. He can feel Orex's discomfort. His aim, he reminds himself, is to find the line between discomfort and panic and stay a millimeter on one side: keep the bomber disoriented enough so that he doesn't object to being prodded, but not so discomfited that he scares, acts irrationally. Thus far, it seems to be working. Fifty feet from the buttress. Orex seems to be searching his memory, coming up empty. And faking it. "Oh yeah," he says, his voice full of insincere feeling. "Hey, um, Fox, nice to see you again." The words come out unconvincing, flat. Mulder grins all the wider for it. "Hey, remember the good times we had in that lab?" His store of personal information regarding Orex is running low. Time to wing it. He sneaks a surreptitious glance at the carton beneath his companion's arm, seeing that Orex still carries the box firmly. Whatever lies within is still invisible; the man's triceps block any view through the plastic stretched along the top. Orex does not respond. Not without some trepidation, Mulder tries a different angle: "Jeez, would you get a load of this mess?" he says, pointing toward the bomb site. "Somebody blew this place to smithereens." The bomber smiles, laughs shakily. Tightens his grip on the package. "Yeah, someone sure did." He pauses, then speaks again. "A damn shame, all those innocent people." "You're telling me." Thirty feet from the buttress. Mulder takes another calculated chance, asking, "Did you hear about what happened in Meinekker's lab last year?" "No. What about it?" His words have the same flat tone as before. Caught off guard by this denial of knowledge--most serial bombers are eager to anonymously discuss their past achievements--Mulder makes a quick decision: volunteering Orex any unrequested information regarding the other bombings might prejudice their case against him. He backtracks. "Oh, nothing," he says. "Never mind." Twenty feet away. He picks up the pace slightly. But Orex seems to have been shaken by the mention of the other bombings. He pulls away, saying, "Listen, um...Fox..." Trying to grin, he frees his elbow and removes his sunglasses, exposing a pair of translucent blue eyes. "Nice...nice seeing you again." The smile widens. "A pleasure," Mulder says, his mind racing for a means of stalling the bomber. Searching around frantically for an excuse, he sees the pen clipped to the pouch of Orex's sweatshirt. "Look, Paul," he says, "here's my phone number." He pulls a small memo pad from his breast pocket--careful not to expose his FBI credentials--and tears off a sheet; then, before Orex can move or protest, he plucks the pen from the bomber's shirt with a practiced gesture. "Let's see..." His eyes are on the page. He does not see the expression on the man's face as he uncaps the pen--silver and matte black, the initials "P.O." carved swirlingly into the finish--and tries to write with it. He cannot. There is no nubbin, no penpoint, no ink. A long, sharp needle--as broad around the base as a cactus thorn--juts out from the casing like a homemade syringe. It is clotted and covered with a sticky black substance. Curare. Mulder looks up, stares into Paul Orex's eyes. Sees them widen. Sees the recognition in them. Orex steps back. His mouth works silently, opening and closing, not making a sound. With shocking suddenness, he hurls the cardboard carton at Mulder's head. There is a ripping sound--wires tearing loose, a rapid pop-pop-pop of broken connections and broken tape--and Mulder falls to the ground but not fast enough; the box hits him, the corner of the cardboard glancing off the crown of his skull as he drops to his knees and squeezes his eyes shut. His scalp is bleeding. Scratched by the box. He crumples to the concrete, waiting for the blast--hears, almost parenthetically, the carton strike the ground and burst open, a dull sound, a handclap--and listening to the ringing in his ears. Nothing. No explosion. He cracks an eye, sees the box lying on the pavement. Open. The plastic stretched along the top has peeled off. One side of the carton has been crumpled, the corrugations showing. He sees the holes--airholes--punched along the sides, and knows for the first time _why_: a bruised hyacinth lies on the ground, petals hanging, the stem broken slightly in one place, wired with electrodes along the leaves and roots, planted in a small earthenware vase. The flower sits pathetically in the street. The pot has shattered along one side; bits of dirt trickle out. A hyacinth of flaming red, serpentlike marks coiling along the surface of the leaves, little snakes, little dragons. He lies on the ground, looking at the flower in disbelief. No bomb. No detonator. He pushes himself up, his hair sticky with blood from the cut. Struggling to his feet, he watches as Orex yanks the wires from his arm, tosses them to the ground, spins toward the loading bay--and collides heavily with the detectives. Orex staggers, rebounds in the opposite direction. Bayliss tries to grab his shoulder and ends up with the hood instead, pulling it down partway to expose a well-coifed shock of blonde hair, keeping a tight grip on it as Orex tries to run. The fabric rips along the seam. Orex scampers in place, treading gravel. Bayliss stabs forward, seizing his wrist and twisting it behind his back as Pembleton snaps on the cuffs with a dry click. "Gotcha," they say in unison. They all but throw Orex into the waiting arms of uniforms. The suspect's face is flushed, blotches of white standing out on his cheekbones as he listens to the Miranda being read, glaring back and forth between Mulder and the broken remains of the _Hyacinthus dracunculus_ lying on the cement. There is a vivid pink mark encircling his neck from where the hood has chafed. He sputters, asking, "What is this? What is this?" over and over again as they drag him away. Hands on his hips, Pembleton watches him being loaded into a squad car, already anticipating the coming interrogation in the Box. Bayliss walks past Mulder to the hyacinth. Prods the flower lightly with his toe. "Looks like we've got a live one here," he says. * * * End of (4/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (5/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:35:03 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (5/12)--The Fire Sermon (III) * * * On Bayliss' desk sits an empty coffee cup. Blue ceramic. Shiny from a week of handling, the oils of his skin polishing the surface as he has clasped his palms around the warm clay, feeling the steam trickle into his pores. Along one smooth curve of the mug, beneath the lip, is reflected a series of thin ruled lines of light, parallel, cast from the venetian blinds that drape the windows of the Interview Room, the Box, ten yards distant, shone through with some internal luminescence. A shadow blocks out the glow--the lines on the cup are extinguished. Someone has stepped before the window, shielding the light in a brief silhouette. Bayliss glances up. Agent Scully stands before the Box, looking in, her back to him. If he wishes, he can rise slightly from his chair, peer over her shoulder, see the figure that sits within the Box, handcuffed to the wooden table, slumped within four yellow brick walls, those tiled walls, tiles the color of amber, the color of urine. The color of wheat. Bare pipe fittings snaking up to the ceiling. The cold fluorescent fittings. The one-way mirror. Indeed, if he stands partway up from his desk, Bayliss can look at all this, take it all in: but he has seen it all before, and it is so much easier, so much more attuned to the natural direction of his eyes, to simply let his gaze linger where it lies. Agent Scully. He keeps his eyes on the curve of her back, the contour of her clothing, the way it drapes against her, the undercupping--fetishistic, really. The fall of her hair. The way she stands, arms crossed, looking in at the man in the Box with calm raptness, the single slender lithe parenthesis of her spine, lips slightly pursed, expression inscrutable. Bayliss thinks of the Four Seasons. I Can't Take My Eyes Off You. He looks back at his coffee cup and stares into the abyss. A thin ring of grime encircles the inner lip, adhering flecks of Java. He takes up a pencil and doodles aimlessly on the back of a Miranda waiver: a _Hyacinthus dracunculus_ takes slow and tedious shape beneath the whorls of the lead, those lobelike leaves, the curving tendrils of chlorophyll rimming the surface, the spike of crimson flowers. He erases a bit, crosses it out. Thinks. No bomb in that cardboard carton. No detonator. Just the plant, carried by Orex to all crime scenes. Why? Frowning, Bayliss quickly stands and walks over to Pembleton's desk, a few feet away. His partner is gone--either doing research or chainsmoking out on the sidewalk--but he has left the most important piece of evidence behind: there, sealed within a baggie, is the hyacinth itself. That plant, tucked within Orex's crumpled cardboard box, dusted for prints, tagged and initialed to preserve the chain of evidence, samples of leaves and flowers taken, along with ampules of soil--to be tested for any chemical residue that might indicate whether curare-bearing _Chondrodendron tomentosum_ had ever been grown in it--and, finally, those wires. That apparatus. Bayliss lifts the package, carries it over to his desk. Light. Surprisingly so. He sets it down, clearing away papers, and carefully removes the box from the bag, half-folding the plastic and setting it aside. Opens the lid. Pulls out the hyacinth, carefully, by the pot. A single petal falls from a bell-shaped flower, crimson, maroon, red, bloody, like a dragon's tongue. It lands softly on his blotter. He picks it up between thumb and forefinger, feeling the light--almost sensual--texture, silky and fine. The smell of flowery perfume is still strong, emanating from the box, as thick with fruity stench as the narthex at a funeral. Funeral... He glances at the fax paper folded loosely beside his elbow. It's the complete Dolorosa Chi death certificate, the circumstances, the Rio Negro, the suspected manner of demise, the curare connection. How many victims does that make, connected to Orex, connected to the Hyacinth Girl? Five, six, seven, and Chi would make eight... Bayliss is startled by Scully's voice. "So--when are you going to begin the interrogation?" she asks, materializing behind him. He glances back at her, smiling slightly. "Not for a while, I expect. It's Frank's call. He likes to go in there prepared, and we're still waiting for further information regarding the Venezuela drowning and the cacti curare killing." She sits at the opposite desk, hands folded, eyes on the flower. Fixedly so? Deliberately avoiding his gaze? "Have you found a connection between Orex and the Arizona death?" "A tenuous one. Orex did some studies of the saguaro cactus while at Johns Hopkins. The greenhouse where the murder took place housed numerous specimens of that particular cacti." "That's all you've got?" "At the moment, yes." He gives the red terracotta pot a full turn counterclockwise, rotating the plant, allowing him to see all sides of the hyacinth. The electrodes attached to the stem with sticky green paste. The yellow and red wires, broken. He pulls another evidence bag out of the cardboard box, opens it, and removes the small black object--not much larger than a pack of cards--that had been strapped to Orex's chest with duct tape. An earpiece runs on a long wire from one end of the device; a small cloudy window, oblong, is set into the other end, a microcassette visible through the aperture. Scully looks at the equipment with interest. "You found all this on Orex?" "Yep. Not a bomb to be seen." She smiles. Almost. "Too bad I couldn't be around when you captured him." "Well," Bayliss says, "we did all right without you. Agent Mulder gave it the old college try." "In a manner of speaking." Bayliss grins and leans back in his chair, looking at the black object, turning it over and over in his hands. "We still don't know what Orex was doing with that hyacinth, though. What all these gizmos were for." "Well, let's see." Scully leafs through the arrest report that lies on Bayliss' desk. "It says that the hyacinth was wired to a...a lie detector?" "Right, this little black box," Bayliss says, holding it up. "The boys down in Polygraph were mighty impressed by this little bastard. It's a reverse-auditory galvanometer. You're familiar with the concept, right?" "Somewhat. A galvanometer is the component of a lie detector that measures surges of human emotion." "Or, more accurately, charts changes in the electrical potential of a subject's skin." "Yes. The galvanometer reads the electrical potential of the skin and graphs the fluctuations, which a polygraph operator can theoretically use to determine whether a subject is lying or not." "Well, that's what Orex was carrying, a standard galvanometer with two modifications: first of all, instead of printing out a hard copy, his polygraph emitted an auditory output, a continuous humming sound, with certain frequencies corresponding to the wave pattern of the graph. Orex was recording the output on cassette, presumably for later transcription." "And the second modification...?" "The galvanometer wasn't wired to a human subject." "The hyacinth," Scully says. "Right. Orex was recording the hyacinth's fluctuating electrical potential. Like giving a polygraph test to a flower." Scully shakes her head. "I should have known. Orex is a crackpot. It sounds like he's copying the work of those New Age 'scientists'"--she injects the sarcastic quotes into her voice--"who rigged up their potted plants to polygraphs and galvanometers back in the seventies." "The ones that believed that plants have feelings?" "Yes, emotions. That plants need to be loved, petted. That they can read your mind. That they can sense danger, that they can be taught to count, to think, to become intelligent." "Plant consciousness." Putting the report down, Scully sets her mouth into a hard little line. "God knows what Orex was trying to do. Maybe he wanted to see whether explosions--mass death--killing--would upset the plants." She runs an agitated hand through her hair. "I never get used to this. Murder is always murder, but when the motives are so ridiculous..." "I take it that you don't believe in plant intelligence," Bayliss states. "Why. Do you?" Bayliss smirks. "If we can get this hyacinth to testify..." He gives a sardonic little half-shrug. "I might be swayed." He takes the plant, places it back into the box, gathering the plastic loosely around the mouth, closing the carton only partially, leaving an opening large enough for air and light to pass through. "But you don't believe in much of anything, do you?" he asks. The question takes her by surprise. Unable to come up with a satisfactory response, she takes refuge in the ambiguous. "It depends." Lacing his fingers, leaning slightly forward, Bayliss asks, "Do you believe in God?" Scully decides to answer his question with a question. "After four years on the killing streets, do you?" "Enough to believe in divine retribution, of some sort. Enough to believe that the sorry fool sitting there in the Box will end up strapped into a one-way ride down the Cyanide Express. So I do believe in something." He pauses, hesitates, vacillates--pauses. "Skip God," he says. "Do you believe in love at first sight?" She smiles quickly. Her cheekbones crumple like a rear-ended economy car. "Not especially." Bayliss opens his mouth to respond, but, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Frank Pembleton approaching through the Homicide door--that frosted glass portal stenciled with number 203--carrying a stack of folders in his large hands. He stands, turning away from Scully, and asks his partner, "We ready?" "Ready and willing," Pembleton says. He asks Scully, "Where's Agent Mulder?" "Observing Orex through the one-way mirror." "Good. Let's join him." Pembleton skims the first three folders from the top of his pile, tucking them beneath his arm as he walks over to the Box, his expression calm but focused as he steps into the cubicle set flush with the interrogation room. Bayliss and Scully follow close behind. The door clicks shut. Inside it is cool and dimly lit. Mulder already stands there in his shirtsleeves, looking through the large pane of glass set into one wall, looking at Orex through that half-silvered transparent portal. Behind the mirror, the suspect is dozing within the Box, handcuffed to the table, dark sweat stains gathering beneath his arms. His head droops to one side. He snores, his face prematurely lined, his eyelids fluttering beneath the uneasy REM of dreams. Mulder states the obvious. "Orex fell asleep." "It's a Homicide rule of thumb," Bayliss says. "Innocent people stay awake in the Box. The guilty take a nap." "I wonder what his dreams are like," Scully says mildly. "I wouldn't care to know," Pembleton says. "But when I get through with him, I'll make him sorry he ever woke up." He knows the stakes. Orex's repeated presence at the bomb scenes, his links to curare, and his possession of the one flower repeatedly invoked by the Hyacinth Girl are all seductive pieces of circumstance, but physical evidence linking him to the explosions themselves is still minimal. A confession is their best bet. And there is another possibility, one that has sprouted quietly in the back of Pembleton's mind, a suspicion that blooms into full flower as he stands here, looking at the pathos of his suspect. A possibility that Orex had not been acting alone. That an accomplice exists, an accessory, a second murderer, a dual Tunabomber who still remains at large. With luck, this still-hypothetical figure may lie in the shadows at the end of the path that Pembleton now prepares to tread. The _real_ Hyacinth Girl. He continues, "I think that Bayliss and I should go at him alone. He won't take kindly to Agent Mulder after his little subterfuge...and, well, I like to keep women out of the Box." he says, underlining the word "out." A heartbeat passes. "No offense intended," he adds unconvincingly. "I'm sure," Scully replies. Time to begin. Bayliss flashes a grin at Scully as he and Pembleton leave, entering the Box quietly, dossiers in hand. He closes the door softly behind him, careful not to wake the suspect. And they simply watch Orex for a few moments, calm, composed, like a pair of orchestral conductors in preparation for a symphony. Many seconds pass. They stand stonily over Orex's unmoving body, looking down at the bomber for a long while, not speaking. Silent. Slowly, Pembleton begins to pace around the sleeping form, circling, looking at the figure from all sides, Orex lying, draped, over the back of the chair, neck at an awkward angle, face is pasty, hair mussed. A small man. He circles and circles. Predatory. A slowly tightening noose. No, not a noose. The tendrils of some carnivorous plant. Drawing closer to an immobile insect, glued in place with some secretion, sated on nectar, botanical jaws ready to feed. Pembleton's body is as lithe as a sapling, a reed, the stamen of a sundew. He waits. Then: motion. Pembleton strides over to the door of the Box and slams it. Loud. The sound reverberates like a thunderclap in the small space, shaking the bricks, making the one-way mirror vibrate; Mulder and Scully's view of the action goes momentarily wavy. Undulating. Orex snaps to attention, head jerking up, a small pathetic "Huh!" torn from his lips. His eyes widen. "H-hello," he stammers. Words fumble out from his mouth automatically: "I n-need to see my lawyer. I've been waiting here for hours. I--" Pembleton explodes. "_Shut up_!" he roars. He leans down, face an inch from Orex's, speaks again, now with voice reined in, low, almost inaudible, a suggestion of violence pulsating beneath the syllables: "When I want you to say something, I will fucking say so. Is that perfectly clear?" Orex nods rapidly. "Good." Not taking his eyes from the suspect, Pembleton draws a bright yellow piece of paper from beneath his arm, along with a felt-tip pen. He drops them onto the table. "Sign this, please." He accents his words slowly, carefully, as if talking to a macrocephalic. "W-What is it?" Orex stutters. "What _is_ it?" Pembleton seems ready to rip the sweatshirt off Orex's back and feed it to him, bite by bite; his brows are furrowed, his narrow eyes boiling with irrational indignation--an act, of course, but a carefully cultivated act, one perfected over a decade of forced interrogations such as this--theme and variation, almost without end. Unnerving. Even from behind the mirror, watching in hermetic darkness, Scully flinches involuntarily at the wave of anger that seems to radiate off the detective. "It's a Miranda waiver," Bayliss says quickly to Orex. "It affirms that you wish to waive your right to remain silent." "But I want to talk to my lawyer first..." "Your _lawyer_?" Pembleton stares at Orex as if the suspect had just asked permission to wallow in his own filth. "Don't you _get_ it? Do you have the slightest idea as to what's going on?" His voice drops a full register, a guttural murmur. "You're looking at the chamber. Death penalty. We're the only ones who can help you, not your attorney. Clear your name today and you might not end up snorting bitter almonds a year from now." Flustered, the suspect signs the waiver, without bothering to read it. They wait until he has recapped the pen; the interrogation then begins in earnest. "Mr. Orex," Bayliss says quietly, leaning against the brick wall of the Box, "you know why we've brought you here." Orex struggles to regain composure, keeping his head high. "Yeah." "We saw you at three separate bombing scenes," Pembleton whispers. Bayliss speaks softly. "We've got you on film." Pembleton: "We caught you with a hyacinth. _The_ hyacinth." Bayliss: "We know about the Arizona death. We have your curare pen." "We know about the Rio Negro." "We know about your other bombings. The arboretum. That teenaged kid." "We _know_, Orex," Pembleton says. "Now, can you give us a good explanation as to why we saw you in all those places, and why you've been connected with all those killings?" Orex heaves a shaky sigh. His words--when he finally speaks, almost a minute later--are almost inaudible. He coughs once. "Because I bombed them." It comes out quickly, a long mumbling ejaculation of sound: _becauseibombedthem_. The two detectives exchange glances. Easiest confession in weeks. Pembleton leans even closer, asks a question, a single word, dark and slippery as a mossy chasm: "Why?" Orex's eyes are moist, clouded with thought, as he sits there and toys idly with the drawstring of his sweatshirt hood, wrapping the cord around his fingers and pulling it taut. Another mumbled phrase: "Because she told me to." Bayliss brings his head close enough so that the three of them speak almost brow to brow. "She? Who is she?" he asks, already guessing the answer. "The Hyacinth Girl." Pembleton straightens up abruptly. Pivots. Paces away from Orex, down the length of the Box, toward the one-way mirror, where he pauses, tossing a significant glance at Mulder and Scully, then turns back. Spins on his heels. "Who is the Hyacinth Girl, anyway?" he inquires, moving back toward the suspect. "She's been the cause of much speculation down here in Homicide." "She's the Hyacinth Girl," Orex repeats. "She's the one in the carton." "Ohhhh," says Bayliss, drawing out the word. "In the carton. I see. The Hyacinth Girl is a flower." "That's what the name implies, isn't it?" Bayliss asks, "The flower speaks to you?" "I suppose that she does. After a fashion." "I'm not surprised--sort of a botanical Son of Sam, no? A hyacinth instead of a prophetic dog." "But flowers are hermaphroditic," Pembleton says. "You can't refer to a flower using any particular gender." "T.S. Eliot does," Orex replies. "Well, of course," Pembleton says. "'The Waste Land.' Let me offer you another charming couplet from that particular poem: '"That corpse you planted last year in your garden--has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"'" "The trouble," Bayliss adds, "is that you, Mr. Orex, have too many corpses in your garden." "Skeletons in your closet." "Deaths that you can't blame on a flower." "Like in 1989. You went on an expedition along Amazonia and Orinoco, studying botany and anthropology with other students from Johns Hopkins. Four months. You were researching Dengue hemorrhagic fever." "Do you have any particular memories of that expedition?" Bayliss asks. Orex crosses his arms--tries to cross them, anyway, forgetting that he is still handcuffed to the tabletop. He settles for rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. "I have a lot of memories..." he says uncertainly. The color is beginning to creep back into his face, his nose blotchy, cheekbones still papery. "Give us an example," coaxes Pembleton. "Anything," Bayliss probes. "A little detail, no matter how insignificant it may seem." "Well..." A pathetic little smile curls uncomfortably on his upper lip. "The first thing that comes to mind? I remember the toothpick fish." "Toothpick fish?" Pembleton asks. "Please continue--sounds interesting." Examining the worn wooden surface of the table--the lower edge carved deep with initials, scratchings, drawings, epithets, some years old, the mute hieroglyphs of a thousand testy suspects kept in interrogation--Orex wavers, thinking, rubbing his neck. Eyes distant, unfocused, he hesitantly begins to speak. "We--the expedition, about two dozen people--needed to cross the Amazon at one point," he says, slipping into reminiscence, fingering the handcuffs absently. "We'd heard stories about piranhas and leeches, of course, but the Candiru--the toothpick fish--is something different. Worse. There were rumors about it before we left Maryland..." Bayliss: "Why is it worse than the piranha?" "Why? Well, the candiru is kind of dwarf catfish. It's a parasite. It lives in the gills of larger fish. But sometimes it gets confused. Occasionally, we heard, if you accidentally piss into the water while crossing the Amazon, the candiru will smell the uric acid and swim right into your urethra." "Right up the dick." "Yeah. It wriggles right up there and extends barbs, little retrorse spines, and digs them into your flesh. You can't remove it or urinate...the pain is enormous, they say. The only possible treatment is to go to a surgeon and ask him to cut off your penis." "Ouch. I take it this never happened to you." "Well, the Candiru legend is mostly fabrication. Rumor. Whenever you drag dead bodies out from the Amazon, the toothpick fish are always stuffed into every conceivable orifice. Nose, eyes, rectum, ears. Urethra. That's how the stories began--but it never happens to living people. I crossed the Amazon without incident. But I'll always remember that anecdote." At Orex's mention of dead bodies in the Amazon, the two detectives exchange glances. "But you weren't there to worry about toothpick fish, were you?" asks Pembleton. "You went there to study Dengue fever, didn't you?" "Yeah," Orex says. "Terrible disease in South America. Mostly attacks children, little kids. They're bitten by a mosquito, develop enormous fevers, blood in the vomit, blood in the stools, bluish lips from oxygen deprivation, weakness. The veins swell. Burst. Internal bleeding. Some die from it. I was studying the sickness." "So you were motivated by altruism, is that it? Treating the savages?" "Yes--I was pretty idealistic in those days." "But what happened?" Bayliss inquires. "How did you go from being an student of medicine with a bright future to a menial worker at a medical supply house? What made you go from helping people to blowing them to bits?" "I think I know what went wrong," Pembleton says to his partner, speaking as if Orex wasn't present. "He probably looked forward to the toothpick fish." "That's what I figured," Bayliss replies. "Has it written all over him." "I'm not surprised." "Hold on, hold on," Orex says. "What are you talking about?" "What are we talking about, Orex?" Pembleton taps the suspect firmly on the forehead with one forefinger, as if testing a melon for ripeness. "We're saying that we think you're a bona-fide _faggot_. That you _wouldn't mind_ being stuck up the dick with little fish." "Hey--" Orex's voice is rising, indignant. "It's obvious. You're a queer," Bayliss says. Orex sputters. "I ain't no faggot." "Sure you are. We think that maybe _you're_ the Hyacinth Girl, buddy." "It's inevitable," Pembleton says, "that a man with such a fetish for botany would end up becoming--pardon the pun--a fruit." "I ain't no...I ain't no..." His cheeks have gone completely red with startling suddenness, livid against the whiteness of his skin like twin Japanese flags. "What the hell do you think you're--" "But if you ain't wired up for sodomy," Pembleton barks, "then who the hell is the Hyacinth Girl?" "I told you!" Orex shouts back. "She's the flower!" Pembleton begins to rant--another act (perspiration hasn't even begun to gather at his brow) but a convincing one, a frightening one; Orex actually seems to shrivel up slightly in his chair like a perennial exposed to too much sunlight. "Jesus Christ, who are you, the Little Prince?" the detective asks. "Listen up, Orex. You've got an accomplice. We know that. We know that there is no way a single man could have coated each of the cactus needles in that Arizona greenhouse with poison. We know that you don't have the guts to build these bombs on your own. You don't have the skill, the know-how, the drive. You don't like explosions. You show no pride in your work. You don't speak of it, you don't brag about it, not even after your confession--your heart isn't in pyrotechnics. Someone else put you up to the bombings. And I absolutely goddamn refuse to believe that it was this...this potted hyacinth that told you when to kill. So--who is it? Who is the real Hyacinth Girl? Who are you working for, dammit?" Orex, flattened against the chair, ridiculously _grins_--ear to ear, for the first time, really smiles, his teeth thin and delicate with predatory jaundice. Mocking. "I work for Belladonna," he says. "The Lady of the Rocks." * * * End of (5/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (6/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:39:48 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (6/12)--Death by Water (I) * * * Unreal City. Baltimore squirms beneath the brown fog of the April afternoon. Bayliss digresses on the sidewalk, his shoes clicking dryly on the pavement, marveling at the yellow fog that rubs its back along the window-panes, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, lingering upon the pools that stand in the street. It rains slightly, a gray drizzle, moist and warm and all-invading. He pulls out an umbrella, opens it wide. A minor rat-a-tat-tat of droplets on the fabric. Scully walks up behind him, ducks under the umbrella. Alarmingly close. He can smell her perfume. She says: "A rather impressive performance in the Box just now." "Whose? His or ours?" "Both, actually. Especially yours." "It wasn't bad. I always end up playing the straight man to Frank's acrobatics, anyhow." He looks out into the rain. The interrogation had gone on for more than an hour, with Orex steadfastly refusing to admit any accomplices beyond that hyacinth--the flower that he claimed was more responsible for the bombings than he was. Nothing had been gained beyond the initial confession. Orex had grown silent, sullen. He answered their questions with grunts or nods--an almost comedic analogue to Sibyl Kantorek, gone comatose in the final moments of questioning. Good enough. Orex had been charged on seven counts of murder. The details of Dolorosa Chi's death are still sketchy, but it well might provide an eighth. The red names on Bayliss' sector of the board had finally faded to black. Bayliss says, "We'll be trying again soon. Maybe we can convince him to give up the name of his partner in crime in return for reducing the charges." "So you really believe that Orex didn't act alone?" "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right, him working all by himself. All those cactus needles that he needed to cover with poison... He couldn't have done that on his own." "But I still don't understand how Detective Pembleton made the connection between the Maryland bombings and the curare incident in Arizona." They begin to walk slowly down the street, close together beneath the umbrella. Painfully self-conscious of their proximity, Bayliss says, "Actually, it wasn't Pembleton at all. Another detective, Bolander--he's currently on suspension--made the connection almost a year ago, just after the Johns Hopkins explosion, when we were just beginning to understand the bomber's pattern. That Bolander..." A smile, soft laugh. "His memory is like a machine. Something about the case--I don't know what it was--made him remember that obscure death that took place two thousand miles away, five years ago, which he didn't even investigate but just heard about over the teletype. It was the peas, really. Reminded him of the curare killing. He suggested we do a little digging; Frank came up with additional links between the cases on his own, and, finally, the Hyacinth Girl mentioned the killing in one of his--her--notes." "But Orex isn't willing to admit any accomplices." "None. It was strange. I can't make up my mind as to whether that bastard has a lot of guts or none at all. One second he looked ready to crawl into a hole somewhere and die; the next, he was talking back and grinning like an asshole. I'm surprised that the homosexuality angle didn't work; Frank and I were betting that it might infuriate him into something. He wouldn't even say why he carried the hyacinth to all those bombing scenes." "It isn't too hard to figure out," Scully says. "After all, there're a limited number of reasons for hooking up a polygraph to a plant. Orex is a psychotic Cleve Backster." "And he would be...?" "Backster was the first to wire a plant up to a galvanometer. He was a reputable scientist, but he eventually became convinced that he detected botanical emotions, feelings, even psychic powers." "Really? What kind of plant did he use?" Scully extends a hand out from beneath the umbrella, feeling the atomized droplets fall. "A dracaena. A dragon tree." Bayliss glances at her. "Any relation to the little dragon hyacinth?" "Quite possibly. Orex strikes me as being a sucker for such cheap poetic correspondences." "But what's the purpose of bringing the hyacinth to explosion sites?" "It isn't too hard to figure out. One of Backster's original crackpot concepts regarding plant emotion is that they are able to detect _suffering_, in small or large quantities. When he accidentally cut his finger in the lab one day, for example, he noticed that the dragon tree registered an unusually high pulse on the galvanometer. He concluded that the plant felt his pain--or, more precisely, felt the pain of his dying skin cells. Plants can sense death." "It doesn't sound too farfetched to me..." "But listen. Backster claims that he obtained similar results when he stirred jam into yogurt, killing bacteria. Or when he poured boiling water down the drain, killing microorganisms in the sink. His plant supposedly reacted strongly to all varieties of death. Do you see the flaw in his reasoning?" "Sure. Living things get killed all the time." "Exactly. If plants were the botanical bleeding-hearts that Backster painted them as, they'd register continual distress as microbes were killed, bacilli were inhaled, bugs were stepped on, cells exploded from viral infections..." "Death is ubiquitous," Bayliss says. "Right. And the irony is that Orex created even more death, apparently for purposes of experimental stimuli. Even when so much death already exists for the taking." "Eight people murdered for pseudoscience." "Just to be sure about his motives," Scully says, "I've got the microcassette that Orex had on him when you captured him." She holds up the small plastic cartridge. "I'm going to have the sounds analyzed. See what Orex was trying to accomplish." "You know," Bayliss offers, pausing in the middle of the sidewalk, "I'm on my way to Orex's house right now to search for evidence." He jingles the keys. "If you want, you can come along. Look for oscillators, waveform generators, chemistry sets, whatever the hell else he might have." "I think I'll take you up on that offer." Scully checks the time--slightly past five. She comments, "Been a fast day. Mulder and I have only been here eight hours and we've already identified, caught and interviewed the bomber we were supposed to find." "You obviously have the magic touch." Bayliss looks out at the rain, the ashen sky. The sun sits comfortably--like a peeled orange, half-visible through the clouds--atop the big stone edifice that he and Scully stand beneath. Dim. A frosted pollen cluster. He nods to himself, adds, "But the day isn't over yet." * * * In the Cavalier. The radio is off. Scully takes aspirins, complains of a headache that has been fermenting at the base of her skull ever since her close examination of crime scene photos that morning. "Impressive work, though," Bayliss says. "Finding Orex in those pictures." She replies modestly, "It beats poring over footage of the Kennedy assassination. Or monochromes of the Roswell crash. My usual specialty." "By choice?" "By vocation. The FBI has been known to send some weird stuff down the pipe." "I can imagine." Looking out through the rain-blurred windshield, steering, he muses, "I wonder which of us sees more bizarre things on any given day." "That depends on which you find more disturbing: anomalies of the unusual--which is what I tend to deal with..." "...or anomalies of the mundane," he finishes. "What _I_ see every day." He is silent for a moment, then: "I never cease to wonder at the idea of murder. Hundreds of new cases a year; day in, day out, that phone always rings with the Reaper on the other end of the line--and I still can't get over the initial strangeness. It doesn't matter whether it's a drug hit that leaves two yos dead on the pavement, or a sniper, or a serial killer, or a Hyacinth Girl. _All_ murder is paranormal, to some extent." "You think so? Or don't you think that murder is part of the human genotype?" "That's what Frank would say. He says that man doesn't just kill for pleasure, he wants to convert other creatures to his sadism. That's why you see pit bulls, attack dogs, taught to go for the jugular. Cockfighting. Or the dolphins trained by the Navy to lay underwater explosives." "Or plant life used to detonate bombs." Scully lets her hand trail out from the car's open window, feeling the damp breeze. "You know, I spoke to Orex's doctoral advisor, Professor Meinekker, who gave me the Dolorosa Chi connection. He told me that the worst thing that the Hyacinth Girl did was to corrupt nature's innocence. Violate the purity of plants. Make cacti kill, peas trigger explosions." "That's what I thought at first," Bayliss says. "But I've been thinking. Plants aren't passive observers. They use thorns, poison; they choke the life out of other plants; they intentionally put toxins into the soil to kill competitors; they can eat insects; they fight for sunlight, wrestle, sting, needle, pierce, stab, suffocate. They aren't pacifists. They just want to survive. It's naive to think otherwise." "You're probably right." Silence for another minute and thirty-seven seconds. Then, treading carefully, more than a little nervous, Bayliss asks with forced casualness, "How long do you expect to be in Baltimore?" "Well, it's only forty miles from here to Washington. I'll probably drive back with Mulder today." "Oh. But, um, listen..." Bayliss bites the inside of his lip, aware that this element of the pursuit never gets any easier. Leaps: "Do you feel like going to see a movie or something tonight?" "Or something?" Scully smiles but does not laugh. "Do you have anything particular in mind?" "There's a new Coen brothers film playing at the Adelphi. You'll love it. Trust me." She looks over at him, says, without too much hesitation, "I'd be delighted." Bayliss' vocabulary has been significantly reduced by emotional relief. He replies, "Neat." The rest of the ride proceeds quietly. They find Orex's house after some circling, buried like a maggot in Baltimore's gut, a slim featureless two-story structure with aluminum siding recently installed, painted a peeling cobalt blue, sandwiched between similar walk-ups. Shuttered windows like cataracts. Bayliss steps out of the car, slams the door, walks up the steps. Rings the bell. He can hear the manic _ching-chong_ echoing through the house. Pulling Orex's keys from his pocket, he tries one, another--finally hitting home on the third try. _Click_. Turns key, opens door. "After you," he says. Scully steps over the threshold. The house is dark, musty, but very clean. There is a faint stench of oleander. In the darkness, she can see that the chairs are draped in plastic, the coffee table covered with a neatly pressed silk cloth embroidered with floral motifs, a single rose--uncut--sprouting from a glass jar sitting in the center of the fabric. Bookshelves line the walls. Old _National Geographics_, ordered chronologically, textbooks, popular works on botany--and explosives--arranged alphabetically along the alcoves. She flicks on a switch, and the room is illuminated with a calm green fluorescent hue, the bulb encircled by a lampshade of forest-tinted acetate. Beneath the emerald light, Bayliss looks like he has a minor case of gangrene. "Consistent design motif," he comments. She agrees. "Early American Botanophile." She moves out of the living room, into the small adjoining kitchen. The counter is spotless, shining; the sink is half full, a pair of large battery cables snaking down into the water from a DC converter, the kind used with model trains. Peering into the sink, she sees at least twenty nails lying at the bottom of the pool, reddish-orange with oxidation. He looks over her shoulder. "He's making rust. Page was expecting something like this; iron oxide is a crucial ingredient of thermite bombs." "Planning for the next blast." "Yep. That stuff can burn through metal." Bayliss sticks his head into the next room. Small dining table, set for one. Another potted plant--a geranium--sits on a circular placemat. It wilts slightly, large petals wrinkled and dark, exuding a dry violet scent. He leans closer to examine it. With a peculiar sense of horror, he sees that bits and pieces of the stem have been cut off; leaves have been snipped, small stumps scorched. The buds are covered with small regular indentations, engravings, like sawtooth marks: places where alligator clips have pinched. "He's been torturing this flower," he says. "Testing for a nervous system," Scully says. "It's been done thousands of times before. The results never amount to anything--but they keep burning the leaves, hoping for a scream. _Something_." "As if the only emotion a flower might understand is pain." "A typical human assumption." Scully walks past him. Two doors are set into the opposite wall of the dining room. Opening one, she sees Orex's meticulously maintained bedroom, bed made, clothes neatly hung in the closet, with--no surprise--floral prints bedecking on the walls. Some of them seem to be Audubon watercolors, enlarged to showcase the botanical instead of the avian elements of the portraiture. Others appear to be Orex's original work, neatly framed. Mostly colored pencil, with some oils, done with some degree of technical skill but no real inspiration or virtuosity--with one exception. Hanging over the bed is a large pastel sketch on rough paper, at least thirty inches by twenty, bold, loud, with smoldering reds and greens colliding like fireworks across the page: the little dragon hyacinth. The colors leap out from the surface. Impressively done; a fine sense of both detail and composition is evident in the piece that is all but missing in the other drawings. The initials "P.O." are scrawled in one corner. "Detective, come look at this," she calls, examining the picture. There is no answer. Stepping back out into the dining room, Scully sees that the other door is partially open, exposing a thin rectangle of black within. She pulls on the handle, leaning inside. It is cool, refrigerated, like a tomb, with hints of mossy odors--lichen--lurking in the soft corners of the air like candle smoke. "Detective Bayliss?" she calls. She steps inside. Her high heels click on smooth linoleum. Inside-- Growth. Soft, swaying, pendulous growth. A small internal greenhouse with no visible source of light. In the dimness she sees row after row of hyacinths, climbing vines, cacti, orchids. Faint scents. Whispering branches, the quiet humming of fans, air conditioning. Scully moves further inside, stepping over a few small crates set in the middle of the floor. And she sees Bayliss. Lying on the ground, a thin thread of blood trailing from his nose, his back twisted painfully. His eyes flutter, his cheekbones bruised and purplish. Alongside him sits a shattered ceramic pot with beads of blood clinging to the fragments. "Oh my God..." she says, hands going to mouth. Behind her: a noise. A footstep. She spins, going for her gun, but something crashes down on her right arm, something heavy, breaking open the skin--a dark shape, moving quickly--a second blow comes, a fist taking her heavily on the jaw. Unsteady, she falls, colliding with the shelves of flowers. Pots crash to the ground. Something slips from her pocket. Cool pebbly earth cascading down, potting soil; she drops to her knees. A smash to her temple. Her hands splayed, she prostrates. Unconsciousness. She looks up, looks into the darkness, for an instant sees the outline of a face against the ceiling. Profile. The face of her attacker--painfully familiar, a face she knows, the female face of someone she has seen before, in photographs, a woman standing over her with blood on her hands. She knows. The final blow descends. The dark chokes Scully-- --but before it does, she realizes something, something that should have been obvious to her before: the initials signing the sketch of the little dragon hyacinth had not been "P.O." Not quite. As she is beaten into blissful oblivion, Scully remembers that the bowl of the "P" had been abnormally large, descending completely to the foot of the letter. Like a "D." And the circle of the "O" had been broken on one side. A "C," perhaps. Yes. No doubt about it. That drawing hanging above Orex's bed had been signed "D.C." * * * Wandering the Homicide floor with bored and circular pacings, Detective John Munch carries a red rose, longstemmed, in his left hand. He passes the metal desk where Fox Mulder sits, sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows, intently studying the transcript of Orex's interrogation and making notes on the page with a red pencil. The agent does not notice Munch until he drops the flower onto his paper, saying, "Here. Thought you might need some inspiration of the floral persuasion." Mulder doesn't bother looking up. "Thanks." Lifting an eyebrow, Munch says, "I appreciate your gratitude. Let me know if the flower offers any important revelations; I've been trying to get it to talk all afternoon." The humor, always questionable, is already old. Intelligent plant jokes have been flying thick on the Homicide floor ever since Mulder casually mentioned, a few hours ago, that he felt that Orex's alleged experiments perhaps weren't so farfetched. His exact words had been: "You know, there is a great deal of empirical evidence--double-blind tests and the like--that supports some of these theories. That plants may have sensory apparatus, that they have some measure of feeling, even cognizance." At first they'd thought he was kidding. Now, Munch leans closer and asks, "Tell me the truth. Don't you sometimes just embrace that crackpot nonsense simply to annoy your partner?" Mulder looks at him coolly. "Yep," he says. "Good. Just wanted to be sure." Munch straightens up, walks away. Reaching out, Mulder twists the switch at the base of the lamp that perches above his papers, casting a white circle of luminescence onto the blotter. The bulb grows hot almost immediately. Turning back to his work, he sees the rose on the desk, picks it up by the stem. Gazes at it for a few moments. Examines the symmetry. Perfect beauty, flawless, Olympian, more ideally formed than any other of God's creations: bloom, blossom, floret. He lifts the petals to his nose and inhales the odor. "Oh, _God_!" he chokes, his eyes watering. He throws the flower away, tosses it into the wastebasket. His gorge rises. The rose is permeated with the stench of rotting flesh. Putrid. It smells like the dirt from a shallow grave. Chuckling slightly, Munch strides up and tosses a few small amber ampoules onto the desk. "Pseudo Corpse I," he says, "made by the fine folks at the Sigma Chemical Company in St. Louis, Minnesota. Artificial putrescence. In dilute form, we use it to train body-sniffing dogs. Purified, it's the practical joker's best friend." Mulder, gills green, asks, "Don't you have a dominatrix killer to interview?" "Rotting in his cell. In the meantime, I entertain myself as best I can." "You must be a lot of fun on stakeouts." A cough. "Of course, you're aware that the Rafflesia flower of the South American rainforests naturally smells of rotting flesh." "Sure. If you want to attract a certain variety of unsavory insect, you stink yourself up like a cadaver." "Sounds like the moral of a koan to me." "Exactly. Listen to your Zen master." Munch nods and sidles off. Very little of substance seems to have come of this encounter. "Yeah," Mulder mutters to himself. "Just great." Pencil in hand, he idly checks the time and is nonplussed to see that nearly two hours have passed--almost languidly--since he last heard from Scully. Frowns. Tries to remember their last exchange: a brief call on the cell phone, something about checking out Orex's house with Bayliss... Hearing a rustle of feet on carpeting, Mulder glances up in time to see Pembleton hang up a phone and walk by. "Excuse me, but have you seen my partner?" "I haven't seen Agent Scully _or_ Bayliss since five," Pembleton answers distractedly, an odd tone in his voice. "Heard that they were going to check out our bomber's quarters." "Yeah, that's what she told me. I'm surprised she hasn't called. I tried her cell phone ten minutes ago, but there was no answer." "Knowing Bayliss, he's probably trying to talk her into a Las Vegas marriage." Pembleton stands alongside the desk, examining a folder full of documents as he speaks; he fails to see the expression on Mulder's face--if any--at this statement. "If we don't hear from them within twenty minutes," he continues, "I'm going down to the house myself. I have some searches of my own to conduct, anyway." Mulder picks up his pencil again, resumes his notes. "Good. I'll join you." "In twenty minutes." Pembleton speaks vaguely, remembering the minor task he needs to perform, walking across the floor to the big white easel that sits along the opposite wall. He uncaps a felt-tip pen, adds another name--black, thankfully--to Bayliss' list. Turns to notify Mulder. "By the way," he says, "that was Johns Hopkins on the phone." He recaps the pen. "Sibyl Kantorek is dead." * * * Bayliss drifts awake to find himself in a world of numbness. He cannot move. Half-remembered snatches of songs flutter through his head like autumn leaves. The Four Seasons. He feels like a latex surgical glove filled with cold water and tied at the top, limbs mere memories of limbs, his chest a hollow cavity, his eyes globules of spun glass. Shifted and carried, he dimly feels himself being set down--not so much a physical sensation as a rumor, a whisper, shuddering through unfeeling bone. He cracks his lids, sees through harsh light the hint of a female face, not Scully's. It bends over him. Smooth form, wrapping his injuries, binding wounds, a cool hand along the back of his neck. There is no pain. Not yet, anyway. * * * End of (6/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (7/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:41:23 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (7/12)--Death by Water (II) * * * Maneuvering the FBI vehicle through the amber-tinged rain, Mulder drives with Pembleton in the front seat, both lost in thought, listening to the hollow _thuck_ of windshield wipers against the glass. Gazing out from behind hornrimmed sunglasses, an unlit cigarette held between his fingers, Pembleton says, "You know, when you were pretending to be Orex's college buddy in order to apprehend him, I thought to myself, 'This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen.'" The corners of Mulder's eyes wrinkle. "What do you think now?" Keeping a straight face without difficulty, Pembleton says, "The same." "But it worked," Mulder says. "Even if it _was_ a stupid move--which I'm not going to deny--the end justifies the means." "Is that your honest belief?" "In this case, yes. Admit it. I saw you in the Box. Manipulating Orex. Tricking him into an hour of lawyer-free interrogation, contrary to the Miranda contract which you read to him no less than three times, contrary to his right to legal counsel which he repeatedly invoked. I know the drill. During interviews, everyone does borderline stupid things to elicit a confession. Bluff. Lie about evidence. I've seen detectives interrogate three separate suspects regarding the same crime, yelling at each of them, 'Confess, motherfucker, we know you did it!'--only to apologize to the two innocents after the guilty one gives in. Deception in the name of the truth." Pembleton contemplates his cigarette for another moment, then tosses it out the window intact. He asks, "Is that really what you think? Personally, I feel that you take the concept of 'truth' much too seriously." "Why shouldn't I? That's what I deal with every day--me and Scully both." "But you two have rather different approaches to the idea of truth, don't you?" Mulder eases the car onto Orex's street. "You might say that," he admits. "To Scully, truth means orthodoxy. She tends to follow what the status quo dictates, the accepted view." "Whereas you believe in the quote-unquote 'buried' truth," Pembleton says, some measure of sarcasm apparent in his voice. "_Secret_ truth. Unknown rationales for the inexplicable." "Basically, yes. Experience tells me that explanations are always to be found if one keeps an open mind--or takes some chances. Does some stupid things." "I disagree. I've long since concluded that what we refer to as 'objective truth' simply does not exist. Everybody lies. There is no truth in the Box, just untruths of varying degree." "Are you convinced of the truth of that statement?" "Of course not. But I've found that time tends to bear me out. There are no givens. No underlying logic. The truth is not out there." They pull up in front of Orex's house and immediately notice that the department Cavalier is still parked at the curb. Getting out quickly, they step alongside the car in the light rain, looking into the darkened interior. Scully's briefcase still sits on the front passenger seat, clasp open. Mulder frowns. "They're probably inside." "Yes, probably." Pembleton has already gone up the walk and beneath the cupola of the house, onto the porch. He brushes the rain from the shoulders of his coat, reaches out and twists the smooth knob: the door responds with a dry click. Locked. Mulder strides up beside him and knocks brusquely. They wait a moment, then knock again. Nothing. Mulder says, "Hold on. I've a Lock Aid gun in the glove compartment." He walks over to the car, fetches the device, and returns; sticking the stubby needle into the aperture, he fires the pins and the door unlocks with a jerk. Pushing it open, Mulder calls, "Scully?" He hesitates, steps inside--and draws his gun. Pembleton follows, keeping his own weapon holstered. It is dim within, the living room suffused with a dozen gradients of dark. He tries the lights and illumines the room in green hues, objects gone flat and sickly, painted with Irish pallor. He comments, "Ironically, keeping a plant beneath green light will eventually kill it. Chlorophyll can't absorb green wavelengths; the plant can't use the energy, and will die sooner or later." Mulder, racing ahead of him, does not respond. "Scully?" he tries again. He moves through the kitchen (not glancing into the now-empty sink), the dining room. Comes to the two doors at the end of the house. He takes one, finds himself in the bedroom. Takes in the mad scramble of color that covers the walls--the prints, the sketches, the watercolors, the pastel scrawl of the little dragon hyacinth. Checks the closet, looks beneath the bed. Pembleton moves past the bedroom, goes through the second door and enters the cool mossy odors of the internal greenhouse. Gliding into the blackness. He sidesteps squat clay vases of drooping ferns, pots hanging from the ceiling, a wiry trellis of vines, shelves lined with flowers and earthenware. Ceramic jars of dirt. He steps close to one shelf, looking carefully at the rows of urns. Some of them seem to be broken, chipped; a thin trickle of soil protrudes from one, the thin stem of a plant bent and bruised. Strange. There are chips of clay along the ground. Mud and water. Signs of a struggle. From the bedroom, Mulder says, "I'm going to try calling her again." He pulls the phone from his pocket, dialing. Pembleton stays where he is, hands in his pockets. His face shows no trace of surprise when he hears a thin electronic whine ring out from the shelf before him. He steps forward, pushes the pots aside. His hands brush leaves, petals, stamens as he probes carefully, following the throaty beeping, finally finding the source of the sound: a small black cellular phone, deliberately hidden behind the rows of plants. He picks it up, answers it nonchalantly. "Hello," he says. "Hello," says Mulder's voice, echoed dimly from the bedroom. "Who is this?" "It's Pembleton." Despite his growing apprehension, he can't help relishing the moment. "I somehow suspect that Agent Scully may not be returning your calls." * * * She opens her eyes. Squints at the painful dryness of her corneas. Bandaged, Scully feels incongruously like Sibyl Kantorek, a wide piece of gauze encircling her temples and jaw, another wrapped around her right forearm, covering an itchy railroad track of butterfly dressings--she has been taken care of. Her arm twists uncomfortably below her back, but she can feel a thin mattress lying beneath her, slick, plastic-covered. She has been propped up. She leans against some thin pillar--a pipe--a cylindrical abutment digging coldly between her shoulderblades. Her hands are cuffed to it. Trying to shift her wrists, she cannot move them more than an inch. Wincing, she brings her head upright. A dull ache. Memories of each blow linger like purplish Volckringer patterns tattooed to her skin. Her face is bruised. A contusion on her jaw, another on her upper cheekbone, the zygomatic rouged with blood. Bracing herself, she sticks out her tongue, opening her mouth a fraction, another. It hurts, but not so much as she feared; she is surprised to find her cheeks numb--as if with Novocain--her lips swollen and unfeeling. So: evaluation. Her gun is missing, along with her watch. She glances down, sees that her blouse has become partway unbuttoned; trying to look into the inside pocket of her rumpled coat, she sees that Orex's microcassette has also been taken. She also feels a sliver of tape on her left arm. Beneath it she can feel an itch, a familiar small puckered irritation: the mark of an IV needle. Then she looks up. Her surroundings are dark, ambiguous. The only source of light is a small bulb dangling down from the ceiling by a wire, perhaps thirty watts, weak and unilluminating. There are shadows of a table, two or three chairs, a long counter, cardboard boxes--it does not seem to be Orex's house. Inhaling, she thinks that she detects the thick scent of bananas. As feeling begins to creep back into her limbs, she becomes gradually aware of a warm back pressed against hers. Scully readjusts her position slightly, swiveling her neck. She can see a man's foot, shod in leather, lying on the ground at the very periphery of her vision; both the remainder of the leg and the man himself are invisible, but she knows whose foot it is. Her hair lightly brushes his as they lie back to back. "Detective Bayliss?" she whispers. The head moves. A second later, so does the foot, dragging itself out of her line of sight. A groan. "Jesus..." Bayliss mutters, his voice weary. "How long was I out?" "I'd say three hours. Maybe four." "Great." He tries to sit up, collapses heavily against the pipe. "I think I've been drugged." "So was I. I think there are needle marks on my arms." "Jesus," he says again. His head pounds. A bandage is wrapped around his neck; wads of cotton are taped beneath his eyes. He tries to think, but only powdery recollections of pain grind down through his mental sieve, squeezed, grain by grain, down from the darkness. Confusion--vague memory--images--sensations. He wrinkles his forehead, says, "My skull is about to explode. What the hell happened?" "Someone attacked us. A woman." "That was a _woman_? God, she must have pounded on my back with a Volkswagen." "No, just a flower pot." "That's a relief." Bayliss attempts to straighten up partway, sliding his shoulders along the pipe, but an oceanwave of agony washes over his back, his spine, and he falls again, sitting down heavily on the mattress. "Goddamn back," he says. "Goddamn fucking chiropractor." Angrily, he tugs at the cuffs, tugs _hard_, metal ringing against metal without any effect. He sags, lets loose with a long, shuddering sigh. "God, this is so fucking embarrassing." "It isn't so bad," Scully says ludicrously. "Of _course_ it's bad. Christ... Even if I survive this, I'll be the laughingstock of Homicide for the next ten years. Bayliss, the guy who was jumped by a woman. Bayliss, the guy who let himself get kidnapped, for God's sake, _kidnapped_, on a freaking routine search." His voice drips with self-loathing. Disgust. Scully can feel the tension in his hands, touching hers lightly inside the cuffs. She tries to comfort him. "Don't worry. You get used to it after the first few times." He tries to look back. "What...? How many times has this happened to _you_?" "Honestly? If I could count--on one hand--the number of occasions that I've been kidnapped, abducted, held for ransom or otherwise absconded with, I'd be a polydactyl." That said, her voice becomes abruptly businesslike. "Listen, Detective Bayliss..." "For God's sake," he says, leaning back, eyes closed, "call me Tim." "Tim. Listen. By the time I'd been kidnapped four times in a row, I started to take some precautions." She tries to look behind her, tilting her head to the side, straining for a glimpse of her bound hands. A glimpse of the handcuffs. But the darkness--and the oblique angle--keep the manacles hidden, at least from her side. "Damn. Tim, can you see what make of cuffs these are?" "I'll try." Bayliss twists halfway around, tugging slightly at the point where his and Scully's wrists are conjoined, bending as far as his aching back will allow him. The cuffs are almost visible; he forces himself to contort another inch, squints, sees a few letters, the telltale shape of the band: "Um, they're Smith and Wesson models. I think." "Good. I can open those with a Peerless handcuff key." Bayliss asks, surprised, "You carry handcuff keys around with you?" "They come in handy in certain situations. And a Peerless can open three different makes." "Well, there's my fun fact for the day. You still have them?" "Yes--they weren't taken from me. I'm sitting on them." Scully lifts herself a few centimeters from the ground, uses her fingers as probes, groping for the keys--but they're too far down, tucked in a padded leather pouch deep in the back pocket of her slacks. She sits again, wriggling slightly against the mattress, trying to edge the pouch upward, rubbing against the plastic in a manner which strikes Bayliss as vaguely obscene. The sound of the polyethylene. Squeaking of small springs. She tries once more, bringing her fingers down, into the slit of her pocket, feeling the smooth cloth; her fingertips brush the pouch, but the cuffs are chained too high, they dig painfully into her wrists, she can't move another millimeter. Clenching her teeth in frustration, she makes another attempt. "C'mon," she says under her breath, a fraction away from the keys. "C'mon, c'mon, _c'mon_." Rubs against the mattress again. Useless: the pouch doesn't budge. She can feel her tendons stretching, unfolding to their maximum extension. After a few more minutes of trying, she asks exhaustedly, "Why don't you see if you can reach them?" Bayliss' ears perk up. "Hm?" "Try to reach the keys. They're in the rear left pocket. Your hands are closer to them than mine." A heartbeat passes. The blood rushes to Bayliss' face. "Yeah. Okay." He makes a fist, unclenches it, loosening the muscles in his hands, and extends his fingers gingerly, as if handling a bomb. He soon finds himself venturing into uncharted territory. "Left pocket," he mutters. His fingertips touch the thin warm fabric, the curve of the woman beneath; beads of sweat pop out from his brow. He jabs blindly. "Ouch," Scully says, jumping. "Be careful." "Careful," he gulps. Tries again. Finds, somehow, the opening of the pocket, that fine sharp slit in the cloth, a hard little button sewn to the seam. Edges his fingers into the crevice. Goes deeper, the sweat pouring down his face, feeling the softness of Scully's well-formed derriere as he gropes. His other hand, his right hand, is shaking. Deeper, inching down, fingertips touching the pouch, just barely missing a firm grip. He manages to get his thumb in partway; she shifts her weight to accommodate him. Another inch. He probes further--a small sound escapes Scully's lips--and yes, _there_, he grips the keys between thumb and forefinger, pulling them out from the pocket. Withdrawing. He exhales deeply. "There," he says. "That wasn't so hard." "Let me see the keys," Scully says. Bayliss passes them to her carefully. She takes the pouch, unclasps it behind her back, removes the keys (three of them) and attempts to distinguish the Peerless model by feel, running her fingertips along the serrations, the teeth, feeling the shape of the head. Now, slowly, deliberately, she transfers the key between thumb and forefinger and curls her wrist upward, toward the cuffs. Scrapes the Peerless along the metal of the hoops, searching for the lock. Methodically. She nearly drops the key at one point, and closes her eyes tightly, counting to ten, trying to stop the trembling of her hands. Then: she finds the keyhole. Inserts the key, clicks it home-- --and a long bare arm, a well-manicured hand, shoots out of the darkness and plucks the key from her fingers. Scully and Bayliss sit up with a simultaneous jerk, hearts pounding, watching as the hand moves back into the shadows, as a female silhouette separates itself from the surrounding gray paper-cutouts of the room and stands. The figure had been there for seconds, minutes, hours, sitting less than a two yards away from them and watching their _comedia_ in silence; now the form moves past them, to the chairs, and lightly takes a seat. There is a minor _plink_ as the key is dropped to the formica surface of the table. It punctuates the quiet. The three of them--Bayliss, Scully and this third--sit and regard each other with anticipation, not speaking, not even seeming to breathe, just looking. Bayliss feels as if he is sealed beneath a glass aquarium, underwater, held in display. The air is thick, liquid. The smell of bananas permeates the atmosphere. Finally, as if to underline this almost aquatic feeling of unreality, the shadowy figure reaches up with one of her long arms, turns on an overhead lamp--and the light this time is not green but _blue_, deepest blue, finally fully revealing the form of an Asian woman of stunning, heartbreaking beauty, her features finely sculpted, without makeup, lips full, hair drawn back from a flawless forehead. She leans her elbows on the table, hands folded, wearing khakis and a silk kimono tied at the waist: her expression is ambiguous, her eyes veiled. "Dolorosa Chi," Scully says. "That's right. And you must be Dana Scully." Her voice is flat and startlingly Midwestern. She pulls Scully's FBI identification from the folds of her robe, tosses it onto the table, alongside the Peerless. Chi allows her gaze to linger briefly on the key, saying, "I must admit, that was rather clever. Silly me, to forget to check your back pockets." "No." Bayliss' voice, somewhat shaky. "That wasn't clever," the detective says. "_Clever_ is faking your death. _Clever_ is pretending to drown in the Rio Negro and covering your tracks so well that, seven years later, everyone still thinks that you died in Venezuela. _Clever_ is using Paul Orex as your lackey, your scapegoat. Because that's who you are, isn't it? You're the Hyacinth Girl." Dolorosa Chi smiles in the blue light. "Not exactly. What did Paul tell you, that the eponymous bomber was a flower in a cardboard carton? He wasn't lying. And there are more Hyacinth Girls than one." Chi rises from the chair. She moves to the counter that stands next to the table, still purplish in the dimness, and flicks on a bulb of normal hue. Revealed in the light are three rows of six hyacinths each, little dragon hyacinths, fiery red and sprouting from fat terracotta pots. Above them are set a series of silvery pipes and nozzles, like diminutive showerheads. One of the flowers, an especially large and luxuriant one, has been wired up to a galvanometer and to another piece of equipment that Scully is unable to recognize--a small squat box dotted on one side with regular perforations, a grille. Like a speaker. Chi leans close to this flower, her lips almost touching the nearest scarlet blossom, and whispers, "Hello, Cynthia." "Hello, Dolorosa," the hyacinth says. "I like you." Its voice is artificial but stiltedly feminine, like an anthropomorphized dial tone. Chi frowns, fiddles with some knobs and dials set along the top of the speaker, speaks again. "Do you want anything, Cynthia?" The flower says, voice slightly modulated, "Water." A fine spray of droplets drizzles down from the nozzle set above the hyacinth. Small transparent beads of water adhere to the leaves, to the petals, misting the plant, drops running down the firm smoothness of the stem and gathering in small rivulets in the clay pot. A thin metallic hum, a hum of contentment, emanates from the speaker, the flower's voice--a subtle, undeniably sexual hum that fills the room, making the air crackle with erotic electricity, rich growth, fertility, that penetrates deeply into Scully's bones, making her flesh sore. Then, a few seconds later, the voice of the true Hyacinth Girl intrudes into the thrum. She, the flower, says, "That is fine." The sound ceases, and the water stops flowing. * * * Waiting rather uneasily outside the office of Lieutenant Al "Ge" Giardello for his requisite _mea culpa_, Pembleton stands looking across the room at the big board, those splotches of red and black ink against white acetate, and muses passingly over a somewhat unsettling fact: FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder is Batman. No kidding. He remembers their hasty search of Orex's house after the discovery of Agent Scully's cell phone. In the small greenhouse, Mulder had found a cardboard box with half-full IV bags, complete with tubing and sterile needles in paper wrappings. He had taken one of the bags in his hands, pulling the top open, and sniffed the liquid inside. Closed his eyes and coughed. "It's succinylcholine," he'd said. "I'd bet my life on it." "Succinyl...?" "Succinylcholine." Mulder had resealed the plastic sac, pocketed it. "It's synthetic curare. Doctors use it during surgery as a muscle relaxant." "Would Orex have had access to it at his job in the medical supply house?" "Definitely. Assuming that Bayliss and Scully have indeed been kidnapped, I'm betting that someone used succinylcholine to temporarily paralyze them for transportation purposes." "What would the effects have been?" "Well, it wouldn't have killed them, but a constant drip would have rendered them immobile for a few hours. Or perhaps they were directly injected. That would have paralyzed them for five to seven minutes." Incredulous, Pembleton had asked, "How the hell do you know all this stuff?" Mulder'd grinned, said, "I'm Batman." But his eyes had been worried, his humor forced, the implications of Scully's absence just beginning to sink in. Now, standing outside Ge's office, Pembleton wonders fleetingly whether or not he and Mulder have entirely misinterpreted the facts. After all, no direct evidence exists to indicate that Bayliss and Scully have been abducted, except for a misplaced cellular phone and an abandoned Chevrolet; for all he knows, they might have gone to follow a lead on foot, pursuing a shadow down some side street, some cul de sac, leaving the phone behind by accident. Or there might be some other explanation for their disappearance. But Pembleton's intuition tells him the truth: something has happened, something terribly wrong. "You may enter," booms Ge from within. Pembleton steps into the office. Inside, Mulder stands with his back to the wall, arms folded, keeping his eyes on the carpet, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Across from him, behind his desk, sits Lt. Giardello. He cuts an imposing figure, charcoal skin, barrel chest, a Wariri rain god wearing a dark suit and narrow tie. "So, where are my investigators?" Ge asks. Speaking honestly: "We have no idea. We're assuming that they've been taken by an accomplice." "But there's no certainty." "No. For all we know, they could be anywhere." "Until we know for certain, I want their disappearance kept quiet. Total hush-hush. Barnfather's already got the gun to my head over this Hyacinth Girl shit; I don't want to give him any further ammo until we conclusively know they've been kidnapped. What does Orex say?" "He isn't talking. Total silence. I could drag his ass back into the Box, but his lawyer would probably tag along." "I doubt that his lawyer would object to any questions that might reveal the whereabouts of two innocent people. I want him interrogated again. Ask him every question twice. I want him to tell us where Bayliss and Agent Scully have been taken. He knows." "And I doubt that he'll talk." "Slap him with conspiracy. Aiding and abetting." "He isn't going to be wowed by any creampuff charges. He's got seven counts of first degree murder hanging over his head, not counting Dolorosa Chi." "Eight counts," Ge says. "The Kantorek woman died, remember?" "Maybe we can make Orex a deal," Mulder interjects. "I don't make deals," Pembleton says. "Rule of thumb, Frank," Ge thunders. "When a member of the department is in danger, all personal principles become null and void." He turns to Mulder. "What kind of deal do you have in mind?" The agent squares his shoulders and weighs his words. "Like someone once told me," he says. "Sometimes in order to attract an unsavory insect, you need to stink yourself up like a corpse." * * * End of (7/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (8/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:43:03 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (8/12)--Death by Water (III) * * * Scully struggles to stay awake. The cold metal of the pipe presses against her skull, digging into the back of her head; she lolls, catches herself dozing, shakes herself back into lucidity. Bayliss already sleeps, his breathing steady and even. Soft. She has no way to accurately gauge the passage of time in this windowless room, but suspects that night has fallen, the darkness creeping over the uneasy city of Baltimore--are they still in Baltimore?--like a melanism of the soul: her eyes are heavy, the air cool against her lids. Mulder and Pembleton will have noticed their absence by now, if not sooner. She clings to this hope as she absently works against the cuffs. Tugging gently, her hands compressed. Striving for an inch of slack, some lubrication, a loosening of the bands. Scraping her wrists raw against the metal. Dolorosa Chi watches her as she carefully prunes a luxuriant bonsai tree with a small pair of shears. Almost invisible bits and pieces of mossy foliage fall to the newspaper spread over the table. Snipping sounds, clicking. The shears gleam in the cerulean light. It gives Chi's face a bluish cast. Like a drowning victim. Or a woman poisoned by curare. Scully wishes she could step inside Dolorosa Chi's head. See what she sees, understand what she feels. Chi's expression is unreadable, mysterious. Her admittance of being Orex's accomplice in crime--indeed, her very presence, the fact that she breathes and walks and apparently remains a viable citizen of the living world--has raised more questions than it has answered. Scully has read the coroner's report regarding Chi's "death"--an official and convincing document hindered only slightly by the fact that the body was never recovered--and repeatedly examined the statements of apparently reliable witnesses, all of whom seem convinced that, seven years ago, while on a Johns Hopkins expedition to catalogue plants and research Yanomamo hallucinogens and Dengue virus, Dolorosa Chi fell into the Rio Negro at the border of Venezuela--and did not resurface. Ever. So how, now, is she alive? And why? And what, for God's sake, does her sudden resurrection have to do with the Hyacinth Girl, that red-tinged burning flower that speaks with an electronic warble--and with the veggie bombings? At the moment, Scully dares not ask--but, still, to speak is better than to lie silent, and to act better than to speak; Scully strikes up a conversation, partly to keep awake, partly intuiting that idle chatter may distract Chi, provide her with an opening, an opportunity, anything that may result in escape. She asks, "What do you plan to do with us?" Her voice manages to strike a note halfway between supplication and indignance. Chi puts down the scissors, as if she had been waiting for Scully to say something. "Do? I'm not quite sure yet." Her eyes sparkle with indulgence, with merry good humor. With murder. "Why did you bring us here? Why didn't you kill us?" She mimes surprise. "Do I look like a homicidal maniac to you?" Not waiting for the answer, Chi continues, "I bandaged you up, didn't I? I gave you anesthesia. I don't hurt indiscriminately. I never kill." "You had Orex set bombs that murdered six people," Scully says, blissfully ignorant of Kantorek's death. "A seventh died from curare poisoning." Chi sets the bonsai aside. "Do you really want to know why I brought you here? The fact is, Dana S., fate offers us so few opportunities to reenact a cinematic cliche that one must always leap at the chance. This is probably the only time in my entire life that I will be able to play the villain to such a delicious extent. Knock the hero and heroine unconscious in a darkened room. Drug them. Kidnap them. Tie them up. Outline my nefarious scheme as they lie helpless. It's quite a wonderful feeling, to be the sinister Oriental." "But for the cliche to be intact," Scully counters, "Bayliss and I would have to escape death in the nick of time, leaving your hideout in ruins." "I love happy endings," Chi says. "But sometimes, regrettably, the artist must do as T.S. Eliot did: take the old archetypes and resculpt them to reflect a new reality. And in _this_ reality, in _my_ reality, you and Detective Bayliss will probably die." Scully replies with a one word question, that same word, loaded with connotations, that Pembleton had needled Orex with in the Box: "Why?" "For the noblest cause of all," says Chi, looking at her intently. "Science." Meeting her gaze, Scully asks, "What are you trying to prove?" "Isn't it obvious?" Chi stands, scissors in hand, and walks over to the hyacinths. As she draws near, the one flower, Cynthia, the Hyacinth Girl, speaks through the speech digitizer: "Hello, Dolorosa." The petals still gleam with moisture, the blooms swaying slightly to unfelt air currents as Chi approaches. "Hello, Cynthia." Chi glances back at Scully. "Uncanny, isn't it?" She strokes the plant lightly, running one of those long leaves through her fingers. "Aren't you the least bit curious as to how this works? How the flower recognizes my presence, how it is able to water itself? How it can do _this_?" She steps back, clapping her hands four times, and asks the flower, "How many?" There is a pause of a few seconds. "Four," says the digitizer--or, rather, the Hyacinth Girl through the digitizer. Three more handclaps. "How many?" "Three." That peculiar, electronic voice. "How much is four plus three?" A momentary hesitation, an imperceptible tremor--imaginary?--of leaves. "Seven," the Hyacinth Girl says, blossoms gleaming like fire. "That was very good," Chi says, elocuting her words slowly and carefully, as if addressing a preschooler. "Water," says the flower. The nozzle reopens; its leaves are misted. A reward. A gold star. Chi turns back to Scully and asks, "Well? What do you think?" "For all I know, it could all be a parlor trick. The voice could be preprogrammed, a tape reel, responding to your commands on cue." Dolorosa nods. "You're right. It _could_ be a parlor trick. Keep that in mind. Keep your skepticism." She fondles the florets with the tips of her fingers, releasing a light dusting of pollen onto her nails. Golden, fine; she brushes the grains away absently. "Actually," she says, "the mechanism itself is extremely simple. As long ago as Cleve Backster--" "Who was an idiot," Scully interrupts. "--we knew that plants demonstrate predictable fluctuations in their surface electrical potential when confronted with certain stimuli," Chi continues, ignoring her. "They signal with a pulse of electricity. These pulses can be recorded using a galvanometer. A plant will display a particular waveform pattern--a thoughtprint, if you will--when it wants water; another, when it detects sunlight or the lack of it; another, when one of its leaves is burnt. Each pattern is individual and unique." "But you're already assuming what you're setting out to prove," Scully objects. "The presence of a nervous system. Of sensory apparatus." As if delivering a prewritten speech, Chi speaks oblivious of Scully's insertions, her full attention fixed on the flowers. "And the thoughtprints remain consistent over time. My role is primarily one of bookkeeping: I keep track of the electrical patterns that the plants produce, and I gradually learn to associate specific patterns with specific stimuli. With specific _emotions_." Chi points to the watering apparatus suspended above the counter. "When the Hyacinth Girl wants water, she sends her standard 'I-want-water' signal through the galvanometer, which reads the pattern and sends it to a central computer. Just a laptop--Apple, of course." "Keeping with the metaphor." "The computer then matches the waveform with its glossary of known patterns--in this case, the 'I-want-water' pattern--and causes the plant to 'say' the word 'water' through the speech digitizer, giving voice to its desire at the same time as it is misted by the nozzle. Simplicity itself. "Other stimuli produce different patterns," she continues. "For example, the Hyacinth Girl recognizes me. When I approach within two or three feet of her, something--perhaps my body heat, or my own electromagnetic emissions, characteristic of no other human being but myself--triggers a response in the flower. She sends out a standard pulse, a _greeting_, which I have chosen to decode as 'Hello, Dolorosa.' The word choice is arbitrary; the idea remains the same." "_Everything's_ arbitrary," says Scully. "Everything the hyacinth says is prescripted. You programmed it all into her." She finds herself automatically using the feminine pronoun. "I program the _words_. But Cynthia knows when to say them; she recites them perfectly! She never greets me by saying, 'Water,' or, 'Five plus five is ten'--she always says, 'Hello, Dolorosa,' and everything proceeds logically from there. What about the numbers? The addition? I couldn't program all of that. No. Cynthia is alive, she is intelligent; I have devoted my entire life to proving that concept." "Yeah?" Scully asks, filling her voice with carefully calculated anger. "So what do the bombings have to do with intelligence? Why the murders? Why did seven people have to die?" Chi pauses, as if considering the question. Her eyes flick down to Scully's tangled body, half-sitting, half-lying on the mattress, leaning against the vertical pipe that juts down from the ceiling, and she replies with a non sequitur: "You look tired." Scully looks away. "Not really. At least I got three hours of drug-enhanced sleep. Very relaxing--what was it, diazepam? No, of course not--the anesthetic was separate, Lidocaine, I'd guess, and I feel no sedation, so, given your apparent fondness for curare, I'd say--succinylcholine?" "Yes. Good job, detective." Chi moves toward her, stepping away from the hyacinths without a backward glance. Slowly. She reaches the table, sits on it lightly, hands resting in her lap. "But I still think you'd be more comfortable in a reclining position." Her arm rockets suddenly to her hip, a blurred movement, a gleam of steel, and she is holding a gun in her right hand, heavy with bullets. A revolver. She spins it by the trigger guard. "Not bad, huh?" Stiffening her back against the pipe, Scully says, "I've seen better." Her heart is thudding. "I'm sure you haven't. Being around these flowers for so long has sharpened my killer instinct." Dolorosa allows this comment to drop unexplained. "Listen, Dana S.," she says. "I wasn't quite telling the truth when I said that I never kill; my mind wandered; I didn't get the chance to finish my sentence. I meant so say that I never kill without _reason_--so I want to emphasize that you probably don't want to offer me sufficient provocation." She jumps lightly, girlishly down from her perch on the tabletop and comes closer, large dark eyes inscrutable, gun in hand. Scully senses her playing a role, immersing herself in her cliche of choice; the hyacinths on the counter seem to shudder in anticipation of what will come next; the revolver barrel is pointed loosely at Scully's abdomen. Her heart reberverates in muffled protest--_ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk_--as she struggles to keep a calm exterior. She keeps her eyes fixed on Chi's face, trying to read something, anything, into that secretive visage. Chi's beauty is beauty of a singularly blank variety, the beauty of sheer mathematical perfection, skin smooth, features sketched with a few well-placed lines--but there is something utterly inhuman to those lips, those eyes. Scully knows of a species of orchid whose flowers are shaped like a certain variety of wasp, complete with faux-wings, head, thorax and abdomen, a plant pretending animal qualities: she suddenly feels, with a paralyzing, almost suffocating fear, that the woman who stands before her is also a mimic, bloodless, with veins of sap and capillaries engorged with pollen, roots snaking down her long legs, a heart filled with graveyard dirt. She moves closer--a flytrap, a pitcher plant, a sundew, to whom murder is little more than a reflex. Scully sees it. Chi may protest otherwise, but she knows that the finger which touches the trigger of that revolver would not hesitate to flick itself, to put a bullet in her belly. She perceives it clearly. As if skipping ahead in time, she sees the finger move, the trigger depress, the powder flash--the heavy shot erupting out like great, dark, leaden pollen, penetrating her flesh like cordite sperm drilling down into a carpel--blood flying, _her_ blood, and Chi standing over her prone body, watering herself with the gore. The flytrap snapping shut, teeth interlocking. Chi is the flytrap, Scully the fly-- Dolorosa Chi strides over to a low shelf, its contents hidden, and turns her back briefly to the two captives, rummaging. Scully seizes the opportunity to elbow Bayliss in the ribs, desperate for a conscious ally; he groans, mutters, and moves slightly in his sleep, not awakening. She can feel the exhaustion radiating out from his body. His back, against hers, is twisted and tense; she senses the weariness of his ligaments, the irregularly rigid curvature of his spine. She keeps one ear on what Chi is doing. There is a sound of rustling, of a box opening, a quiet clink of metal against metal. When Chi turns back, she holds yet another pair of handcuffs in her left hand, the gun in her right. "_Not_ a Peerless model, I'm afraid," she says sympathetically. "Or any of the other makes that can be opened by that key. Not that it matters, anyway." She approaches Scully, high-heeled shoes--black and thinly-strapped--clicking against the cold linoleum of the floor. Now, right alongside her, Chi kneels and brings the gun to Scully's head in one fluid motion, pressing the barrel lightly between her eyes, directly in the middle of her forehead. The gun is cocked. Chi smiles grimly and says, "Bear in mind, one sudden move and I'll blow the top of your skull off. The bullet would probably kill Detective Bayliss as well." Scully gulps, her breath coming in harsh, ragged gasps. "Or it could ricochet off the pipe," she says hoarsely. "Be deflected back to you." "I'm willing to take that chance. Now--I'm going to undo your cuffs. Briefly. And I'll be keeping this revolver to your head, so consider your options very well before acting." Chi shifts the barrel from Scully's forehead to her right temple, finger still on trigger. She moves crabwise to Scully's side, handcuffs in view, and pulls a keyring from her pocket, selecting one. Then she reaches down and unlocks the manacles. Scully feels herself freed, the steel unclasping from raw skin. "Go ahead," Chi says. "Rub your wrists. They're badly chafed." Slowly, Scully brings her hands in front of her, sees how the layer of skin beneath the Bracelets of Venus has gone red and tender, bleeding slightly in places from her attempts at escape. They tremble. She wills them to stop, but the tremor continues imperceptibly--and she knows that Chi notices. Massaging the soreness, Scully asks, "Now what?" "Bring your hands over your head. Clasp them around the pipe." Chi prods Scully sharply with the barrel when she is a second late in responding. Quickly, now, she lifts her arms, interlocks her fingers around the coolness of the cylinder above her. The fabric of her sleeves bunches lightly around her elbows. She takes a deep breath, closes her eyes. Opens them to see Chi rising and standing back slightly, apparently admiring her handiwork--and removing the gun from Scully's head without reshackling her. The circle on her temple from where the barrel had pressed burns like a dry ice scar. Then, suddenly, Bayliss makes a guttural noise in his sleep: a murmur, the sound produced by an uneasy dream. Distracted, Chi turns slightly, glancing at the detective. And Scully's heart stops--thuds--stops. An instant passes. She sees her chance. Without thinking, without regard for the consequences, acting on instinct alone, she rips her hands from around the pipe--making a lunge for the revolver--frozen in time, her upward grab for the weapon, the heel of her hand sweeping down in a move to crack Chi's tibia--a catlike leap which under other circumstances would have knocked Chi over and smashed her head against a metal shelf as Scully trapped her with the gun--but she has forgotten one thing, one crucial thing: the succinylcholine. Its effects still linger, almost subliminally, and her leap is clumsy and unsuccessful. She telegraphs it from a mile away. Chi sees it coming, turns, with lightning quickness raises the gun, finds the point midway between the crown of Scully's skull and the spot between her rapidly widening eyes where the frontal lobe of the brain in located--and pulls the trigger. Scully sees it. Sees the hammer snap forward, the firing-pin snapping against the rear of the revolver. Frozen. The world grows quiet except for the sound of Scully's own peep of dismay. Comically soft, comically weak, a moan in the face of death. Then time ricochets back. The revolver clicks dryly and is silent. "Bitch." Chi frowns, spins the gun around so that she grips the barrel in her fist, and delivers a smashing blow to the side of Scully's face. She collapses in pain, the bruises on her cheeks reopening. Chi steps over her, hisses, "Really, really, really, I expected better from you." She grabs Scully by the back of the neck, hoisting her upward with surprising strength, whispering fiercely, "Let's try that again. Put your hands back where they were." Incredibly, Bayliss still sleeps. Shaking, Scully reclasps her hands around the pipe. This time, Chi cuffs them quickly, without ceremony. She leans down, roughly seizes Scully's ankles, yanks her legs straight--and pulls them down along the floor, stretching Scully out, forcing her onto her back. She is pulled flat; her cuffs slide down along the pole. Now she lies against the ground, staring up at the musty ceiling like a sacrificial victim in pinion. A woman on the rack, arms stretched tautly above her head. Scully brings her head up, sees Chi readying the second pair of handcuffs. Sees their intended use. A thick steel ring is set into the floor roughly seven feet from the pole. Moving to this metal doughnut, Chi says, "You're damn lucky that I chose to keep the first chamber empty. Rest assured that, from this point on, a bullet will be released each time the trigger is depressed." That said, she threads the handcuffs through the ring and clicks the manacles around Scully's ankles. So: Scully is completely helpless, hands and feet bound, flat against the mattress. She looks up into the shadows and prays silently. Her shoulders pinch together where her arms are extended; her clothing is disheveled, her suit jacket open. Chi's face suddenly intrudes into her field of vision, grinning down. "Is that more comfortable?" Scully tries to keep her composure, says, "Not particularly." "You'll get used to it. I rather like it, myself; submission appeals to me." Chi bends down, very close, her face only inches from Scully's. "Do you know why I didn't put a bullet in that first chamber?" she murmurs. "Can you guess?" She blinks slowly. Her bruised and rebruised cheekbone still crackles with lightning bolts of pain. "Because you're playing with me?" Bobbing her head, Chi says, "Interesting answer. Gives me some ideas." She moves even closer. "But that isn't the real reason. Actually, I was moved by the symbolic significance." "You're quite the poet, aren't you?" Scully shifts herself awkwardly on her back. "I try. I was impressed by the fact that, in order to kill you, I would actually have to pull the trigger _twice_--once for the empty round, another for the loaded chamber. One...two. Like that," she says, extending her index finger and pantomiming the motion. "Don't you understand the metaphor?" "I'm afraid I don't." Chi kneels even lower, so that her lips and Scully's almost touch. Scully briefly considers an upward head-butt--her forehead smashing against the bridge of Chi's nose, at one possible extreme causing unconsciousness, at the other driving a splinter of bone into Chi's brain and killing her instantly--but discards the notion; she is still unsure of her succinylcholine-clumsied muscles, knows that she would remain trapped in any case, pinioned to the floor. Best to wait... Best to listen. "Look, Dana S.," Chi says, her voice low and dark. "When I first became preoccupied with the idea of possible intelligence in plants, I was still studying at Johns Hopkins, on a four-year scholarship, a Midwestern girl whose parents had come from Hong Kong in 1968. My father worked at a botanical lab, breeding faster-ripening tomatoes and juicier squash. I inherited his love of plants. I was sweet, innocent. Naive. I didn't know what I was looking for. I stumbled on Cleve Backster's work almost by accident, and I immediately saw that--while his studies were marred by deep flaws and unwarranted assumptions--this was a rich vein of research to be pursued." Without warning, Chi brings the gun up to Scully's chin. To her throat. "I was only thinking of my thesis at that point," she says, running the feverish steel along the line of Scully's windpipe, almost absently, caressing with the barrel. "I didn't have the passion, the _devotion_, that the field of botany demands. _Desire_." Scully keeps her eyes fixedly on the ceiling. Remains motionless, feeling the cold metal glide down her larynx...the snout of the gun drifting down lazily to the hollow above her clavicle, lingering in that shallow depression. "So I became interested in plant intellect, as widely ridiculed as the subject was in those days," Chi continues. "Botanical thought. But where to begin? The galvanometer work was intriguing but inconclusive, suggesting that--although plants did have a certain amount of primitive, raw, unwieldy cognitive power at their disposal--they were not yet completely sentient. I didn't feel that grasses or cacti or hyacinths, as they existed, had the potential for true intelligence. There was something missing, something lacking in the plants themselves." "Like a nervous system?" Scully asks, her Adam's apple bobbing nervously beneath the blue ice of the barrel. "Actually, you'd be surprised at the computational apparatus that already exists in your common autotroph," Chi says. "No. The missing element was something _metaphysical_. Something _spiritual_. Looking at the evidence, I eventually concluded that the problem was, again, one of desire. Quite simply, there was no reason for plants to cultivate intelligence. It was useless. Plants are producers. They sit in the sun, absorb sunlight, carbon dioxide, excite electrons in their chlorophyll, synthesize carbon compounds, perform photosynthesis--totally automatic. No thought required." "I could've told you that." "Well, yes. The problem was obvious. The solution, when it finally came to me, was even more evident." Chi stops speaking. Her eyes move slowly down Scully's face, down her neck, down to the point above her breastbone where the tip of the revolver rests. A long moment passes in silence. Unnerved, Scully asks, "What was the solution, then?" Her upper lip curving into a cruel smile, Chi says, "Murder. Murder is the key to intelligence." She suddenly lifts the gun from Scully's throat and eases it down nine inches, slipping it into the valley above her heart, probing through the fabric of blouse and bra, the nose of the revolver edging in like some unimaginable parasite. Her smile widens. "It's all evolution, Dana S. Natural selection. Cheetahs evolve spines like curving springs because it allows them to kill more efficiently. The same with an elephant's tusks, a shark's teeth, the venom of a adder, the spitting cobra--and the brain of a human being. That's all intelligence is: another means of cheating death. Another method of maintaining a genotype. The only reason _Homo sapiens_ developed a large braincase and a well-developed cerebrum is to allow the species to survive, to propagate. And, ultimately, survival entails murder." She continues, increasing pressure of the gun against the skin above Scully's aorta. Scully catches her breath, shuts her eyes. "I began by looking at the Venus flytrap. Carnivorous. Murderous, in a petty way. The most notorious example of vegetable bloodlust claiming animal life: the plant that devours insects, butterflies, occasionally even hummingbirds and small frogs. I asked myself: 'What adaptation does the flytrap exhibit that apparently arises from its capacity for murder?' The answer was obvious. The trigger." As a reminder of the parallel, she slowly cocks the hammer of the revolver, then brings it back into safety with equal languor. Whispers: "Do you know how a Venus flytrap captures insects? A fly lands in the trap and touches two stiff trigger hairs, causing the lobes to snap shut. That's the beauty of it: the fly must brush against _two_ hairs; the trap must be triggered _two_ times. That, my dear friend, is why I kept the first chamber of the gun empty. I needed to pull the trigger twice to kill you, just as two hairs on the flytrap must be triggered before death can ensue. Now, to keep the metaphor intact..." Chi removes the gun from between Scully's breasts--bringing a soundless exhalation of relief--and carefully revolves the cylinder back one notch, bringing the empty chamber back into position. "There," she says. "Now the trap is reset." She tilts her head, looks curiously at her captive. "But why _two_ hairs, exactly? Why not just one? Do you have any idea?" Scully tries to find her voice again, to keep it steady, and succeeds only by half. "I assume that if only one hair were required to shut the trap, it would be triggered by all sorts of random impacts--by a raindrop, for example." "Or by an idiotic attempt at escape--as you so memorably demonstrated." Chi returns the gun to its previous, intimate location. "But that isn't the point. The point is that, because of the necessities brought about by its carnivorous lifestyle, the Venus flytrap can count to two--correct? Better than a computer, which can only tell the difference between 1 and 0." "I suppose." "Plus, it has a memory. I've tested this. As much as _forty seconds_ can elapse between the touching of the two hairs, and the flytrap will still respond. Somehow, the plant 'remembers' that signal." "Then why aren't you experimenting with Venus flytraps? Why are you using hyacinths?" "Good question," Chi says generously. "Three reasons. First of all, personal pride--I was, after all, the first to discover and catalogue the little dragon hyacinth. You knew that, didn't you?" Scully nods. "Secondly, hyacinths have a number of gross physical advantages. They have nice long leaves and a thick stem, perfect for electrodes." A dreamy look coming into her eyes, Chi says, "Mostly, however, I was moved by poetic impulses. There are a thousand allegorical reasons as to why these hyacinths should be the first flowers to taste of intelligence, but the paramount reason, the one that guided my decision from the very beginning, were the markings found on their petals. You know the story of Hyacinthus, right? The two letters that the Greeks claimed to see on the blossoms?" "Your Professor Meinekker told me. Alpha and iota. A and I. A sound of anguish and suffering." "That's right. A.I. But do you know what else those initials stand for?" Chi smiles. "Of course you do." "Of course," Scully echoes, feeling the tip of the gun slide across the warmth of her skin, nudging softly, scraping smoothly across her sternum and coming to rest just above the first buttoned hook of her blouse, where it stays. "Artificial Intelligence," she says. Chi nods approval. * * * End of (8/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (9/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:43:05 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (9/12)--Death by Water (IV) * * * Erwin Meinekker stands awkwardly in the beige foyer of the sixth-floor Homicide department, spatters of rain beading the shoulders of his overcoat like the dew on a saguaro cactus. Pembleton sees him, strides up. "You must be Orex's old professor," he says, setting his cup of coffee on a nearby filing cabinet. "Glad that you could come on such short notice." Meinekker coughs once, shaking Pembleton's hand firmly. "I'm afraid I don't quite see why I'm here," he replies somberly. "Although I've...I've heard that you've apprehended the serial bomber who killed Albert DeCastro and Alicia Horesji and Dolorosa Chi. That the murderer turned out to be Paul Orex." "That's right. I understand that you knew all of them." "Quite well, quite well. Especially Dolorosa. She was a beautiful girl, just beautiful." Pembleton rests a hand lightly on the professor's shoulder, guides him along the floor toward the Box. "How well were you acquainted with Paul?" "Mildly. I helped him with his thesis, and he was a frequent visitor to the lab. Quiet, polite, taciturn. I know that he was less interested in botany than in medicine, in virology, especially certain Third World pandemics..." "We're aware of that. However, we're more concerned with Orex's enthusiasm for plants, as subservient a professional interest as it may have been. You spoke to Agent Mulder over the phone, right? You know what the stakes are." Frowning and rubbing his eyebrows, Meinekker says, "That pretty FBI agent who talked with me this morning--she's missing?" "Along with my partner. We think that Orex knows where they might be, but he isn't going to talk. Hopefully, you may provide some incentive." They arrive at the Interview Room; Pembleton swings open the door and steps inside. The Box's furnishings have changed dramatically since the interrogation that afternoon. That sole table, its edge pitted and marked with carvings and initials, still stands at one end of the room, but a blackboard now lies against the opposite wall, along with four chairs set in the middle of the floor. Two of the chairs are for show alone; neither Pembleton nor Mulder have any plans of diminishing their authority by sitting during this deal-making session No, the chairs are for Meinekker, if he wishes, and for Lieutenant Page, who has no choice. Page already sits in his seat, crutches balanced across his thighs, going through a small looseleaf stack of papers as he waits. A ink scratchings can be glimpsed on the sheets as he flips through them: diagrams of a wired Venus flytrap, of the adzuki bean bomb that tore through the Johns Hopkins lab, of the plastique detonator that lay at the core of the pollen explosion. Page examines these schematics again and again, the drawings worn and dog-eared, eyes narrow. He does not look up as they enter. Pembleton says quietly to Meinekker, "Orex should be arriving any minute now. In the meantime, you can stay here and chat with the lieutenant." He bobs his shaven head and exits. Heavily, Meinekker tucks the fabric of his overcoat beneath his rump and sits, glancing at Page. There are a few rote smiles, introductions. Page soon returns to perusing the papers; Meinekker examines his fingernails absently. It is very quiet in the small room. The cool hermetic yellowness of the tiles breathes back at the two of them, breath for breath, a slight chalk odor wafting out from the blackboard. "Was it really Paul?" Meinekker abruptly asks after a few seconds have gone by. Page nods. "It was Paul, all right." Meinekker clicks his tongue. "I still find it hard to believe. He was so quiet, so ordinary." "That's the litany," Page says, deciding to enter a full-fledged conversation. "Isn't that what they always say after the killer is caught? Always on the eleven o'clock news: a parade of casual friends, each saying, 'He seemed so normal, just the boy next door, I never would have guessed...'" Page makes a notation on one of his sheets, grunts. "Of course, Pembleton believes that Orex had an accomplice. That he didn't work alone." He makes a stab at the obvious point. "Listen, professor, maybe I should sound you out on this. You knew him; you instructed him at the college. I assume you had some inkling of his social life. Was there anyone you know of whom he might have recruited to his ideology--or who might have recruited him?" "No," Meinekker says, "No one." He considers the question more fully, then qualifies, "Well, no one who's still alive, anyway." "Who are you thinking of? The Chi woman?" "Dolorosa, yes. She and Orex were fairly close. I don't know if there was anything romantic about the liaison, but..." He waves his hand in a noncommittal gesture. "Judging from what you say took place, I'd guess that the relationship between them wasn't as amorous as I'd assumed. Him sticking her with curare and pushing her into the river, I mean. Not the actions of a man in love." His voice is subdued but bitter. "You'd be surprised at what a man in love will do," Page says. He slides the papers back into his briefcase, putting the valise onto the floor alongside his brace. "Look, I'm not interrogating you--I just don't like to sit in silence--but what else do you know about Orex and Chi?" "I'll be honest with you. Back then, in '88 and '89, I'd only become a full professor the year before; I wasn't much older than Dolorosa was. And I was attracted to her. Even disregarding her physical beauty--which was considerable, as you know if you've seen the pictures..." "I have." "...she was enormously intelligent. Brilliant, I might even say. It's a rare combination. And--let me underline this--those were her _objective_ qualities; I mean, let's be honest, if a man cares for a woman enough, she'll seem like Marie Curie, Marilyn Monroe and the Virgin Mary rolled into one, no matter what the reality is. Love blinds. But I'm not exaggerating when I say that Dolorosa possessed an almost empirical perfection. For one thing, her IQ was tested at 170, well above the genius level. But there's a more interesting example. In 1992, a professional colleague of mine in the Anthropology department tried to establish an international, multicultural, comprehensive vocabulary of beauty. He did it by analyzing religious art, Botticellis, magazine ads, pictures of supermodels, album covers--Madonna _and_ Madonna, if you know what I mean--and going over the faces of beautiful women with calipers, measurements, rulers, gauges, microscopes, trying to come up with a scientific ratio between their features, a mathematical model of loveliness. He eventually found what he was looking for and published his results quietly. This was three years after Dolorosa died, but I thought of her immediately. I found a photograph, full-face shot, and spent an afternoon comparing the ratios. Distance between lip and eyelash, length of nose, width of forehead; the perfect face unfolds with a geometrical perfection comparable to a rose, to a chrysanthemum. Marvelous. And Dolorosa's face corresponded, straight down the line, with the scientific ideal of grace." Meinekker lapses into brief silence after this extended speech. Then, he says, "I never really understood what she saw in Paul. I had nothing against him, you understand, but she was of exponentially higher quality than he was. And they say that he killed her, damn him. As if there weren't already too few women like Dolorosa. An endangered species. And do you know what the irony is? That FBI agent who spoke with me this morning, the one who's vanished..." "Dana Scully," Page says. "Yes. I didn't tell her this, but she reminded me a little of Dolorosa herself. Her beauty was less ethereal, perhaps, more down-to-earth--a Wyeth, perhaps, instead of a Botticelli--but she was very assertive and very bright. And I like red hair. It's a pity. A dying species. Alicia Horesji was another. If Paul is really the one behind these killings...well, he's like the reaper in the garden, except that instead of weeding out the undesirables, he uses his scythe on the most lovely blossoms." Page replies simply, "But even weeding out the undesirables is murder." "Well, of course. I mean, I didn't mean to imply..." "Of course you didn't," Page says brusquely. "Neither the beauty of the victim nor the beauty of the killer makes any difference. Dead is dead; roses become humus as easily as ragweed." "Dust to dust. Did you know that the black armbands that mourners wear to funerals are called weeds?" "Yeah." "That's a fact that has struck me more than once." "Let's hope you don't have to wear another one soon." "Yes, let's hope." The conversation lapses for more than a minute. Then, to break the silence, Meinekker clumsily points to Page's injury and asks redundantly, "Bum leg?" "Yeah. Broken in three places." "Ouch. How'd it happen?" "The short version? Five months ago, the end of autumn, was the Baltimore burning season; we were short on men during one emergency call, so I found myself riding the engine, going into a six-story apartment building that'd been kindled by a doper cooking heroin near a broken gas line. Middle of the night. And we could hear voices on the top floor, men and women. That was a problem, because you don't want to use a master stream--the big hose, a thousand gallons a minute--when there are people inside; it'll collapse the walls or push the fire straight into them. Me and three other guys went in, tried to do what we could. We were on the sixth floor, squirting the fire, looking for survivors, when my low-air bell went off, meaning that my oh-two tanks had less than five minutes to go. I went over to break a window to ventilate the room, and goddamn if a thick stream of water doesn't smash through the pane ahead of me. Some idiot'd revved up a master stream. Broken every rule in the book. The water knocked down one wall, caved in the ceiling and broke my leg. I dragged myself out of there on my knees. When I got out, they had to pry the oxygen mask from my face with a crowbar." "Save any lives?" "Two. And that's all that matters. Or so they say." Page nods thoughtfully and continues. "But you know, when I was crawling on my belly out of that inferno, my leg dragging like a broken marionette, I had an epiphany. Listen, before I start to ramble, let me ask you another question: you mentioned this colleague of yours who tried to reduce beauty to a formula..." "Yes, that essentially is what he tried to do." "Well, personally, do you believe that can be done? Can beauty be quantified? Labeled, stored like a specimen?" "I really don't know. I mean, half my professional life has been spent drying and pressing flower samples for posterity. Flattening them, making what was once moist and full of life as sterile and necrotic as tissue paper. But, dammit, that's what science is about. A reduction of the mystery." "And that's what fire fighting is about, too. Fitting, really--I mean, fire is what lies at the heart of science, the heart of mind. There's nothing like fire when you get right down to it. The mystery of the beast. It hunts you, it has a kind of cunning intelligence, an awareness, and it fights back hard when cornered. All that Christian doomsday rhetoric about the fires of Hell, the burning touch of Satan--that isn't a coincidence. But neither is the fact that God always appears in the form of flame: the burning bush, the pillars of fire and smoke that guided the Israelites out of Egypt, the fiery wheels that Ezekiel saw in the sky. Fire is a living thing. A mystery. All that fire fighters do is try to reduce the mystery as best they can. Reduce it to the formula. We know where to aim the water, how to avoid a backdraft, how different types of wood burn, at what temperature paper catches fire--" "Fahrenheit 451, right?" "Yep. We know all this--but we still can't understand the mystery. There's something about pain that clears your head; maybe it's the serotonin or the adrenaline, I don't know. But in that burning building, I saw that mystery again. Goddammit, the beauty, the seductive beauty. With that fire blossoming all around, I understood what arsonists feel. Pyromaniacs. I understood the Tunabomber, the Hyacinth Girl...I understood--although I didn't know it then--Paul Orex. I think that I know why he killed Dolorosa Chi, even if she was as wonderful as you describe her as; I don't think that any mortal woman could compete with what fire could offer Orex. Or flowers, for that matter. Fire and flowers--aren't they just the same thing?" "They both grow rapidly. They bloom." "They take root. They reproduce rapidly." "But of course," Meinekker says, "the only thing that can grow, blossom, root and reproduce faster than either fire or flower is _mind_." "A trinity. Fire, flowers..." "...and intelligence." They grin awkwardly at each other. In this brief conversation, the two men have become friends. The door of the Box bursts open. Pembleton enters and says, "Orex's here." Mulder follows closely behind in shirtsleeves. His hair is tousled, sticking up in nervous spikes along one side of his head; he burns with manic energy, his close-cut fingernails skittering along the tiles as he shuts the door, saying, "He's talking to his lawyer in the Fishbowl. We have another minute to get ready." He steps over to the blackboard. Both he and Pembleton carry pieces, black pistols strapped into shoulder holsters, a trifle more conspicuous than necessary. Turning to Meinekker, he says, "You're here as an authority figure. What was Orex's attitude toward you?" Meinekker tries to find the right words. "There was some implied tension between us over Dolorosa, but nothing serious; I mean, we weren't good friends, but..." "Did he respect you? See you as a superior?" "I believe so, yes. I outweighed him by forty pounds." "Good. When I signal you like this"--Mulder taps his chin with the tip of his index finger--"you are to make him the offer we discussed earlier. Quickly, simply. Don't be surprised if I contradict you or act unusually." "A good cop/bad cop type thing?" "Hopefully not so obvious. Page, you're a professional. Remember that our object is to pump Orex for whatever information he has regarding the possible whereabouts of Agent Scully and Detective Bayliss. Don't talk more than necessary. Leave that to me and Pembleton." He looks at the black detective. "Is Lt. Giardello going to be joining us?" "No, but he'll be watching," Pembleton says, with a nod toward the one-way mirror. "If we start to screw up too badly, he'll probably intervene." "Well, I suppose that if..." He is interrupted. The door swings open, and Paul Orex enters the Box for the second time that day. * * * What in God's name is Dolorosa Chi doing? A variety of things, actually, which all seem to involve red powder of some sort, although of different natures. The first type of powder Bayliss recognizes easily enough: iron oxide, scrapings from the rusty nails he'd seen in Orex's sink, which Chi has heated over a low flame until they glow rosy red. He'd caught a glimpse of the smoldering crust--not so much red as purple in the bluish light--as she'd cooled it with water and poured it onto a long cookie sheet, mixing the grit with thin shavings of aluminum, ground with a file from an aluminum pipe that sits phallically clamped within a vise on the edge of the counter. Near the hyacinths. Occasionally, when making thermite begins to bore her, Chi will play a game with her flowers. With the Hyacinth Girl. There is a hint of sadism about it, as she lights kitchen matches and brings them close, slowly, to the plant's leaves, beginning roughly three feet away and drawing the flame gradually closer, _closer_, at the most languid speed she can manage without burning her fingers. When the little shining ember is brought within one foot of the Hyacinth Girl, the speech digitizer beeps, "Okay, close enough." Monotonous. Light match, bring it close: "Okay, close enough." The ground is covered with the burnt corpses of matches spent. The second kind of powder is more difficult to identify. It lies in a shallow bowl on the table where Chi sits, a fine dusty texture, deep brownish-red in color, with hints of maroon and gray and dots of scarlet, smacking of a vegetable mixture, plants and herbs ground and dried and homogenized together. Even from where he sits, handcuffed to the pole, he can smell a thin spicy odor. Next to the bowl of powder lies a long pole, at least five feet in length. Bamboo? It is very thin, a hollow reed of some kind, a tapered nozzle at one end, wrapped with friction tape near the center. Bayliss tries to lean to one side to get a better look, but a sudden spasm of pain in his back stops him short. Christ. It feels somewhat like a slipped disk, but the pain is more insidious than that, almost ingratiating, worming down into hot cavities of his spine and lumbar region. He reduces the discomfort by lying halfway on his side, his shoulder abutted against the pipe, solar plexus an inch off the ground. The embarrassment is enormous. It crushes down on him even more than his sciatica: pretty boy Bayliss, back buckling, handcuffed to a pole while this sexy serial bomber plays with her Hyacinth Girl and makes incendiary material--goddamn if Munch could see him now, he'd never live the damn thing down, worse than death, worse than anything, is how damn _stupid_ he feels. Christ Christ _Christ_. He twists even further, crinkling the plastic beneath him. Dolorosa Chi finally notices--or had she noticed before and kept it secret?--the fact that he has drifted back into awareness. Looks over at him. Appears to wait for him to speak. He obliges. But first, he assesses the situation. Handcuffed, muscles screaming, Scully--God, what is the matter with Scully? she no longer lies with her back to the pole but seems to have been stretched out along the ground, fitfully asleep, not snoring despite her supine position--Scully dozing, his head aching slightly from his own period of rest--God, that sleep had been deep, like a large dark well that beckoned more and more as he fell, dead to the world--and Chi staring at him--God, she is a beautiful woman. Even in his predicament, humiliation, even with Scully splayed along the floor behind him, Bayliss cannot help but marvel at the inevitability of this conclusion. But no, something more to the point needs to be said: "I know that this question may seem a bit belated," Bayliss says, "but where are we?" "At my home, of course," Chi says, fist beneath her chin, idly sifting through the thermite with a wooden tongue depressor. Bayliss sees an unopened pack of magnesium ribbons lying near her elbow. Fuses. "You don't think I live with Paul, do you?" "Hard to say," Bayliss says. "Where _do_ you live?" "Here," Chi says with sardonic obviousness. "This house lies within the city limits of Baltimore, if that's what interests you. Well within your jurisdiction. If the time ever comes for you arrest me, no complicated extradition procedures will be necessary." "Great. You're under arrest." Chi laughs as if he'd just made the quip of the century. "Very funny. I can see why Dana S. likes you so much." Bayliss tilts his neck sideways, searching for a better glimpse of Scully. All he sees is a flash of her upper forearm lying parallel to the ground, sleeve crumpled, hands lightly folded above where the cuffs bind. Sleeping. He asks, "What do you mean?" "She and I have gotten to know each other quite well. It's obvious that you two see something in each other. Tell me, Detective Bayliss, would you enjoy f-f-f-fucking her?" She draws out the "f" sound in a long lingering obscene hiss. "It would be quite easy. I have syringes of succinylcholine. One injection and she'd be as helpless as an inflatable doll for at least five minutes. You could do _anything_ with her." "No thanks," says Bayliss, deadpan. "I'll pass." "It's a charming notion, though, isn't it? Those handcuffs and shackles are such a bother. It would be so much easier for me to administer a constant succinylcholine drip on the both of you, keep you limp and flaccid for my amusement. I could pose you like puppets. Put you in interesting positions. Do you have any suggestions? I believe I have a copy of the _Kama Sutra_ here somewhere..." "No, please," Bayliss repeats. "I'm quite comfortable the way I am." "But that isn't quite the truth, is it? Bad back? Is that what troubles you?" "It's nothing," he lies. "Too much time spent behind a desk, I suppose." "I pity you. A good poultice of nettles and pennyroyal will clear that right up. Or some wood betony. I've also heard that a bullet in the groin does wonders." "I'll take your word for it." Chi's cheeks dimple with glee. "You're very funny--you talk like a regular tough guy. Are you one, I wonder? Or do you just do the macho bluff and bluster to hide your inherent insecurity? I mean, aren't you just _dripping_ with contempt for yourself for being so bonecrushingly _idiotic_ as to enter Paul's house without backup and then step into a darkened room without checking it first, ending up handcuffed and headsore in some dark house with the possibility of death hanging over your head--and all because of a _woman_, Detective Bayliss? Doesn't it just gnaw at you?" "I try to look on the bright side of things." Bayliss feels the irony in his own voice. Feels the truth of what she says. His exterior wavers; each glib statement seems to weigh more heavily in its nonchalance. "Marvelous attitude. I envy it. Let me give you that silver lining: I slip Dana S. the succinylcholine, you get five minutes with her. Isn't that what you want? Five minutes should be enough, shouldn't it?" "No thanks." "But things are set up so _perfectly_," Chi says, a wheedling tone in her voice. "I've got her lined up along a perfect north-south meridian, ideal for the transmittance of bioplasmic energy to my hyacinths. Sexual stimulus is the only area of plant response that I have not yet adequately explored. The galvanometer readouts should be fascinating." "But..." "Haven't you read the work of Pierre Sauvin? He demonstrated that philodendrons can register response to human orgasms over a distance of more than eighty _miles_. Imagine the output of energy..." "But wouldn't that be corrupting the innocence of a minor? She's the Hyacinth _Girl_, after all, not the Hyacinth Jaded Suburbanite." "She knows the facts of life," says Chi. "She's made ovules, felt pollen fall upon her carpels, her stigma, felt the sperm wriggle down the style into her ovary, joined, mated, conceived. Sexuality is an integral part of intelligence." "Along with murder?" Bayliss makes the connection on his own. "Along with murder," Chi grants. She drops the tongue depressor into the thermite and dusts her hands gingerly. Moving to a small stainless-steel sink set alongside the counter, she runs water briefly, washing away the rust. "Detective Bayliss, in an enterprise such as this, it's the little things that matter. Forget the complications; after all, the foundation for a rudimentary nervous system already exists in all plants. The inherent structure, the physiology, has been there since the dawn of time." "I find that hard to believe." Returning to the table, Chi lifts the long hollow reed that lies alongside the bowl of powder, hefting it lightly in her hands. "You shouldn't," she says, switching back into her loquacious mode. She produces a funnel and inserts it into one end of the tube. "Intelligence is not the great big complex thing that it's made out to be. It's squalid, almost casual. What is it, really? Ones and zeros. On and off switches. Any such structure will work. You can use neurons, blocks of biophosphorin bacteria, silicon chips, plant cells or the New York subway system to build your thinking organism--it's all the same. The hardware is already there. The only thing missing is the motivation." "And the motivation is...?" "Survival. The plants already have anything else." She carefully lifts the bowl and pours a long, dusty dollop of the dry mixture into the reed, flicking the barrel to distribute it evenly. A small cloud of red excelsior puffs up from that eye of an opening. "Listen. Everything that you are, everything that 'Tim Bayliss' represents, is somehow encoded in the network of neurons locked in the gray matter within your cranial case." Chi caps the end of the tube with a plastic disk, then washes out the dish. "Do you know what your 'intelligence' is? It's ion transfer. Brute chemical force. You have different concentrations of potassium and sodium ions on each side of the membrane which separates two of your brain cells. When you have a thought, a signal is sent, some ions are pumped over between the two neurons, altering the electrical potential of the membrane and continuing the signal along its way. That's all it is, these particles moving from place to place according to the laws of physics, like billiard balls thrown into a swimming pool. The stupidest fucking thing in the universe. And humans think that they're so special because they've got it." Her voice has segued imperceptibly into bitterness as she dries the bowl with a paper towel. "But the same underlying structure already exists in plants. The major difference is that the neurons in the human brain are weblike, with little bridges built between them to establish interconnections, whereas plant cells are stacked up alongside each other like rooms in a house. The secret, Detective Bayliss, is to open doors between each room. Establish a pattern. Establish memory. It's all in the properties of the membrane. All the plants need--all that mankind needed--was a little push in the right direction. I gave them that push. I taught the Hyacinth Girl and her kind how to kill, and they rewarded me with a flicker of sentience." She steps back to the table and looks down the length of the reed at Bayliss, as if staring down the barrel of a rifle. "Forgive me if I ramble," she says. "I don't get a chance to talk with many people, except for Paul, and I really don't find him all that interesting. It gets lonely, sometimes. Being dead and all." Staring at her abstracted eyes, Bayliss wonders what her life has been like. "I've often asked myself," Chi continues, "whether that little push was how the earlier, unenlightened experiments with plant intelligence managed to get results. Backster thought that, when he burned the dragon tree's leaves, he was registering a response of pain--but what if the burning had _caused_ the response? What if he had shocked the plants into intelligence, immolated their brains into sluggish cognizance? But he took the wrong path. His plants were terrified of death, of pain; he shielded them from it, and they never yielded anything more than a blip during a polygraph test. But I understand the fact which he missed: the way to make a plant intelligent is to convert it into a sociopath. If the hyacinth learns to enjoy killing, it will accentuate any dormant trait--including intelligence--that will sweeten the chase. Hence the bombs. Murder is my motivation." Next to her, sitting alongside Dolorosa Chi, the Hyacinth Girl speaks. The speech digitizer kicks into gear with electronic lunacy: "Murder," it says. "Murder. Murder. Murder." "Enough, Cynthia," Chi says. "That's enough." "Okay, close enough," the flower burbles, lapsing into silence. Chi turns back to Bayliss. "Enough conversation." She picks up the reed, walks over to Scully, who lies bound fast on the ground behind him. He tries to turn, feeling the weakness of his back, feeling his irrelevance, feeling heavy and stupid and grindingly helpless. Scrabbling with his cuffed hands, he finds the tips of Scully's fingers. Feels them tingle, know that she has awakened, perhaps has been awake for quite some time. He touches them lightly, trying to lend support, comfort, whatever he can give. What little there is to be found. Chi shakes Scully. "Hello, Dana S.? Oh, were you already awake?" Scully makes a small insignificant sound, eyes wide. "Don't worry...You've been wondering what goes on inside my head, haven't you? You've wondered what happened to make me fake my death, to devote my life to murder and botany, to bomb, to kill--what is it?--seven people?. Discover. You'll enjoy this, I know." Dolorosa Chi reaches down and uncaps the tube. She lifts the reed, three feet in length, encircles one end with her lips, places the nozzle over Scully's nose, and, before Scully has time to react or turn her head, blows. Red powder fills Scully's nasal passages. It is cruel, burning, and it sears her nostrils like a rough tendril of fire: it falls into those dark places, trickling down, begins to glow along the walls of her veins: she coughs, chokes-- --and trails her fingers in the great brown waters of the Orinoco as their broad-bellied boat sails down the smooth surface of the river. * * * End of (9/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (10/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:43:05 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (10/12)--Death by Water (V) * * * Ebene. A hallucinogenic snuff powder made from various wild and cultivated species native to South America, dried and prepared almost exclusively by the warlike Yanomamo tribe of Venezuela and Brazil. The drug is usually composed of the species _Justica pectoralis_ and _Virola elongata_, ground and mixed with the crumbly bark of certain jungle trees, but the concoction that now circulates through Scully's villi--invading her sinuses, poisoning her soul--has been adulterated, perhaps to a dangerous extent, with morning glory seeds, psilocybe, mescal, peyote. Ebene, also called yappo, has been rumored to cause brain damage. * * * Who is she? Is she Dana Scully or Dolorosa Chi? Does the world look appreciably different when seen through blue eyes, brown eyes, or one of each? Two images, shifting. It is her reflection that stares up from the muddy Orinoco waters, but to one eye--the left--the face is Caucasian, soft and cinnamon-tinged; to the other, she is amber and Chinese, well-angled cheekbones, almond eyes. It is April of 1989 and April of 1996. The air is warm above the river and botflies buzz around her head. (The mattress on the floor is cold and she coughs and dry-heaves from the noxious powder as Bayliss holds her hand and Chi looks down--or is it Scully looking down onto Chi as she sits in the bottom of the boat, hand trailing, thinking about Paul and the blossoming flower at the base of her perineum?) Dolorosa--and Dana. The ebene crosses time and links the two memories. The presence of a third can be felt, winding down through the corridors of the past like a shadow on the wall, following close behind, nipping at their footsteps as they run hand in hand down the choking poisonous labyrinth of Dolorosa Chi's life: Cynthia, the Hyacinth Girl. She lingers, watching. Vegetable intelligence, deep and dark and malevolent, as the rubber boats bounce on the river and the Johns Hopkins expedition penetrates deeper into the rainforest. Scully looks down into the water. (Scully looks up at the ceiling of Dolorosa Chi's prison as Chi wipes a trickle of bile from her open mouth with a tissue held in a gentle hand. Brown-stained mucus oozes down from her nose and across her lips in sticky rivulets, dribbling down throat and chin; her eyes work busily behind half-open eyelids, rolled back into their sockets, whiter than slices of onion. A streak of lightning tears across Scully's unconsciousness like a fingernail splitting an overripe cherry.) The scene blurs, shifts. They are no longer on the river. They have encamped, they have gone into the jungle with their big packs and native guides, struggling through the thick underbrush with bayonets and machetes. Dolorosa/Scully looks up at the denseness of foliage that trembles above her head. The sun hangs low in the sky like a rotten orange. "Are you all right, Dolorosa?" Paul Orex asks, trudging alongside her with his heavy boots squishing through the tall grasses. ("Scully--are you all right?" Bayliss asks, holding her hands behind his back, feeling that her palms are moist with sweat, her fingers curled and distracted. Chi looks down with interest, placing a cool cloth across Scully's forehead. She mutters something halfway intelligible, the ebene working slowly down into the deepest corners of her brain, short-circuiting neurons and fostering delusion, into the past, ever closer into the past--) "I'm fine," Dolorosa/Scully replies, irritated. "Aren't you supposed to be off researching Dengue virus someplace?" "Not right now, sweetie," Paul says. "At the moment, I'm just wallowing through the pampas, same as you." Shifting, the scene changes again. The expedition plants itself deep within the steaming maw of the rainforest, stretching their hammocks a yard above the chocolate-brown earth, those soft sloping hills like the breasts of the Andes. Green light streams down through the knotted jungle canopy. Dolorosa/Scully lies with her eyes staring at the soft ground, examining its texture, the humus breathing back at her heartbeat to heartbeat. When Paul removes his blocky jungle boots, she sees that his ankles and calves are dabbled with dots of model glue, smeared over places where botfly larvae have burrowed into the meaty flesh of his leg. The cement cuts off the larva's air supply and forces it to return to the surface; when it pokes its albino head out from beneath his skin, he pinches it between his fingernails, now red from larvae blood. It is a tiresome chore. He sits and sweats and waits for the larvae to burrow up from his flesh so he can kill them, tunelessly humming. Beads of perspiration collect on his forehead from the heat. The back of his neck is badly burnt and peeling. No one speaks. They listen to the weeping parrots, the heavy branches of plantain trees swaying in the wind. The stench of rotting fruit fills the air. With eerie suddenness, a pair of Jivaro tribesmen materialize in the midst of the camp. How long have they been there? Their footfalls make no sound in the deep growth as they move into the clearing. They are large, broadshouldered men, brownskinned, with unruly mops of black hair and dark-colored skirts wrapped tightly around their thighs. They carry light arrows of blonde wood slung over their shoulders. Their faces are flat and oddly intelligent, circular plugs dangling from their earlobes; one of them carries a burlap sack stained with blood in one hand, leaning it uneasily against the ground, awkwardly, the fabric becoming dusted with the rich earth. (Is this right? Or is this just another part of the dream? The Jivaro are a tribe of Ecuador, Peru--but isn't the expedition in Venezuela? Then Scully remembers--although _remembers_ is perhaps not the right word--that Venezuela is merely the country where Dolorosa Chi arbitrarily met her "death"; the Johns Hopkins expedition had traveled over much of South America in its taxonomic venture, and they could theoretically be anywhere in the rainforest.) Pansitimba, their dark Amahuaca guide, speaks a few words to the Jivaro men in their sonorous tongue. There are nods, snatches of English. Dolorosa/Scully watches with interest from where she lies on her belly, slung from two trees, her eyes peering up over the edge of the hammock at the trio of natives that confer in the center of the camp. They stand very straight, their heels digging into the soil. One of them shifts the burlap bag to his other hand--the base of the sack clotted with dark fluid--muttering something in vowel-laden language; Pansitimba seems perturbed for a moment, then moves over to the leader of the Johns Hopkins group, a well-tanned professor of Swedish descent, and whispers into his ear. A brief exchange follows. Dolorosa/Scully hears the expedition leader say, "Fascinating!" and, a few seconds later, "No objections at all. Excellent anthropological opportunity." The guide returns to the two Jivaro men and gives a curt little gesture of approval. Grinning shyly, the Jivaro squat down in the dirt clearing at the center of the encampment and build a fire. The Jivaro are headhunters. Three human heads cascade to the ground when they empty their burlap bag. The eyes have been sewn shut. The lower extremities of their necks are bound with strips of cloth, although the blood still drips; the heads are fresh, their absent bodies probably still warm. It takes at least twenty hours for a Jivaro to properly shrink a head using the old methods. The two tribesmen continue their work far into the night. Dolorosa/Scully remains awake, watching the brown men move around the fire, glowing red, beneath the stars and the swaying trees. She wraps herself in a sleeping bag, her hands folded, elbows pressing below her breasts, watching them make a slit along the back of one head, down the neck, with a blood-darkened wooden knife. They pull the skin off over the skull like a banana peel. Scrape off adhering flesh from the inside. Pin the mouth shut. They immerse the entire head in a smelly herbal brew, dipping it into a large black-handled cauldron that a member of the expedition has provided, their eyes shining in the light of the flames. She can't take her eyes from that fire. The cauldron bubbles; the head is seeped in the mixture for two hours; when it is removed, it is nearly twice as small as it was before, the hair stringy and soaked. With skillful fingers, the Jivaro sew up the back of the neck, then fill the head with hot coals and stones, saying "Ow" softly when they burn their fingers; later, handfuls of hot sand. The skin of the head has become brown and tough and leathery. She finds herself aroused. Slipping from her hammock, she awakens Paul. The two of them move away from the rest of the camp, going deeper into the jungle, pausing beneath an overhang of heavy leaves to undress. She listens to the sounds of the Jivaro men, the crackling of the fire, as she lies down on the moist earth. (Scully's eyes shut themselves tightly. She hears a digitized voice, as if from far away, saying, "The Jivaro believe in the principle of _muisak wakani_, the avenging soul, which is birthed by those who die violent deaths...In order to foil the manifestation of the _muisak_ in their enemies, they shrink the heads of slain tribesmen and use them in the performance of certain magical rituals that are intended to expel the _muisak_ and return it to the region of the dead. Murder, murder, murder.") Blur: time flashes forward several hours. The next day, the Jivaro have gone as quietly as they came. Dolorosa/Scully aches in secret places as she repacks her things and prepares for another day on the river, cinching her backpack, rolling up her hammock. Her bra is missing. Returning to the place of the night before to search for it, she sees, beneath the pendulous branches of the trees, a small striking cluster of fiery red blossoms, the spike surrounded by splayed lobelike leaves that twist with streaks of green. She checks her field guide, fails to identify it, fetches the expedition leader, who is puzzled. Claims of newly discovered species always take many weeks to process, but Dolorosa/Scully finds herself dreaming of the possibility, weighing possible names and genera as they proceed down the river. The day is lazy, the heat oppressive. She holds a red flower in her hands, plucked from that unknown plant; she also presses a leaf between a folded piece of paper, placing it between page 256 and 257 of her heaviest volume, the leatherbound edition of Tart's _Altered States of Consciousness_--unknowingly seeding a Volckringer pattern that will manifest itself seven years down the line. Progress down the river is slow. When Dolorosa/Scully again sees herself set foot on dry land, three weeks have passed, as if the Orinoco flows with waters of time that wash twenty-one days away like silt into the riverbank. Now the expedition is in Peru, perhaps, or Ecuador, among the Amahuaca. Pansitimba is greeted with smiles and hoots from people he knows well, grinning back, splitting his sunworn brown face into tectonic plates of good cheer. It is not surprising that he knows all members of his tribe intimately; time and bloodshed and predators and warfare have reduced the numbers of the Amahuaca to well below the five hundred mark. They camp and observe the natives, hammocks dangling from the trees like fungi. On afternoons, the Johns Hopkins team enters the thickest parts of the rainforest, methodically cataloging and counting species, taking samples, feeling their leather boots being sucked slowly down into the sentient mud. Botflies are scarcer but leeches are always to be found. Dolorosa/Scully cuts her own hair, looking into a small shaving mirror, trying to keep the bangs even but chopping off the rest. The Amahuaca practice a form of slash-and-burn agriculture, demaciating sections of the jungle and planting plantains, sugar cane, squash, peanuts, maize and manioc in crowded plots--exhausting the soil after three years--supplementing the harvest with honey, eggs, berries, fish, and monkeys and deer killed with curare arrows. Tapir, too, trot along the outskirts of the village, those large fat piglike creatures with flesh hanging down from their lips, their noses loose and dangling. They are benign and stupid, snuffing around the bases of trees, digging up tubers and trampling grass. They die with a snort and a whimper when pierced by a dart. Dolorosa/Scully watches the men skin the beasts and hang them up over the fire to roast. One day, she sees a young Amahuaca woman--not much older than she is--moving quietly into the jungle, wearing a short cotton skirt, very pregnant with a bulging belly. The people here have different faces from the Jivaro, more heavily lined and puckered, but this woman is very beautiful, her skin unblemished and her eyes large and clear, mouth solemn. She disappears soundlessly into the trees that border the village. Dolorosa/Scully keeps an eye out for her return. The following night, the woman creeps back into the clearing, her stomach flat and her arms empty. Her hair is matted and wet, her expression exhausted, but she quietly kneels and begins to mash plantains along with the other women, her hands covered with the flesh of the fruit, as if her absence had meant nothing. Walking up to Pansitimba, Dolorosa/Scully demands, "What happened to that woman's baby?" He seems uncomfortable, hemming and hawing before finally outlining what had happened. "That woman, she have _yoshin vaca_. Spirit child. No good for tribe." "What do you mean?" she presses. "What's a 'spirit child?' Is it a stillborn?" Pansitimba shakes his head slowly. The entire story eventually comes out. During pregnancy, Amahuaca women traditionally go off into the jungle, unassisted, to give birth. Under certain circumstances--if her family is too poor to support another child, if the child is a girl, or if the child is a _yoshin vaca_--the woman may strangle the newborn, returning empty-handed. It is not considered murder. This case, especially, had been unusual. Nine months earlier, while drinking deeply of the _ayahuasca_ hallucinogen (a vile green liquid, prized by the Amahuaca, with an effect similar to hashish, known to the Spanish as _soga de muerte_, the wine of death), the woman's husband--she was only one of his three wives--was inspired into a warmaking frenzy. He shaved his head, painted himself with the purple juice of the genipap tree, readied his arrows and attacked a neighboring village, where he was summarily killed by a thrown rock. Then, according to Amahuaca burial custom, his body should have been cremated, bones washed in the river, ground to powder--and eaten. However, due to a freak accident, the bones had been lost and the rites had not been performed. It thus came as no surprise to anyone when the dead man's wife gave birth to a _yoshin vaca_--a deformed child, conceived by a demon. She questions Paul about it, but he responds with boredom. "I'll never understand these people. Even without constant warfare, this sector of South America has to be one of the most violent places on earth, what with the jaguars, the piranhas, the candiru, the fer-de-lance, the bushmaster, disease, the Dengue virus. This is an emaciated population. Only a few hundred of this tribe remains, scattered over a huge area. And yet they must accentuate the difficulty by strangling their newborns, marching off to war, fighting among themselves. Polygamy breeds bloodshed--that's one of the first clauses in the anthropological rulebook. But, of course, the Amahuaca are perfectly mild compared to the Yanomamo. Be glad that we haven't seen them yet." Several days later, the plantain festivals begin in earnest. The banana-like fruit has been pulped and boiled and strained in great troughs of bark, steaming hot. Men chew the soft flesh and spit it into the vats, mixing it with the mashed cores kneaded by the women, the steam and smoke and stench of plantains mixing with piping music and toots of native trumpets. Children are grabbed by their hands and ankles and swung through the steam, face down, their pores sweating as the heat penetrates them, charging them ceremoniously with the power of the fruit and the power of the fire. Laughing and redfaced. The children's bellies become beaded with condensation. The plantains are allowed to bubble overnight. The next morning, in the thin quiet rainforest dawn, the Johns Hopkins team gathers to observe the final phase of the ceremony. Dolorosa/Scully stands watching as the Amahuaca men drink of the plantains, drinking and drinking, gorging themselves on the thin soup of the fruit until their stomachs become distended, their lips covered with the whiteness of the flesh. Then each man grabs a child and vomits the concoction over it. It is a very merry occasion. Once again, Dolorosa/Scully cannot tear her eyes away from the fire. That steaming vat of banana-fruit, the thick odor of fertility and petals that emanates from the stew. The steam rises, snakes, milky, into the redness of the sky. She can feel the sticky heat on her face. And the fascination is back, bigger than ever. She thinks of the Jivaro with their shrunken heads, the woman who strangled her _yoshin_, and the gaudy and almost infectious primitiveness of this celebration, and wonders whether there is more truth here than in all her books and learning: whether mankind can only be saved by a return to its unabashed origins, to the primeval. She wonders what it would be like to drink _ayahuasca_. Officially, she is here to study ebene, part of her thesis on naturally-occurring hallucinogens and their possible impact on the study of botany, but she finds herself thinking more and more about her early, casual work regarding plant intelligence, bioplasm, the Venus flytrap. After all, what is the plantain festival if not an attempt to harness the botanical energy of a certain species? Make the children strong, redblooded, rawboned, by swinging them through the steam of boiling fruit. Charge them with the life-force, flower and fire linked together. She brings out the wilting specimen of her unidentified fiery hyacinth, examines the letters on the petals, the A and the I. What can they stand for? They can stand for the initials of Hyacinthus. Or for Amahuaca and Iivaro, written in the Roman fashion. They can stand for "AI!"--the scream of anguish that the infant made when the young mother clasped her hands around its neck and squeezed. Or they can serve as an acrostic for the first two words of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." Finally, they can stand for Artificial Intelligence. A.I. She sniffs the flower idly, the smell of plantains making her eyes water. Paul's sinewy arm is draped loosely around her shoulders. He holds her close. She says quietly, "I don't understand any of this." There is a sudden insignificant _pop_, like the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum. Dolorosa/Scully looks up, vision still blurred, from the hyacinth blossom--and sees that the scene has changed. The Amahuaca village has disappeared. Paul is no longer there. She stands alone, watching two native men slowly circle each other with palpable violence, their feet scraping in the dust, holding long springy wooden poles in their gnarled hands. The poles are at least ten feet long, twice as high as those who wield them. The tribesmen are short and coffee-colored, hair hacked into fierce-looking inverted bowls of crowfeathers. Their faces are marked and pitted with ugly scars, shiny, twisted lines that convulse down their foreheads, their cheeks, along the line of their noses. A circle of onlookers presses close to the scene, leaving a bare patch of ground about fifteen feet in breadth for the men to move. Shouts, uttered in a vaguely obscene language. Dolorosa/Scully finds herself flanked on both sides by natives, all of whom pay no attention to her but keep their eyes fixed on the two men in the center of the ring. She sees that the poles they carry are sharpened at the ends, fire-hardened. Large black tufts of monkey fur are bound around their arms high up the triceps, stringy but muscular. She can feel the electricity in the air. Looking down, she sees that the hyacinth flower in her hand has gone dry and dead and fragile; several weeks have passed. The A and the I are as ancient- and etched-looking as hieroglyphics on rose-colored stone. A sudden movement in the ring redirects her attention. The fight--for it is a fight that they have been preparing for--commences quickly. The tribesman on the left--small and wiry, with a face not unlike that of a Yanomamo Clark Gable--drives his club a few inches into the loose earth and leans against it, his hands folded around the pole, chin resting on knuckles. He bows his head. The other man--somewhat taller, with a broad unlined face, teeth blackened with spices--lifts his pole high and brings it down, wind whistling as it cuts the air, and delivers a shattering blow to the other man's scalp. Dolorosa/Scully closes her eyes; the sound of the impact is unbearably loud. The other man does not flinch beneath the sundering, although droplets of blood immediately begin to trickle to the ground, running down the back of his neck, making his skin slick. Bits of hair and flesh adhere to the pole as it is withdrawn. Straightening up, blood in his face. The roles reverse. Now the other native submits and receives his own smashing clout, the club nearly bending in two from the force. The wood of the poles is smeared with gore. Then, angry outbursts from the surrounding crowd; she suddenly sees that all the men here carry their own clubs, raising them high over their heads as they rush in, hooting and thwacking each other, stabbing with the sharpened end. She stands stock-still, fascinated, until a thick gout of blood catches her on the forehead, thrown out from the melee. It blinds her. She staggers back, wiping her face, stumbling backward into the Johns Hopkins encampment. The sound of the fight is still loud. Hollow thuds. Cracks of wood against bone. Grunts. When it is over, blood is left on the ground. A young woman comes back into the clearing and tosses dust over the redness. The Yanomamo. The Johns Hopkins expedition has camped in dense tropical forest bordering the banks of the Maturaca, a tributary of the Orinoco, where the air is thick and the vegetation hangs heavily over their tents. Dolorosa/Scully creeps back to her hammock and draws the mosquito netting over her head. The canvas is clammy and moist. She remembers an anecdote that Pansitimba had told her about this village--or, more accurately, about the people who now reside in this village; Yanomamo houses, made of thatched vine and grass, are burnt every two years because of the cockroaches and parasites and scorpions that begin to accumulate and drop down from the roofs; this event had taken place three years ago, so the setting had been different. Nonetheless, as Dolorosa/Scully imagines what took place, she cannot help putting this unthinkable incident into terms she understands, restaging the bloodshed in these dusty clearings, within this circular village, beneath these trees, alongside this portion of the river. What had happened was this. The Yanomamo are a warlike people--indeed, perhaps the most warlike in the world--and constantly foster conflicts between neighboring settlements. The source of the disagreement is irrelevant. It can be over women, who are widely traded and adulterized; it can be regarding tobacco, which is grown in large plots, chewed and frequently stolen; or it can involve sickness and disease within villages, supposedly caused by the sorcery of enemies. Any excuse will do. To the Yanomamo, war is not a means of population control; their jungle is unimaginably rich, unimaginably fertile, and could support many times the number of individuals that currently reside there. War is simply war. It provides its own rationalization. Yanomamo culture is built on war, on the concept of _waiteri_, the code of violence, of ferocity. Children are encouraged in their cruelty, especially to women, who may be shot with arrows or beaten or burnt simply to demonstrate their tormentor's courage. Dolorosa/Scully has seen countless wives with bruised faces, scars along their upper arms, broken wrists, teeth clenching against the pain. And adultery is constant. Seduction of another man's wife is practically a pastime. Dolorosa/Scully rarely ventures into the village alone for fear of rape; it has hindered her ebene studies to a tremendous degree. Enough digression. To return to the story: three years ago, these Yanomamo had played a _nomohori_, a trick, on a neighboring village. It had been during autumn, when the air around the Maturaca becomes filled with the smell of fermentation, with ripe fruit, and celebration and food is on everyone's mind. They had conspired darkly for many months to arrange the _nomohori_. Messengers had been sent through the jungle to a third village, many miles away, which was on mildly friendly terms with the village they wished to destroy. Plans were made, along with bribery. One month later, a great feast was organized in this third village. The entire population of the second village was invited. The ground had been heaped with roast tapir, roast wild pig, cassava, fish, yams, sweet potatoes. Eating and drinking had gone on long into the night, until the moon hung high in the sky like a peeled plantain. Afterward, this group of enemies--two hundred souls in all, women and children alike--had lain quietly, satiated, in its hammocks, bellies full and dozing, fanning themselves with leaves and slipping off into slumber. Then this Yanomamo group had snuck inside with hatchets, axes and spears, and slain the entire village as it lay sleeping. Except for the women, of course. The woman had been taken and divided equally between the two groups. Now they sit and laugh and cook as if nothing untoward had occurred three years before. But their movements are birdlike, their eyes nervous and fluttering. This village lives in a constant state of nervous tension, a perpetual microcosmic Cold War with neighboring tribes, where false alarms occur once or twice a day and the slightest disturbance--the rustling of a bush, the barking of a dog, an unfamiliar shout, an agitation in the birds--sparks general panic, the men snatching up their bows and spears at any provocation, muscles tense, ears searching. The pervasive feeling of uneasiness permeates the air. An attack, it is felt, could come at any moment. Women rarely venture outside the circle of huts, despite the need to gather water and crops. Fear grows here, along with the plantains and the sweet potatoes, just another crop, that occasionally blossoms into violence or warfare. A child, small and puckered like a walnut, sits in the middle of the village and plays in the dirt. Dolorosa/Scully watches the tribesmen dam a stream, poisoning the waters with _barbasco_, paralyzing the fish and gathering them up with nets as they float to the surface. The air smells of bananas. At dusk, the shamans gather in a central hut to snort ebene. She hears them ranting and raving in hallucinogenic stupor long into the night. The Yanomamo are an anthropologist's nightmare. Their constant, unremitting warfare is inexplicable and, indeed, pointless from a conventional point of view. Their so-called raids follow an unchanging pattern with almost numbing frequency: Dolorosa/Scully watches from a distance (does she? or is this just part of the ebene hallucination? it seems to stretch credulity that she would accompany the men on a raid) as the men move like dark panthers through the jungle, silent, gliding between hanging lianas and spiky rasha palms, the diffused sunlight playing in luminous cuneiforms across their faces. They creep quietly through the underbrush, painted with mud, strips of red cloth bound around their loins, gripping bows and arrow-quivers. In the distance, the flat brown exterior of an enemy village is seen. The men crouch in the darkness, waiting, their cheeks bulging as they chew tobacco. Time passes. The sun sets, the rainforest is painted in deathlike hues, but they do not speak, sitting there patiently, balanced on the balls of their feet, knees drawn up to their chests. A man rubs the tip of a spear with his finger, smoothing the wood. Dolorosa/Scully looks down, as if from above, at their indistinct forms--and suddenly it is as if the vegetation in which they hide is composed entirely of little dragon hyacinths, the foaming red blossoms dangling down, brushing against their shoulders, casting scarlet shadows as they watch the village with shining eyes. The hyacinths are everywhere. They look on eagerly as the raid finally begins: a single man, carrying a gourd full of dirty water, emerges from the boundary of houses, sniffling slightly from a cold. He skips quickly over to a drainage ditch. Empties the water. Someone notches an arrow and sends it flying out of the darkness. The man of the enemy village is shot dead where he stands. Whoops and cheers erupt from the hiding place among the vines. The men hiding in the jungle turn and run, crashing through the foliage, stumbling and tripping occasionally, but mostly galloping like gazelles, leaping over shrubs and grasses, through mud and soft sand, running as fast as they can. They run for three days straight before returning to their own circle of houses, where they lie, gasping and tired, in their mud huts, full of triumph at the killing. Such is a Yanomamo raid. Go to a village, kill the first man who emerges, run away. Repeat if necessary. Again: an anthropologist's nightmare. The killings seem to exist for their own sake: they are not done to conserve resources, or because the environment demands it, or to serve any political end, but as a simple demonstration of fierceness, as innate and unrefined as the most basic stimulus-response. To purify the stock of savage men, the tribe practices female infanticide. When a Yanomamo discovers that his first-born child is a girl, he takes her outside, places her on the ground, lays a stick across her throat and steps on it, crushing her windpipe. Daughters are not an option until a son is born. As she lies in her hammock, listening to the weeping of macaws and parrots, Dolorosa/Scully broods over the fact that the Yanomamo consider themselves to be the most magnificent form of man, the original, first, finest and greatest civilization to ever walk the earth; all other races and cultures are seen as a degeneration from the ancestral purity of the Yanomamo tribe. She wonders briefly if they might not be right. They and the Jivaro, with their shrunken heads, peeling the skin from the skull, soaking it, sewing it up and filling it with hot stones in the midst of the Johns Hopkins camp, following the old ways as if the old ways still had meaning. And the Amahuaca, who eat their dead and kill their young and vomit plantain soup over their children, wearing no clothing except for a belt of bark and a nose ring. This ring was once made of abalone shell or mother-of-pearl, but it is rumored that a downed small-engine plane, a Cessna, has been wrecked deep in the jungle for many years past, and the rings now are scraps of aluminum shaven from its chassis. The old and new ways collide. But if these people are primitive, why have their ways survived so long? * * * End of (10/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (11/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:43:08 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (11/12)--Death by Water (VI) * * * Dolorosa/Scully sits up from her hammock, fist pressed under chin. There seems to be a revelation near, a realization. She thinks of that flaming red hyacinth, those two letters, A and I, almost like a pictogram of a bow and arrow laid side by side, drawn in curare red. She lifts herself partway up from her hammock and looks back at the clearing in the Yanomamo village, dust still being thrown over the blood. She finally begins to make the connection between murder and the origins of intelligence--looking at these people whose history is the history of mankind itself, the primordial, these people whose society is based on murder, meaning that mankind itself is based on murder, that perhaps murder is the instigator and not the enemy of intelligence... (Scully tries to sit up, her back arching, but the handcuffs still bind her wrists and ankles. Her eyes are closed. She opens her mouth and says something in an unfamiliar language as Bayliss grips her hands tightly, his face full of concern. The Hyacinth Girl waters itself and hums unceasingly as Dolorosa Chi looks down at Scully's convulsing form and says, "Perhaps it's time for you to return.") * * * Paul Orex had met Dolorosa Chi in Meinekker's lab in 1988. He had been engrossed in his work with Dengue virus and its possible botanical treatment, but not so preoccupied that he failed to notice Dolorosa, who in those days was dividing her time equally between her hallucinogen studies and her hobby, the pursuit of plant intelligence. Back then, her intelligence "studies" had consisted of wiring Venus flytraps up to galvanometers and doing anything she could think of with them: playing music, burning their leaves, watering them, petting them, talking to them for hours, illuminating them erratically with strobe lights or sunlamps. She could never explain what she was doing. She was a dilettante, a dabbler--but she could speak with passion when she wanted to. He only paid attention to her because she was so beautiful. "Consider your brain," Dolorosa had once said. "How does it work? You have billions upon billions of little cells, neurons, linked together by billions upon billions of synapses, sending signals, making new connections. That's where intelligence lies, in the connections. Forget the cells themselves. When you think of a red rubber ball, for example, it isn't a single neuron which holds the image of the ball, but a whole series of neurons and the nature of the signal that is sent among them. You take the same neurons but send through a different signal, and you'll be thinking of something else." "A blue rubber ball.". "Sure. My point is that the actual structural material isn't so important; you just need to know how to put the pieces together." "So it isn't the Lincoln Logs--" "--it's what you _build_ with the Lincoln Logs. Precisely. I just happen to be working with a different set of logs than Nature has been for the past hundred million years--plant cells instead of neurons. Same idea." But when he'd asked her _why_ she was doing this...she hadn't known. Not back then, anyway. After Venezuela, however, after the Yanomamo, something had happened, something that had perhaps arisen from that close encounter with the most warlike of peoples: Dolorosa had returned to her studies with a vengeance, weirdly convinced that the only way to make a plant intelligent was to teach it to kill. He'd never fully understood her argument, but knew that it went something like this: Man is the only intelligent organism yet produced by evolution. Man is also the only organism which consistently kills other members of its species for pleasure or because of psychological factors. It can thus be inferred that there is some connection between homicidal tendencies and the development of intelligence. Now, although plants do possess the basic structure necessary for intelligence and memory--specifically, a system of cells which can form links with each other in the form of membrane proteins--plants do not appear to think. Various researchers have attempted to show otherwise, but their results are inconclusive and unconvincing. The only thing that their studies have demonstrated is that plants respond poorly to the death of surrounding organisms. Plants _emphasize_. They do not enjoy death; they do not enjoy murder. And, as they currently exist, they are not intelligent. Dolorosa eventually arrived at the obvious conclusion. She decided to bring a plant to the level of the Yanomamo, the Jivaro, the Amahuaca--to symbolically restage Man's long journey to sentience on a botanical level. To make a plant kill. Once this was achieved, she reasoned, the remainder of the plant's intellectual development would take care of itself. An insane idea, of course. Except, in the end, Dolorosa had been right. * * * As he stands in the Box and looks down on Orex, Mulder knows nothing of this. Indeed, he ponders the fate of the Kantorek woman. Sibyl. Dead at thirty-two. The victim of the ragweed bomb had been vacillating on the borderline between life and death, as if hesitant to plunge in either direction, her consciousness appearing and disappearing like sunlight strangled behind thick clouds; it was a miracle that the detectives had managed to get any testimony from her at all--and, only a few hours after they'd left, she'd taken a turn for the worse, despite all the care that Johns Hopkins could provide. At seven o'clock she was dead. "As if she'd lost the will," Pembleton had stated. "As if she'd just stopped caring." Mulder vows to himself that _he_ will not stop caring, that he will find Scully and Bayliss and the Hyacinth Girl, stop the bombings and make sure that someone pays for those nine people dead. He looks at Orex, handcuffed to the table in prison blues, sees the lawyer--a tired-looking blonde, her maroon business suit neatly pressed--sitting alongside him, listening to Pembleton speak. Making the offer. "All right," Pembleton says. "Here's the deal. If you tell us where Detective Bayliss and Agent Scully have been taken, the DA's office doesn't seek the death penalty. Plain and simple. That sound good to you?" Orex slowly shakes his head. There are circles beneath his eyes. "I don't know where they've been taken. I don't know what you're talking about." Pembleton leans close. "Orex. Who are you protecting?" "Nobody. I just don't know where they are, that's all." "Listen," Mulder says quietly, "we know that you're lying. Bayliss and Scully didn't just disappear. When last seen, they were headed toward your house. We found their car out front. We found Agent Scully's cellular phone inside, along with signs of a struggle. Whatever happened to them happened _there_. In your home. Now, tell us, who might have been there? Who has a key? Who has the necessary motive?" His mouth drawn tight, Orex says, "There isn't anyone I can think of." Damn. The lie is apparent, but with a lawyer in the Box, it becomes all but impossible to break out the thumbscrews. Bribery is all that remains. Or, perhaps, fear. Pembleton tries the latter, saying, "Just out of curiosity, have you ever been to a Baltimore county prison?" He tilts his head, pins Orex down with his unblinking dark eyes. "No, I haven't." The prisoner's fingers skitter aimlessly along the surface of the wood. His elbows resting on the table, Pembleton asks, "Do you know what the conditions are like? Steel bunks, steel bars, the smell of sweat, asthma, blood, nothing but grayness and antiseptic blue as far as the eye can see. Tile and metal, concrete, aluminum. That's what jail is. Total monotony of the senses. Food tastes the same. Every sound echoes off your pretty ears in exactly the same way as the sound before it. Days blur. Years blur. And do you know what the worst part is?" Pembleton jabs a finger into the air before Orex's face. The prisoner flinches. "The worst part, my friend, is that there is no greenness to be found _anywhere_, unless you count vomit and the peeling paint of the infirmary walls. There are no...flowers," he says, drawing out the latter word. "No growth, no plant life, not a single sign of leaf, bud, petal, root or stem. Nothing. Isn't that what you live for, Orex? Can you imagine existence without that? Think about it. The DA will be aiming for life without parole. Think of the decades spent in grayness, in artificial light, the _blankness_. Think about it . Because that's your future. No roses or pea blossoms or cacti or hyacinths--for forty years. Longer, if you take good care of yourself." He straightens up. Orex sits silently, his face unreadable, looking somberly down at his cuffed right hand and flexing the soreness of his wrist. Meditatively. The Box is quiet for a few moments. It appears that Pembleton has struck the right chord. Mulder taps his chin with the tip of his index finger. Meinekker sees the prearranged signal. "Paul," he says hesitantly, his voice hoarse, "bear in mind that there _is_ an alternative--if you tell us where they've been taken." At this statement, Orex--his former student and onetime romantic rival--lifts his head and regards him with those lightning-blue eyes of his, listening with apparent intensity. Somewhat flustered, Meinekker continues, "We can make you an offer. You don't need to live without plants if you don't want to. Interested?" A beat passes. "...Yes," Orex says slowly. "What's...what's the offer?" "Very simple. Give us information which leads to Bayliss and Scully's safe return--and the apprehension of your accomplice--and you'll be allowed to keep up to five plants in your cell at a time, potted in soft styrofoam jugs. You can change the plants as often as you wish. You'll be able to choose from any species--as long as they are nontoxic and nonincendiary and don't have sharp parts, woody stems or long trailing vines--to be provided by the Johns Hopkins labs. Provided that the information that you give us is useful." Orex seems to ponder this. Mulder remembers his impression of the bomber's home--filled with specimens, orchids, chrysanthemums, green lights, books on botany and pictures of plants--and senses that the offer will succeed, that Orex will not be able to live without plants for any period of time. So, after what feels like a long while: "All right," Orex says, pressing his palms against the table. "Good deal. I accept." "Great," says Page from his seated position. "So where are Scully and Bayliss?" Inhaling deeply through his nostrils, Orex pauses and says, "I'm not exactly sure--but I know how to find them." They wait for him to continue. "I'll need the Hyacinth Girl," he says. * * * Scully remains unconscious for a long time after the effects of the ebene have begun to fade. Her skin is clammy, her nostrils reddened with inflammation and dusted with the drug. Chi looks down at her with a curious expression, lightly daubing her forehead with a damp cloth, humming softly, an unfamiliar tune, eyes absent but tender. Bayliss broods. Over the past few hours, Chi had narrated much of what she thought Scully was seeing from moment to moment: the river, the Jivaro headhunters, the Amahuaca, the plantain ceremony, the Yanomamo, the club fights, the raids--all events of her life, channeled through the ebene for Scully to relive. As they wait for Scully to regain consciousness, Chi tells him a few more stories, like the time the expedition visited the Kamayura of Xingu Park, that tribe whose shamans coat their faces with mashed caterpillar cocoons, contacting the spirits through sacred wooden flutes that no woman may look upon--lest she be raped or even killed. "I, of course, just had to see them," Chi says. "I snuck into their hut during the depths of the night and took as many photographs as I could. I make it a point to show the pictures to all the women I meet. When Dana S. awakens, I'll get out the album. You can look, too." "Thanks," Bayliss says. His back still throbs with pain, but he ignores it and turns his head for a glimpse of Scully. "How's she doing?" "Reasonably well. She's reacted admirably to her first experience with ebene, although I expect that she'll have a splitting headache by the time she awakens." "She has aspirin in her purse." Bayliss looks away and shuts his eyes, leaning back against the coolness of the pole. "Why did you do that, anyway?" he asks, eyes still closed. "Do what?" "Give her the ebene." "To secure myself some empathy, of course. You've seen how she treats me, with contempt, as if I were just some kind of common criminal... I hoped that with some understanding of the events that brought me to this place, she might not judge me so harshly." She loosens Scully's collar, gauges her temperature with the inside of her wrist. "With some luck, she should be back any time now. But I have the feeling that she's just getting to the interesting part." * * * Cyanosis: a blue discoloration of the skin, lips and other mucous membranes caused by oxygen deprivation, a condition characteristic in victims of curare poisoning--and also in those suffering from certain serious cases of Dengue fever. In the former case, onset of symptoms is usually too rapid for medical treatment to be of use; for the Dengue patient, oxygen is administered as quickly as possible. Mobile medical centers in South America often carry O2 tanks and canisters for such therapy. As does Paul Orex. Dolorosa/Scully has often noticed those heavy blue cylinders among Paul's things. They are compact yet weighty, cool to the touch, with small masks dangling from their nozzles with rubber tubing. She has never paid them much attention before, and today, during her last few hours among the Yanomamo, she barely glances at them, preoccupied with packing her own things, primeval thoughts of murder and intelligence and hyacinths crawling like lizards along the back of her mind. Someone shouts for her to hurry. She cinches her I-frame pack shut and slings it over her shoulders, a baseball cap (the Orioles, one of Paul's) pulled tightly down over her cropped hair. Another day on the river lies ahead. The day has dawned clear and muggy, the air transparent as spun glass. She climbs into the boat with six other people, the rubber quivering beneath her feet, taking one of the plastic-handled oars and thrusting it into the cool water. They shove off, carried down along the broad back of the Maturaca. The Yanomamo village gradually dwindles in size behind them, swallowed up by the toothy incisors of trees that line the banks--as if it had never existed in the first place--as if it had been an illusion half-seen through the haze of an ebene stupor, diminished by lucidity. The boat bobs. Waves splash up, the curving prow of the boat slicing through the current's peaks and valleys. Dolorosa/Scully is soon soaked by spray, thankful for the lifejacket buckled firmly around her torso, less for safety reasons than for reasons of modesty: her white t-shirt has become nearly transparent with moisture. Time goes runny with heat. The expedition travels and travels until the sun beats down from overhead and the water blinds them with its brilliance. An hour after departure, almost without warning, the boats approach an undulating Y of waters, the river splitting into two divergent halves: the main body of the Maturaca on the right, a far vaster, far more sinister belt of water on the left. They take the left-hand route--and soon find themselves floating down the obsidian belly of the Rio Negro. This river has been well named. Its shallows are as somber as bitter coffee, a deep ebony sheen that caresses the sides of the rafts. Dolorosa/Scully's mind wanders, looking down into the funeral ripples made as her oar cuts the surface of the water. The Swede's watch beeps twice, signaling the arrival of noon. They drag the plump boats onto shore and take an hour for lunch. Wandering by herself through the green pudenda of the jungle, she chews on a granola bar and thinks about what she has seen. The conclusion is already obvious, at least to her: perhaps plants can only learn intelligence through sociopathy. How to test such a hypothesis? Perhaps an experiment in which her hyacinth--she has already begun to refer to it in the possessive sense--would somehow be able to terminate bacterial cultures using electricity... But no: such attempts smack of weakness. Walking through the thick undergrowth, sitting on a rain-rotted stump that smells of loam, she knows, deep in her heart, what the final experiment must be. Sitting there, she asks herself the crucial question: what is she willing to sacrifice? What is her commitment worth? She thinks of what her life is like. Pleasant student Asian girl who goes to school each day with a smile and vacuous eyes and exists completely within her education and has absolutely no social life excepting interactions with classmates and profs. (Calm cool professional FBI agent who stays home each night with small dog and television set and exists completely within her work and has absolutely no social life excepting interactions with partner and boss.) There, beneath the trees, listening to the monkeys chirp above her and the birds fan by, she feels absolutely crushed by her own insignificance, literally, heartbreakingly _crushed_ by the knowledge that to return to America, as if nothing had happened, would be tantamount to abandoning her soul to obscurity. "I can never return," she whispers angrily to herself, seeing, over and over again, the image of that blazing red hyacinth, standing defiantly out of the uniform greenness of the jungle like a beacon. Damn them all. Damn Paul with his book-learning and snotty voice. Damn Pansitimba. Damn that tanned Swede who leads the expedition. Damn Meinekker back home, his piggy leering eyes running over her when he thinks she isn't looking. She can never return to being that pretty-nameless-girl-sitting-in-the-corner. She can never return to being Dolorosa Chi. (Or Dana Scully.) She has seen Yanomamo warriors run each other through with sharpened poles, the blood dripping down onto the dust; she has looked into the eyes of an Amahuaca woman--just back from strangling her newborn child--as she returned to the plantain-mashing as if nothing had happened; she has watched Jivaro tribesmen peel skin from skull with almost culinary finesse, filling flesh with sand in order to exorcise an antagonistic spirit; and, most compellingly, she has seen that dragonlike hyacinth peering out from the steaming undergrowth like fire in a bottle, like the last spark of sentience gleaming in a dying brain, like a flower whose petals have been painted with plasma. Like her last chance at humanity. And she will be damned if she can renounce all that. So. The next forty-five minutes pass slowly. Dolorosa/Scully rises, her mind fixedly blank, tracing her fingertips along the rough pulsating bark of trees, feeling blades of grass lick her inner thighs as she moves back toward the river. The boats still lie beached on the riverbank. Tarps have been lashed over the bulging packs with nylon cord. Glancing quickly right and left, she reassures herself that no one watches, and kneels quickly alongside the nearest boat, her bare knees sinking partway into the wet Negro silt. She undoes the tarp with trembling fingers. Pulling back the plastic, she sees duffel bags, I-frames, rolled-up hammocks, jaguar-proof cans of dried meat and pemmican--and, wrapped within a rubber poncho, Paul's tanks of oxygen. Three of them. A small enough number so that one missing will be noticed, but he decides to take that chance. Carefully, she grips one of the canisters and lifts it. Heavy enough to sink quickly, without being carried by the current. This is a crucial point: the river is as black as ink, and she must be certain of the canister's precise location in the mud for her half-formed plan to succeed. As a test, she finds a football-sized rock of the approximate size and density of the oxygen tank and hurls it into the Rio Negro. A small splash, concentric rippling circles. It descends quickly into the drink, invisible after the first few feet. There is no appreciable deviation from the vertical, but she knows that she must plan for some drifting. A few yards, nothing more. Now: the specifics. Her plan coagulates into coherency. Three-quarters of an hour from now, she will be late returning to the riverside. Prodded on by shouts to hurry, she will jump into the boat without bothering to don her lifejacket, and, a respectable distance down the river--a hundred yards, say--she will lose her balance and fall overboard into the current. She makes a mental note to fill her pockets with stones, but soon runs up against another difficulty: how will she make her death convincing without spurring a rescue attempt? The answer, it seems, is to sink as rapidly as possible. No theatrics. No screams, no going down for the third time. Make it look like clowning. Let them smile at her clumsiness and slapstick refusal to resurface. Their concerns should only begin later, after she fails to reappear. At one edge of the river, roughly five hundred feet away, lies a tangled deadfall of palms and brush, apparently of recent origin. Brown termite nests still adhere to the trunks. The trees dangle halfway into the water, splintering, their roots exposed, thick dirt clumped between those scrabbling fingers. Their hanging fronds form a natural curtain, a place of concealment. The water beneath them is dense with shadow. Dolorosa/Scully keeps her eye on that spot: the perfect place to return to shore, hidden, shaded, with the jungle just a step away. She makes the final preparations. Straps a long-bladed hunting knife between her shoulder blades, firmly sheathed. Slips a plastic-wrapped passport easily into her back pocket. As an afterthought, she finds a few of the flower seeds that the Swede has kept as taxonomic specimens--seeds from the hyacinth, _her_ hyacinth--and folds them securely in a small square of tin foil, tucking them into her most secret place. Finally, she walks down the riverbank to where the deadfall lies. Stands there on the opposite shore, across from the fallen trees. Pulls her arm back, steps forward with all her might--and throws the oxygen canister into the Rio. It sinks immediately. A small blossom of water splashes up at the point of impact, droplets, those rings within rings unfolding across the Negro. She looks at those circles, rippling out from the central point with isochronal precision, rippling and rippling from where the canister has sunk, the water trembling, soon still, the current folding over the waves, that watery tomb or mausoleum... She blinks. And, before she knows it, it is time. Forty-five minutes have come and gone. As planned, she is late returning, she rushes into the boat, does not buckle her jacket, grabs an oar as they set off on the Black River, heart thumping, fingering a curare dart, short and sharp and covered with poison. The boats flounder down toward the deadfall. They are a dozen yards away from the tangle of fallen trees when she instinctively knows that the time has come. She fakes pricking herself with the toxin, yelps and gulps air--no time to think, no time to consider, no time to ask why, no time for second or even first thoughts--and leans abruptly backward on the raft, the small of her back bouncing lightly against the rubber lip, and, a splash, a moment of purest vertigo, of stinging eyes, finds herself in the river. Sinking quickly. The waters close above her head in brackish disarray, bone-cold, more frigid as she descends. Her clothes are soaked, diaphanous. There is a moment of panic, her nostrils flooding, eyes opening wide and seeing nothing in the darkness of the Rio Negro, staring up at the diminishing glow of the surface, the rectangular shadow of the boat above, thin sickly sunshine, the grand unimaginable _silence_ of depths. Her ears thunder with the rush of blood. A vein, a cataract: she sinks deeper and deeper as if to drown would be the easiest thing in the world. She inverts herself, legs kicking down forcefully, casting her shoes away, propelling her body down to the bed of the river, arms extended. Oxygen goes sour. Her lungs whimper, villi clouding with carbon dioxide. Down, further down--she keeps her mouth shut tightly to avoid a rush of bubbles that might indicate her position--her fingers scrabble for the channel--one yard passes, another, another, tentacles of black water trailing out behind her in muted phosphorescence. Eyes burning. The quiet is unbearable, a quiet as deep as the silence of outer space. For the first time she allows herself to think of piranhas. Dark blue and silver in the corners of her vision--or does she imagine them?--hints of fins, scales, large fleshy bodies like footballs. Their hissing, screaming sounds. She reassures herself that they only attack if they already smell blood; she is not wounded, and it is not her time of the month. But still... Air runs low. It seems that hours pass, her legs aching from fatigue, a needlenosed cramp pinching her upper thigh, until at last her fingertips touch the river-bed: clay, smooth stones, slick algae. Visibility is very low. Murky. Tears stream from her eyes and mix with the river water as she unfolds herself in an underwater handstand, arms scissoring, hands proceeding slowly across the bed and digging into the mud and silt, searching for the canister. She wills herself away from fear, even as her lungs scream and her eyes blister with spots of red...searching...searching...letting the sand trickle through her fingers. It isn't there. She can't find it. Her lips are clamped together. Her limbs go numb, her skin as unfeeling as latex, as she feels her mind drifting away, that peculiar detachment, withdrawal, that precedes death by drowning--her movements gradually grow more frantic, a hyperactive sweep of the mire--feeling and squinting--drowning--sluggish. Too much weight. The entire bulk of the Rio Negro presses down on her spine. She is a deflated balloon, pressed flat. Her eardrums pop, one after the other. Dolorosa/Scully makes one last frenzied lunge at nothingness-- --and there, cylindrical metal, coolness. She grasps it, her vision going black and clotted with the dark, finds the aluminum snout, the tubing, pulls the mask over her head--and twists the nozzle open. Relief of oxygen floods her senses. Some water leaks in through the mask; she breathes it in, coughing, but air is mixed with it, sweet metallic air that clears her thoughts and forces her to examine her surroundings, the river still squeezing tightly around her like a watery fist. She takes another breath. Stands stock still, floating in the depths, feeling for the direction of the current. There: the water brushes coolly against her right cheek. It orients her. She turns in the direction of the flow, knowing that one riverbank lies at her left, the other at her right--and it is the latter to which she must proceed, toward the deadfall. Giving her ankles a mincing chop, she moves upward a few feet. The boats are still invisible, but she knows that the current--which is faster near the surface--will have moved them several dozen yards down the stream, far enough away to allow her to resurface quietly. Which she does. Her head bobs above water several minutes later. She has bided her time among the sharp fallen branches after arriving at the deadfall, sucking oxygen, counting to one hundred, twice, before resurfacing. The glare is painful. Gooseflesh breaks out on her shoulders from the chill. The deadfall forms a kind of inverted cup, chinks of sunlight blazing down through the cracks, hiding Dolorosa/Scully exceedingly well as she treads water and unfastens the mask, letting it sink into the water beside her. Shouts, coming from fairly far away. They are worried, if not yet anxious. Time to re-emerge. She swims over to the riverbank and pulls herself out quietly, slipping unseen into the penumbra of the jungle. Does not look over her shoulder. Does not hesitate. She drips like a virginal goddess, clothes a second skin, knife outlined against her back. After plunging a few hundred feet into the rainforest, she plucks several large leaves and wraps them around her bare feet, tying them snugly with strips of fabric torn from her shirt. She walks for a long time. * * * End of (11/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (12/12) by LoneGunGuy Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:43:11 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (12/12)--What the Thunder Said * * * "I didn't have a plan, an objective, at that point. I just needed to get away. Remove myself from the hypocrisy of man. Find freedom to pursue my research without judgmentalism." "Very interesting," the Hyacinth Girl says with her digitized voice. "I eventually found my way back to the Yanomamo village. A few of them know a scattering of English; I asked them to accept me. They did. Not without pain on my part. I offered myself as a sex toy. I willfully degraded myself in exchange for their hospitality." "Very interesting." "I spent two weeks in the village. Then, one night, I played a _nomohori_ on them. Killed them all in their sleep with curare arrows. I managed to rig up a primitive galvanometer using juice from a native citrus fruit (I don't know the species, only that it was acidic enough to carry a charge), copper tubing from the knife sheath and the tin foil I'd wrapped the hyacinth seeds in. Took crude readings from the surrounding vegetation. As I suspected, they all reacted poorly. They hated death. So I burned the bodies and moved on." "Very interesting." "I made my way back down along the river and eventually found myself back in civilized Venezuela. Forged my passport with a false name and returned to the United States. I'd been back for a month by the time my monetary situation became dire--it's difficult to hold onto a job when you're officially dead. So I took a chance. Found Paul, explained my situation to him." Dolorosa Chi shakes her head slightly from side to side, laughing quietly. She sits at the table, sketching with pastels, her fingertips reddened with chalk dust. Auburn-colored dust. She is drawing Scully, who still lies unconscious on the floor, hands cuffed above her head. It is difficult to accurately render the contours of Scully's hair, lying as it does spread out across the mattress, half of it plastered to her head with sweat, the remainder wild and tangled. Chi frowns, smoothes the pastel lines. She glances up at Bayliss. "How well did you know Paul, anyway?" Bayliss stirs himself. He has been lying against the pipe, his mind wandering, only half-listening to Chi's recollections. "Orex? I met him in the Box. The Interview Room, I mean." "How did he strike you?" He sits fully up, considers the question. "Changeable. Weak. Somewhat intelligent, but smartassed. He had a way of going from solid to gelatinous and back in the space of a few seconds." "Well, that's how he's always been. He thinks otherwise, of course. He has a high opinion of himself. Thinks he's dynamic, but he's always been a masturbator. It didn't take a great deal of convincing to make him come to Arizona with me, provide some financial support. Keep my secret." "Is that why he gave up his future in medicine? Left Johns Hopkins? All because of you?" "Of course. I can be very persuasive." She rubs the pastel over the rough paper, adds a shaded gradient of red. "That's why I chose Paul over Erwin. Did you ever meet Erwin?" "You mean Erwin Meinekker? Your college professor?" "Yes. I knew he liked me; he was attractive, I suppose, in a muddling kind of way. But he also thought of me as a specimen. Something to be catalogued, studied, classified. I could feel his eyes on me, not lecherous, but penetrating, examining--I don't even think he knew he was doing it. Paul, on the other hand, was someone I could control. He was like a bonsai tree: I could prune him, keep him potted in place." Chi holds up her drawing of Scully, compares it to the real woman, lying stone-still. "Of course, he never listened to my ideas. To him, it was just a physical thing. He thought that he was controlling _me_, can you believe it? Up until Arizona, I let him continue thinking that." "Arizona," Bayliss says. "Where you killed that woman with curare." "Yes. I'd smuggled a great quantity of the poison out of Venezuela. Paul thought it was totally cool, used it to make some little playthings, the idiot. Secret weapons. He carries around this pen with a curare dart inside, like he was James Bond or something..." "I know. We confiscated it." Chi drifts back into reminiscence. "But the cacti needles...they were my idea. The greenhouse I selected was filled with saguaro cacti, the same kind that had been used in some of the pioneering experiments of plant intelligence. A Japanese scientist wired a dwarf saguaro cactus up to a galvanometer using acupuncture needles, taught it to count to ten. He used auditory output, had the cactus 'speak' to him using a digitizer. Groundbreaking stuff. I decided to duplicate his experiments with the murder variable factored in. So I poisoned the needles to see whether the plants reacted to the killing." "Did they?" "Not really. The tuna cactus that actually killed her registered nothing but negativity. A total waste of time. " She flips to a new sheet in her sketchbook, begins to draw again. "I was still missing the point. In order to spawn intelligence in a plant, you must make it _love_ to kill--and the only way to do that is through classical positive reinforcement. Expose the plant to death on a regular basis, along with some kind of 'reward' input, and it will eventually come to associate one with the other. Simplicity. That was when I decided to use the hyacinths. I grew them myself, trained them to kill from day one. Luckily, Paul had saved all my books and papers from the Orinoco expedition, so I didn't have to start from scratch." "Explain," Bayliss says. "What was your positive reinforcement?" Chi sets down her pastels. "I realized that the galvanometer can also be used in reverse: it can _send_ signals to the plant, instead of merely receiving them. The rest was easy. My hyacinths release a certain signal when they are content. It's their happy sound, cheerful, like a laugh, a smile. I have recorded it, analyzed it and played it right back at them--and they respond. It's like petting a dog, telling it, 'Good boy, good boy.' Feed them this signal persistently enough, and the hyacinths will soon come to associate it with anything you wish. I could have made masochists out of them, transmitting the impulse while simultaneously burning the leaves, dunking their roots in sulfuric acid--and they would have loved it." "But you chose to make them sadists." "Essentially, yes. That's why I set off all the bombs: in the aftermath, with the bodies still cooling on the ground, I would send Paul in with a hyacinth concealed in a cardboard box, transmitting the happy sound to them while bringing them close to the devastation. After a while, they became attuned to it. Desensitized. They would look forward to each new outing, to each new death, new corpse, until the positive stimulus was no longer needed, until they enjoyed murder for its own sake. And, meanwhile, the growth of their intelligence proceeded apace." "You brought them to the level of the Yanomamo?" "Beyond. Take their counting capabilities. The Yanomamo have the crudest numbering system imaginable. Three numbers: _mori_, _mori-mori_, and _mori-mori-mori_. One, two, and more than two. That's it. _Mori-mori-mori_ is the only word they have to describe every quantity from three to one hundred thousand. So my hyacinths are already beyond them, in that respect. Isn't that right, Cynthia?" "Hello, Dolorosa," the Hyacinth Girl burbles. Smiling tolerantly, like a loving parent, Chi says, "All that remains is to bring their language up to par, and that's only a matter of time. Admittedly, Paul's capture complicates things. Over the past seven years, I've only managed to produce two truly viable Hyacinth Girls--the one you see here, and the one Paul was working with when you apprehended him--and now that number has been reduced. Perhaps irrevocably. But she's all right, though, isn't she?" "The flower, you mean?" Bayliss remembers toying with the hyacinth on his desk, looking at the petals and electrode-studded leaves, and suddenly wonders what that plant had been feeling, whether it had been thinking murderous thoughts during the examination... "She's fine, I suppose." "Good. It's a pity, though; she'd had so much promise. Listen to this." Chi stands up, moves to the cluttered shelf where she'd kept the handcuffs, and pulls out a small tape recorder, bringing it back to the table. With a practiced magician's gesture, Orex's microcassette suddenly appears between her fingers. She plugs it into the player and presses the rewind button, talking all the while. "You've heard the happy sound before, right?" Bayliss nods. That deep, all-pervading, sensually arousing hum that had filled the room while the Hyacinth Girl had watered herself. "Now, bear in mind that there's an _unhappy_ sound, too," Chi says. "The exact opposite of what you've heard. Grim, depressing. Like a polygraphic scream. It's the sound that most plants make when you wire them up to an auditory galvanometer and expose them to death--any death, be it an explosion site or a few bacterium being imploded by penicillin. My hyacinths, though, react in _this_ manner." She pushes the play button--and the room is once again filled with the sexual murmur of the happy sound. It makes Bayliss' groin ache. The sound is overlain with a thousand shifting textures of joy, melancholic euphoria, ecstasy, fierce longing. "This is what Orex was recording," says Chi. "This is what the other Hyacinth Girl felt at the scene at that open-air restaurant which was bombed this morning. One person died. Many were injured. But the Hyacinth Girl loved it. It turned her on." Gritting his teeth, Bayliss asks, "So why did you use plants in all the bombs? Peas, pollen, flytraps--ingenious, yes, but the same effect could have been produced much more easily with a few sticks of dynamite and some fertilizer." "But it wouldn't have been nearly so poetic. The bombs, actually, were mostly of Paul's design. He had some interesting ideas, some innate understanding of plants, even though he was a fool..." "But were the bombs necessary? Aren't there easier ways to find death?" "Of course there are. Death is everywhere, if you know where to look; I suspect, though, that Paul simply blows things up for the sheer enjoyment it offers him--one can find obvious Freudian motivation in pyromania, and Paul has sexual frustration a-plenty." Chi chuckles. "He'd probably have blown _me_ to bits by now, if I hadn't kept my whereabouts mostly secret. He doesn't know where I live, not specifically." Pausing to let that bit of information sink in--it had been one of Bayliss' last hopes, actually, that Orex might reveal their location to Pembleton and Mulder, thus precipitating a rescue--Chi continues, "But yes, to answer your question, there are easier ways. Places where death is everywhere. The Johns Hopkins bombing, for example, was really just a diversion in order to--" Chi breaks off. Scully has lifted her head slightly up from the floor, consciousness regained. The eyes that Bayliss had once described as 'translucently oceanic' have now gone cloudy, confused, weary, their blueness tempered with bloodshot streaks and exhaustion. "How are you feeling, Dana S.?" asks Chi. Scully does not respond, but sets her head down again. Reaching over to the tape recorder--which has continued to vibrate with the happy sound--Chi clicks it off. Says, "How convenient. Now that you're both awake, I can finally explain why I've kept you here for so long. What your purpose is." She stands and moves over to her flowers. The Hyacinth Girl beeps its greeting, and she responds with beneficence. "Hello, Cynthia. We're going to have some fun now--do you like fun?" "Murder," says the plant. "Murder, murder, murder." "Very good." Chi turns back to Bayliss and Scully. "Listen up. I know that you probably aren't in a position to appreciate this, but you two are going to be the most celebrated martyrs of the botanical leap to intelligence." "Please engrave that on my tombstone," Bayliss says. "They will, I assure you, because your role in human history is unprecedented. The Hyacinth Girl is going to kill you with her bare hands, so to speak, sometime in the next few hours--and this will be the final test of her sentience. Up until now, she's been an observer. A bystander. No longer. This will be the final bombing, the crucial bombing, the apex of all my work so far." His blood running cold, Bayliss manages to say, "At the restaurant scene...we found a note. You said that you would return in one day." "So I did--and a day has passed. My original plan was to kidnap someone off the street for Cynthia to kill. Use a random victim. You and Dana S., however, simply fell into my lap; it would be silly not to use you." Chi pulls a wooden box out from under the counter, opens it. Inside is a small vial of homemade thermite and a magnesium fuse, wired up to electrodes. The apparatus has apparently been designed to neatly fit onto the Hyacinth Girl's galvanometric rig. "It's very simple," Chi says, fondling the setup. "As I've pointed out time and time again, Cynthia sends out signals, electrical pulses, whenever she desires something--water, sunlight, attention. Now, with this device, she can also murder at will. I've wired it so that if she sends out the correct pulse, the pulse that I've roughly translated as 'I want to kill,' the fuse will automatically light the thermite. Annihilating everything in its path." She unscrews a pair of electrodes from the galvanometer, tinkers with the machinery, prepares the thermite bomb for connection to the speech digitizer. The two connections--one leading out from the hyacinth, the other snaking up from the fuse--lie less than three inches away from each other: not touching, but ready to be fastened together at a moment's notice. Completing this circuit will arm the bomb. "This is the plan," she says. "In an hour or so, I will transport you and Dana S. to a public place somewhere in downtown Baltimore, my gun to your heads. I will be carrying Cynthia at a safe distance; the two of you will have tubes of thermite strapped to your chests, connected by long wires to the Hyacinth Girl. At the right moment, I will arm the bomb and tell Cynthia to give the signal. She will, the thermite will burn--and the two of you shall be immolated beyond recognition, much to Cynthia's delight. I am confident that, at this point, her evolution into an intelligent being will be complete." Bayliss does not respond. There is nothing more to be said. He looks back at Scully, lying there motionless, her eyes unseeing. Wonders what the ebene has done to her. He can only see part of her face, twisting himself around nearly double--his back aching in wordless protest--but he is again struck by her deep, unquantifiable beauty, the diametric opposite to Dolorosa Chi's mathematically precise features: Scully's face is pale and haggard but almost transcendent, lying there on that plastic-coated mat, tired and weak, lips white. An astonishingly strong and profound feeling of affection rushes through him; he shudders from the force of it. An absurd mix of emotions. The circumstances of his death have just been spelled out in explicit terms...but he finds himself caring for Scully as much as he fears for himself. Bayliss leans back on the pole and thinks of his life thus far. Its emptiness. He has no close friends outside the Homicide department, and much is lacking even there: he lives alone in a Baltimore bachelor's apartment, has never even had dinner at his partner's house, never socializes with his fellow detectives beyond an occasional drink, rarely dates, keeps to himself, measures his success by increments of black names on a white board. Beyond that, nothing. Why, then, does the thought of his death fill him with such dread? It's only the last dry leaf trembling from a skeletal deciduous. Branches like claws, scratching at the sky. His life is albino wood, bare bone. Doomed before it began. But with Scully... He might have found happiness. It is this thought, more than any other, that shakes him to his foundations. His eyes close of their own accord. He can hear Dolorosa Chi at the far end of the counter, perhaps twenty feet away, puttering with the hyacinths and the thermite. Otherwise, silence. He listens to Scully breathe. Darkly outlined in his mind, he sees--faint and fuzzy, like a Volckringer pattern--the image of the little dragon hyacinth, held in Dolorosa's arms an hour hence, set against a backdrop of fire, _his_ fire, intelligence blossoming, crude Yanomamo bloodlust filling the veins in the Hyacinth Girl's leaves, her stomates opening like gaping mouths, inhaling oxygen, proclaiming in electronic voice that, yes, murder is the avatar of mind, that rebirth--be it the arrival of springtime or the pulling of a drowning victim from the Amazon with toothpick fish stuffed into every orifice--is a cruel and bloody process, that April is the cruelest month, that flowers may only arise from pain, that the firmament is based upon pain, that May flowers may only be brought about by cruel April showers... Bayliss knows what he must do. His voice is hoarse, croaking. He does not know if his words can affect the Hyacinth Girl, or whether something of his intent can be transmitted across the seven-odd yards of space that lie between them, but he speaks, mentally visualizing the electrodes that lie on Chi's counter, the electrodes that need only some kind of connection to complete the circuit: "Cynthia, wouldn't you like some water? Some _water_?" He opens his eyes. Dolorosa Chi is staring at him. She opens her mouth--he sees this in perfect slow motion--her lips moving to form some syllable, her head turning slightly toward the hyacinth. The flower sits there sedately. Everything in Bayliss' field of vision seems to be outlined in red hues, a double-exposure, sealed with a stroke of lightning that thunders across his senses as he feels Scully stir and lift her head, as he hears the Hyacinth Girl say the word... "Water," she says--and water streams down from the nozzle suspended above the flowers. Droplets splash off the leaves, the petals, a virtual flood of irrigation, dripping down onto the counter, splattering alongside the electrodes, completing the circuit. There is a spark. The Hyacinth Girl hums with contentment. Chi's eyes widen--and the flower sends the final signal. "Murder," the digitizer whispers. * * * --and half of what Scully sees may be hallucination, an ebene delusion, as she lies there on the floor staring at the ceiling, feels a rush of intense heat, a blinding light, her hair singeing, skin blistering, eyes squeezing shut, the crackling stench of burning thermite that blazes down in faux-China syndrome through the counter and the floor and the concrete of the foundation beneath streaming through her nostrils, white flame, blue flame, as Dolorosa Chi is burnt alive where she stands, the Hyacinth Girl muttering and gibbering to herself as her leaves and petals are blasted into charcoal--that heat, that hellish heat--scorched metal, scorched pavement, two thousand degrees of inferno--Scully hears something breaking, splintering, a door caving in--hears voices--shouts, cries, none of them Chi's--feels four men burst into the room and recoil from the fire--the portions of her face not covered by bandages seared into redness--someone rushes to her side, clangs a sharp heavy object against the manacles of her handcuffs, snapping them, pulling her free from pinion and lifting her up in a fireman's carry, out from the enormous heat, that room where, like a firestorm, the air is consumed and vacuum rushes in with a resounding, thundering pop: _da_, the voice of thunder. Dolorosa Chi is roasted. * * * One day later, the city of Baltimore still writhes beneath the light rains. Droplets patter intimately against the window, those small starbursts of water running down the glass like tears. By remarkable coincidence, Scully has been placed in the same burn ward room where Sibyl Kantorek died only a few days before. Kantorek's essence seems to linger in the dark corners and odd shadows of the room, inscribed on the white walls, mirrored in the smooth oscillations of the electroencephalograph, drawn in the pale lines of IV tubes, a constant reminder of the woman who had died where Scully lies now, her corpse having spent many postmortem minutes draped in sheets on this very bed: Scully, her face half-hidden by bandages, might be Kantorek's twin sister. Mulder muses over the similarity. He sits at her bedside, holding her hand, listening to the rain. Pembleton leans against the far wall, arms folded, watching with apparent impassiveness. Mulder tries to smile. "How's it going, partner?" "I've been better," Scully says distantly, voice tired. Her cheeks and forehead are draped in gauze, and her hair has been closely cropped, lying against her scalp; she wonders dimly how she will look when the dressings are removed, whether the burns will leave any lasting marks. But, doubtless, marks will remain, even if her face remains unblemished. Internal marks. Her soul bristles with scarification. Scully has spent much of the past twenty-four hours looking up into the darkness, unable to sleep, brooding over recent events, feeling her skin prickle and knit beneath the dressings, tight, itchy. In places, unfeeling, as if there has been nerve damage. Or perhaps it is the morphine. She wishes that her emotions could be so numb--she feels close to the edge, irritable and drowning in melancholia. Enough of that. She asks the dreaded question. "What do the doctors say?" Her partner's response is encouraging, and he does not seem to sugarcoat the truth. "Well, listen, you definitely don't need to worry about scarring. The burns and bruises will heal in a few weeks. Any cosmetic damage is doubtful." "Doubtful." She shuts her eyes and breathes in silently. An embarrassing amount of relief floods through her at this reassurance. The image of Dolorosa Chi, immolated instantaneously by the thermite, the iron oxide burning through her body like wildfire, has haunted her to a frightening extent. The memory will not be driven away. Indeed, there are times when she awakens from one of her infrequent dozes, soaked in sweat, a nightmare of burning, of flame, of cremation, still tearing through her subconscious--as if some part of her has died, _continues_ to die, along with Chi. As if something in the ebene--something in that hallucinatory connection that had arisen between her and the bomber, in that strange empathy, in the illusory figure of Dolorosa/Scully--had allowed them to burn together, sparing her body while destroying the other's. But she fights these thoughts down, asks, "How's Bayliss?" "He's fine. He messed up his back pretty bad, but he should be able to walk out of here soon. Some burns. Nothing very serious." Mulder grins. "He says that you owe him a movie." "Tell him that I'd be delighted. As soon as we get out." Hesitating, Mulder says, "Listen. You know that he did a stupid thing. He triggered the bomb to kill your kidnapper, but you both might have burned to death if we hadn't arrived in time." "Sometimes stupid things are necessary to achieve an end." "Yes," Mulder says, smiling at how she echoes his own words. He continues, "Bayliss has explained everything to us, to the best of his ability. About how Dolorosa Chi faked her death, how she killed all those people because she thought it would somehow make plants intelligent." "It's difficult to understand, isn't it?" "Yeah. I don't think anyone will ever understand Dolorosa Chi. Least of all Professor Meinekker. After he found out that she'd survived--and then been killed a second time--he just broke in two, totally devastated; he crumbled right in front of us. Last I saw, he was drinking himself to death in a Baltimore bar." Scully feels sad for him, and says so. "He isn't a bad person." "No. As a matter of fact, he and Orex were the ones who were able to track you and Bayliss down. It was all thanks to them." "How exactly did you find us?" Scully asks, sitting up slightly in bed. "Through a slightly unorthodox method." "Which was...?" "Well, it isn't easy to explain. It was Orex's idea. According to him, there apparently exists some kind of psychic link between the two Hyacinth Girls. They feel each other's emotions and can detect each other's signals and thoughts." "Bull," Scully says. "That's what I thought at first. But it led us right to you. You see, Cleve Backster's original experiments with the galvanometer indicated that plants can broadcast their feelings to other plants, but usually only over a short distance. There are ways of increasing their sensitivity, however. Which is what Orex and Meinekker did. They attached the hyacinth to a bioplasmic antenna: a specially-shaped metallic trellis on which they draped a long, vining plant with large leaves. It exponentially increased the distance over which the hyacinths could communicate, and allowed us to find you and Bayliss. "So, we heard it through the grapevine," Mulder says. She forgives the pun. Quietly, she asks, "The Hyacinth Girl was destroyed in the fire?" "Completely. Along with Dolorosa Chi, and all record of her work." "But the other hyacinth--that's still alive?" "Sitting on Bayliss' desk as we speak." Scully pauses. "Can you do me a favor?" "Sure, what?" "Burn that plant. Destroy it. Scatter its ashes." "Well, you see, it might be needed as evidence in Orex's trial..." he begins. Bitterly: "Fuck the trial, Mulder." Scully turns aside, rests her head on the warm plumpness of her pillow, her expression stony. "Listen. You don't understand what that flower is capable of. You don't have the slightest idea. Burn it. Do it as soon as you get back to Homicide--promise me," she says fiercely. "Promise." A bit taken aback, he says, "All right, Scully, I promise. If it's that important." "It is." She looks back at him. "There's one more thing." "Yes?" "When I was emerging from the ebene stupor, I heard Chi say something to Bayliss. She said that there were easier ways of finding death than through bombings. And she said that the Johns Hopkins explosion was merely a diversion. A _diversion_. Do you understand?" "Not really." Scully sighs. There is so much that she wants to tell him, so much that she cannot find words to express. She wants to say: _Mulder, death is everywhere. Ubiquitous. Death lies in our DNA, encoded in our genotype, written in our cells, tattooed to our psyches, part of the infrastructure of every city, every rainforest, every Baltimore greenhouse: death is the black river that cuts channels through the soul. But the final paradox is that death always accompanies rebirth. Inevitably. For one life to arise, another must succumb to the grave. That's why April is the cruelest month: because April--the grandest hurrah of springtime, when flowers bloom again and the trees become heavy with leaves--is the time when life is weighed against life, when natural selection is most ruthless, the month where Yanomamo kills Yanomamo, when the Orinoco turns reddest with blood. Chi is still alive_, she wants to tell him, _alive, somewhere within me, and will remain there until a thousand Aprils have come and gone_. But Scully says none of this. Instead, she states flatly, "There is too much death in this hospital. Go away. I want to be left alone." She does not speak after that. Mulder remains silently at bedside for a few moments, then stands abruptly and leaves the room, looking back once over his shoulder before exiting. Pembleton, standing by the doorway, does not move. He leans against the wall, face expressionless, looking at Scully. He considers what she has said. He remembers what Bayliss had told him, how Dolorosa Chi had been desensitizing her hyacinths, exposing them to death on a regular basis, constantly, measuring their reactions and refining their sociopathy. Until they loved death. Until it turned them on. He remembers sitting in this very room, listening to Sibyl Kantorek drift in and out of delirium. He remembers the long period of silence when he and Mulder had sat there, by themselves, waiting in vain for Kantorek to return to lucidity. How he had then looked up at the ceiling of the room, at the ventilation grate, and had seen a fine bit of yellow dust trickling down from the perforations. Scully had said that the Johns Hopkins bombing had simply been a diversion. A diversion for what? Walking casually over to the bedside, Pembleton takes the chair that Mulder had been sitting on. He lifts it quietly, careful not to disturb Scully, and places it in the center of the room, directly beneath the vent. He stands on it, reaches up. Finds that the grating is loose. Pembleton pulls down the grate, sets it aside, and lifts his head into the square aperture. Three little dragon hyacinths have been placed inside the metallic duct that runs through the ventilation system, each wired to a polygraph. The galvanometers are thickly coated with a year's worth of dust. The metal is lightly coated with their pollen. A small, dim sunlamp casts illumination onto the flowers, its light shaded from beneath by a thick sheet of watercolor paper. The soil is dry but not completely so, as if Chi or Orex had snuck periodically into the hospital to water the plants. Those red, flaming, terrifying petals glare down at him. Like vultures. They preside over this burn ward, this place where death is never in short supply. In the predatory slant of their stamens, Pembleton thinks he can mark the passing of a hundred patients who slept and died in this room, Sibyl Kantorek being only the most recent. They glare at him--and they do not seem entirely unintelligent. Stone-faced, Pembleton takes them down one by one. They are potted in terracotta, and he sets them on the floor, lining them up, their florets foaming like a bloody sea: he looks at those flowers, scarlet, orange, crimson, maroon, those bell-shaped blossoms grinning up with dark sentience and mirth. Then he tears their stems in half. * * * End of (12/12) =========================================================================== From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy) Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative Subject: NEW: April is the Cruelest Month (End Notes) Date: 25 Mar 1996 00:44:27 -0500 April is the Cruelest Month (Endnotes) * * * Just a few observations. This novella was inspired by a humorous 1973 short short story by Edward Rager, entitled "Crying Willow," which I heartily recommend as one of the finest the genre has to offer. It can be found in Isaac Asimov's 1978 anthology _100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories_ (which is a terrific book, by the way, one of my favorites). Rager's story is less than four pages long but is crammed with puns and ideas, essentially an elaborate shaggy dog story with "I heard it through the grapevine" as a kicker. I've lifted that joke directly from Rager, along with the idea of the use of polygraphs to give "voice" to plants; however, to my credit (?) the rest of the story is entirely my own invention. Well, almost. There's "The Waste Land" element--which is not to be taken too seriously. As James Joyce said, such thematic scaffolding provides a bridge for a story to be built upon, but after its purpose has been served, it can be "blown to smithereens." So just ignore all the Eliot-references, and you'll be a lot happier. This probably should not have been a crossover. The "Homicide" aesthetic is very alien (no pun intended!) to that of "The X-Files," especially in terms of plot: "Homicide" episodes are primarily dialogue- and character-driven, as opposed to the other show, which depends largely on gore and intense action to create its emotional effects. Many purists may feel that I've violated the spirit of Barry Levinson, Tom Fontana, David Simon and Paul Attanasio's vision by putting Bayliss and Pembleton into a paranormal situation; to them, I offer my apologies. But in any case, the crossover element may have needlessly complicated an already hopelessly tangled plotline. Sorry. Letsee, what else is there? A lot of the research that went into this story is shaky at best. My portrait of South American tribes, especially the Yanomamo, may not be entirely accurate, as I was forced to extrapolate where my conventional sources ended. If anything about my fictional treatment of these indigenous peoples has offended, again, let me apologize. That's it.