Something I wrote during Christmas Vac. It's rather long and disgusting and I divided it into sections. I give it an R for adult situations involving gore. And of course, of course, I beg forgiveness for stealing the characters of the X-files from Ten-Thirteen productions. Amp. THE SACRIFICE By Amperage@aol.com 2/1/95 The cushion under her was of velvet, a dark velvet. Meredith opened her eyes dazedly. She sat up, still half-awake, looked around her. The church around her was very big. It had three aisles and a balcony. Long windows told the story of Christ's life. It was very pretty. This was a Baptist church or some sort of evangelical church anyway, because of the front. Except the pulpit had been moved over to one side and the communion table that normally set in front of a pulpit was on the platform down in front. There was a little boy on the communion table. He had been tied down with black straps and he struggled. His mouth was full of cotton so he could not scream, only make little strangling noises. They had taken the little boy's clothes away. This was usual, of course. Meredith hated the thinness, the paleness of the human body against the plastic sheeting. Her own skin did not seem as white, as devoid of color. Even the black children killed in such places seemed pale, cold. But Meredith did not cry; she had seen many other children in other midnight churches and she knew what would happen. The worshippers did not watch Meredith. At first she had been frightened they would see her, but they never did. They were still covering the area around the communion table with clear plastic sheeting. The table was already wrapped in plastic. The worshippers wore white and black robes with large, veiling hoods. Their leader was not present. When he arrived they would make twelve. A coven, according the books in the school library. That was so the thirteenth member could come--the devil. But Meredith was thirteenth and she wasn't a devil. She was a preacher's daughter, which put her firmly on the other side. Sometimes, when Meredith thought about it, she though that maybe she saw the murders so she would be thirteenth, so that the devil couldn't come. Meredith knew what was coming next and hated it. They would gather around the little boy and then the leader would take a long knife with a white handle and he would cut the little boy open. He would show the little boy his own heart. The heart, not very big, not as big as Meredith would have guessed before she saw one, would beat two or three times, then the leader would crush it in his hands. And the little boy would die. And then Meredith would go back to sleep. She would wake up in her own bed, crying. Dana Scully had nightmares now. There were three main kinds that woke her from her sleep with a worrying familiarity: dreams of a case, dreams of her abductions, and dreams of betrayal. No matter what the subject of her dream, their ending had a definite pattern. Waking with a start, a sudden intake. Then staring at the alarm clock, trying to remember where she was, reminding herself that she was safe, the dream was not real, was not happening, that right here, right now, everything was all right. Sometimes when the dream was too vivid, too real, she would turn on her bedside lamp and read for a while. Usually she just rolled over in bed. Two and a half years ago she had not had many nightmares. She thought about that, where her life had gone, rolling over in bed, waiting for sleep. She wasn't unhappy. She had work that she enjoyed, hard work, good work. There was Mulder. There was the truth. Being Mulder's partner was kind of satisfying in and of itself. It was like a marriage: she knew his quirks, his likes and dislikes, his personality traits, strengths and weaknesses. Mulder knew the same about her. She trusted Mulder and Mulder trusted her. Implicitly. She cared about Mulder and Mulder cared about her. Absolutely. Scully would yawn, think about going back to sleep. As she would fall back asleep she would think of Mulder and worry that he was dreaming. He woke, heart pounding, mouth dry, terrified. Tears coursed his face, clogged his nose so he couldn't breath. For a moment he could not think, could not remember who he was. The pain constricted in his chest, extended up into his neck, into the inner part of his throat and stretched down into his groin and into his hips. His arms were already wrapped around his chest, waiting for the pain to alleviate. The worst dreams were those that hurt so badly that he could only curl fetal to pad himself against the pain. He rocked back and forth, finding comfort in the motion. Those times he was beyond crying: then he moved into the soft moans, the anguished animal sounds that betrayed how badly he had been hurt. He had never been in such pain before and could not explain it now. He only knew it hurt, only knew the dreams would come. A few weeks ago, on a stakeout, Scully had seen him come out of one of the worser dreams. Mulder hoped she never saw it again. She had been frightened for him. She had held him the way a mother holds a child in need of love, held his fighting arms down with a gentle strength. It had helped the pain go away. Crying against her chest made him feel safe and secure, made it easier. But her concern later had been overwhelming. The fear she felt for Mulder's mental state had reflected in her eyes for a long time. Sometimes he still saw it. This dream wasn't so bad. Mulder focused on the television set. Focusing on something else was hard. Still, he concentrated. After a while he realized he was watching a t.v. show in black and white. A little while longer he recognized it was a sitcom. Then he tried to remember what the show was. Father Knows Best. That was it. Mulder reached for the remote, flicked channels until he found an old Battlestar Glactica episode. He tried to stop crying. He would watch the rest of the show then get up, go jogging. Meredith sat up. She knew this dream well. The boy was dead, but she must accompany him to his final spot before she was released. Woods, but not woods like those close to home. There were Mountains. The ground sloped. Three men got out of their bronco in the darkness. There was a shallow grave already dug. The little boy, wrapped in the plastic, was dumped into the grave and the men began filling the grave. Meredith waited as they filled the grave. She was terribly cold. It was warm at home, but cold here. Terribly cold through her thin nightgown; icy on her little bare feet, but she was the only mourner. She would stay until they finished. "Morning." Scully said. She assessed her partner's mood quickly as he sat behind his desk and handed over her ritual morning cup of coffee. It was a clear sign of just how bad his night had been that Mulder took the coffee without a single snide comment. Scully sighed, put her hands on her hips, but didn't say anything. Any word would put him on the defensive. He drank her coffee, savoring every sip. "We've been invited to work on a high profile case." He said after her coffee had been deposited down his throat and he'd gone for a second cup--in her mug. "Hmm?" Scully looked up, curious. She had resumed her own desk, was going through her own paperwork. "I am still the FBI's best Satanic killer profiler." Mulder told her. "The Church murders." Scully guessed. She leaned back in her desk chair. "So they want you to. . ." "Go in and look things over, profile the murderers. See if I can find any pattern to the choosing of victims and the choosing of ritual sites. I get to choose my forensics expert. .." "Does this mean I can stay home?" Mulder honored her remark with a withering look. "I get carte blanche on the case. We won't be working with the task force, except in name. There are eleven other agents on this thing and they're getting nowhere." "Are they scared you'll corrupt everyone?" "Or that I'll strangle them all after one too many Spooky jokes." Mulder replied. "We'll make more progress on our own." "What do you think's going on?" "I'm not sure. I know it's more than one person, probably more than two or three." Mulder stood, paced a moment. "From what I've read this morning, they're a wealthy group, very intelligent. This is part of a larger ritual. From the professional nature, I'd guessed that the five murders that have been identified are just the tip of the iceberg. Children have probably been murdered in numerous Churches. The five that have been found and paired off with the appropriate churches were exposed due to the kind of sloppiness that comes from doing a thing too often." Mulder handed his partner a file. "If you write the monograph that catches the murderers you'll be the FBI's darling again." Scully commented, glancing through detailed photographs of butchered remains. Mulder smiled almost sardonically. "I doubt that I could ever do anything to make me the FBI's darling again, short of proving that Hoover wasn't a transvestite." "We're not going." Mulder announced as Scully slid into the Taurus beside him. "What?" Scully frowned at her carry-on bag. They were supposed to be headed for Archer, Nevada where one of the bodies had been found. "I got this early this morning." Mulder handed his partner a computer printout. "This is a listing of phone calls from America's Most Wanted Hotline; they ran a story on the murders a week ago. Look at the synopsis of the ones I've circled." "A child. No message posted. A child again. This time she said it was a coven. Hung up. Umm. . ." Scully scanned quickly. "All right." "Read the two I highlighted. Read it aloud." Mulder clenched the steering wheel. Scully glanced at her partner. "All right `There are many children. Many bodies. They bury them in round holes.' Umm. . . `In the churches they are very neat. They move the communion table to the stage and the podium to the wall. One you found they scuffed the wall.'" "It's the same child." Mulder told her. "The child's only on maybe a minute before she hangs up, so she's scared of someone knowing that she's talking. She's giving us information she couldn't know from any source other than as an eyewitness. I didn't even know they dug round holes. I asked investigators to check the churches. There were scuffmarks on a piece of drywall in a rural church that matched the corner of the lectern." "Do you think she's involved in this?" "I don't know. But I'm going to try and talk to her. She's called every day, between two thirty and four thirty." Scully stared at the printout, aghast that no one else had caught this. The operator nodded, waved her hand. Mulder spit out his sunflower seed and ran to the cubicle, grabbed the headset. It was faster, safer than transferring the call. "Hi. I'm Agent Mulder. I'm working on this case." "Hi." "You've been calling a lot." "Mhm." "Can you talk to me some more?" "No." "Please don't hang up." "You'll trace it." The voice was self assured. "I seen it on t.v.." "Why don't you want us to know who you are? Are you scared? Is someone you know involved?" Silence. Click. "Damn it." Mulder threw down the headset, exasperated. "Damn it. How long was she on?" "One minute twenty seconds." The operator cleared her boards. "A child's asking for Agent Mulder." A man, three chairs down, handed over the headset. "I'm not scared. But I'm not supposed to be having dreams. My momma and daddy think I'm taking my medicine." "You're having dreams?" "I see them in dreams. All of them. The devil is supposed to be 13 but it's me so he can't come." "You see the murders in your dreams?" "Mhm." "Listen, if you tell me who you are, I promise your momma and daddy won't be mad when they find out." Click. She did not call back. Two a.m. The hotline had only a skeleton crew. A memo had been posted above each cubicle about the child. "Hi. Is Agent Mulder there?" "Hi honey. No. He went home." "Oh. I'll call back. In a half hour? Or tomorrow?" "Why don't you talk to me I can get another FBI agent." "No. I want Agent Mulder. He's probably asleep I'll call back tomorrow. Okay?" "Honey, I'll get him right up here. He won't mind." "Half-hour." The line clicked. "My uncle is a sheriff. He just got elected last year." "How old are you?" Mulder asked, relieved she wasn't wasting her time with pleasantries. "Seven. Listen, my name is Meri Aimes. I live at 5537 Highway 422 East. In DeMarr Louisiana." "Thank you, Merry." Mulder leaned against the wall of the cubicle smiling. "Could you come and explain it to Uncle Kenny and then let him explain it to my momma and daddy?" "I think so." "I decided it was silly for me to be scared of them. Momma doesn't even spank. The little kids. . .they. . ." She paused. "It was silly of me." "How long have you been seeing the murders?" "I don't know. Since I was in first grade I guess. They took me to a psychiatrist and made me stay in a hospital. Now I have to take medicine. But I can't think when I'm on it and I think, even though I don't like it, that the dreams are important. You have bad dreams too." "Yes." Mulder tried not to breathe. "A lot of them." "Yes." "Oh. I guess I gotta go. I got school in the morning." The phone clicked again. Scully refused to pass judgement. "The child has dreams with information she could only have gotten as an eyewitness." Mulder said the next morning as they boarded the plane that would take them to Houston. From there it was a commuter plane to Lake Charles, and from there a rental car to DeMarr. "You're taking her word from three telephone conversations, two of which lasted less than a minute." She pointed out, letting Mulder stow the carry-on luggage. "Her father is a minister and Agricultural Agent. Her mother is a schoolteacher. She's seven years old and has been very sheltered since she was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at the age of five. She attends a rural school where the average class size is 14. She doesn't even watch television unless it's off a video tape her parents have previewed. Where is she going to get information about a murder that took place in Oregon?" "I don't know. But her allegations are. . ." Scully threw up her hands ". . .all right. I admit to not having the slightest clue how she knows. Can't I refuse to give into the notion of psychic phenomenon for at least the length of the plane ride?" Mulder sighed, smiled. "Hi. So you're agent Mulder. Meri has told me a great deal about you since this morning." Sheriff Aimes took Mulder's hand in a firm shake. "I'm sorry she was so. . .elusive when she first called your hotline." "I understand she was worried about. . ." Mulder let the sentence falter, hoping Aimes would pick it up. He did. "Robin and Ellie have been sending Meri to a shrink since she was real little. They've tried so many drugs. . ." Aimes shook his head, led both agents down a gravel path towards the small, neat house. "She's been on imprimine for sleepwalking for, oh, I don't know. A couple of years." "Meredith. . ." Ellen Aimes, a young woman, not over 30, closed her eyes. "Is our only child. We've spoiled her somewhat. But it's hard not to. She's always had problems. When she was two the doctor first said she was autistic. She had her own inner world. Hadn't learned to speak or stand. Then in a year she discovered. . .I guess she saw the outside world or something. When she was four she started hearing voices, seeing things. They said she was childhood schizophrenic. Then she stopped. Just stopped." Mrs. Aimes snapped her fingers, tossed her blonde hair back over her shoulder. "She told us she was tired of being in special preschool. She wanted to be in kindergarten. When she was five she started waking up in the middle of the night screaming. She developed all these phobias--she was scared of the dark, of shadows, people in white dresses made her scream. I still can't take her to a baptismal service or a wedding." Mrs. Aimes looked up. "I know this sounds so odd. But you have to meet Merri. She's. . .she's so delightful to be around." "Merri never has acted like a child." Robin Aimes added, shifting from his spot leaning against a bookshelf. "I guess that's our fault. She's always been around our friends, adults. We're the only people in our social group with any kids." He looked down at his leather work boots. "I don't believe in psychic phenomenon." "Your daughter has described murders that have happened in states as far north as Oregon and Maine. She has said things she could not have known, things we didn't even know." "Did you know there had been other murders?" Reverend Aimes asked. "I suspected it." Aimes nodded. Sheriff Aimes glanced sympathetically at his brother. "Ellen, why don't you go get Meri?" Ellen nodded. "Meri?" She called, getting up from her seat in an old rocker. A small figure appeared from the door way. She looked perhaps six, but Scully's belief, having heard the description of her mental problems, that she would be a thin child, with dark circles under her eyes, was shattered. Meredith was tiny, petite, but she was also a beautiful child with dark brown, curling hair, deep set brown eyes. She hugged three big chief tablets to herself like a talisman. "Agent Mulder." She went straight to Mulder's seat beside Scully on the loveseat. She stared a moment, wrinkled her nose, smiled. "Hi. You were right. They weren't mad." "I told you they wouldn't be." Meri nodded and sat down on the coffee table, facing Mulder. She glanced back at her mother, not hesitantly, but as if to assure her mother. Then she looked at Mulder. "I. . . this are my books. I kept them taped to the undersides of the bottom shelves in my closet so no one would find it. Umm . . ." She held out her tablets hesitantly. "I wrote down after every dream what I knew. The first one has really big handwriting. I was only in kindergarten." Mulder took the pads gently. "How do you have your dreams?" Meredith looked at her parents, at Scully. "Do you want to talk privately?" Mulder asked. Meredith glanced at her mother, bit a lip. "I don't mind." Ellen Aimes said softly. "I won't be hurt." Meri considered Agent Mulder and Agent Scully. "Yes. I don't like talking about it." "They tried to make me stop, so I stopped telling them. It worried them." Meri told Mulder. They sat, alone, in a glassed in porch. "Who's them?" Mulder asked. "My momma and daddy and the shrink and oh, everybody." Meri replied. "I dreamed about this church. There was this preacher and we'd play games in the church. Preacher was so nice. He told me Bible stories. I started having dreams when I was three. See, I wasn't talking to anyone or anything. Preacher said he was going to help me know how to talk to people outside." "When did the dreams change?" "When I was five." "What did you start dreaming?" "About the murders. The first one took place in his church. Then Preacher was gone." "How often do you dream about the murders?" "As often as they kill someone." Meri stared at Mulder unflinchingly. "How often is that?" "Once every three weeks." Mulder nodded as though this information did not shock him in the slightest. "How do the dreams go?" "I wake up and I've been asleep on a pew. I sit up and I see they've got a little kid strapped to the communion table. And they . . ." Meri shut her eyes. "They cut him up." She opened her eyes. "People don't die when you cut them open. People don't die then. They don't even die when you take their heart out." "No." Mulder agreed. Meri nodded. It was obvious she had cried often in the past. She was used to this knowledge now, horrible as it was, it was something she knew, had to live with every day. "The next night or the next, they bury the body. The last place was very cold. We've had a heat snap here, that's why it's so warm. I only wore my cotton nightie to bed. But it was so cold there. Icy cold." Meri stared at Mulder. "I don't know why I know. But I do." Mulder nodded, taken with the child before him. "I don't scream anymore. I'm just like you that way. But you were older." "Yes." Mulder nodded. "You were in a hospital too. That's where I learned not to scream too." Mulder looked away, to the winter woods outside. "I'm sorry." Meri's voice was terribly soft. "I didn't mean to remind you." "It's all right." Mulder turned back to Meri, considered the pad he held. "How many murders have you witnessed?" "29." Meri replied. "I kept count." "Will we be able to find most of the churches and bodies from your descriptions?" "No. I can only tell what I see. Most of the time I can't see where I am." Mulder nodded. "You said on the phone that they were 12 and that you were 13." "It's in this book I checked out of the library. Momma and Daddy didn't know I got it, don't tell them 'cause they'd be mad at the librarian. They want to protect me from bad things; they're worried I won't grow up normal. "The book was on witches. It talked a lot about the good witches, how they're just another religon. But it says that black witches, the bad kind, must have their covens in 12 so that the devil can come and be 13. But see, they have their 12, but then I'm there too. They don't know I'm there. And I'm 13. So the devil can't come. They do the sacrifice to make themselves powerful, but since the devil can't come they aren't getting powerful. They just think they are." Meri flashed a quick, scared smile. "I guess. You know it's funny. I'm thirteen and so are you." Mulder didn't track. He shook his head. "Dana's the twelth and you're the thirteenth. The seer." It took a moment, but Mulder finally got it. He was the thirteenth agent on this case. A chill went up his spine. "She knew about something I've never told anyone." Mulder told Scully over lunch, a quick meal in the motel restaurant. "What?" Mulder sighed, looked around. Closed his eyes. "After Sam disappeared, my parents started. . .losing it." He said. ". . .Social services was called in on an anonymous report of child abuse. The social worker was sufficiently upset with my behavior that she called in a psychiatrist who decided I was emotionally disturbed. I was taken from my parents and placed in the adolescent unit of a psychiatric hospital for about a month." Open-mouthed, Scully stared at her partner. "I shared a room with a boy who was about 14. He got tired of my screaming at night, so he would punch me when I screamed. I learned not to scream." "I didn't know. . .Mulder, why haven't you ever told me any of this." "It didn't last long. My parents got another psychiatrist to say I was okay and the judge agreed with them so I went home." Mulder shrugged. "Were you disturbed?" "I don't know. I . . .I remember crying a lot and talking about how Sam would be home when I got in from school. I remember one night, right after they made their 'placement' decision, standing in front of the doors, which were locked, of course, and demanding to be let out because Sam was going to be home and I had to be there to babysit." Mulder smiled, embarrassedly. "I guess I was pretty far gone. I've never talked about that month, never made any mention of it. No one knows." "But Meri knew." "She knew." Mulder agreed. "You don't have any other kind of dream any more, do you?" Scully asked as their sandwiches were brought out. "I mean, all your dreams are nightmares now, aren't they? "What makes you ask that?" "Just answer it." "I used to have other kinds of dreams." "Until I disappeared." "Yes. But then, when you came back, they got better." His eyes begged her to believe him. "They did. I had okay dreams. But now . . ." He looked off, at a waitress. Scully sighed, bit into her club sandwich. Chewed carefully and swallowed. She wanted to push, to find out what was going on in his mind. "Mulder." She began, being very careful with her words. "I'm worried about you. I know it really bothers you for me to be worried. But I'm your partner. I know you trust me. Probably more than any other person in the world." Mulder stared at her, begging her to shut up. Shut up and leave it alone. Leave him alone. "I know you can probably keep going like this, you won't lose it. But. . ." Scully broke, searched desperately for words. ". . .you're hurting. I know you're hurting. It's not right, and it's not fair. When you saw that I was hurting, you didn't shy away from helping me." Mulder tried to think of something to say to this. She had not accused him of being crazy, she had not tried to find out what was going on. Those were things he could slap back, things he could stone wall. She said something that they both knew was truth. Any denial would weaken his own position. He smiled awkwardly. Scully ignored his reaction, tasted her potato salad. When she had eaten a small portion she looked up at Mulder. "I'm sorry." Mulder did not insult her by pretending not to understand. He nodded slowly. "I don't remember that you're safe." He said quietly. Scully looked at Mulder, questioning. "When I wake up, I think you're dead. I know it was my fault." Mulder pushed his roast beef plate away. "That's why it hurts so much." Scully reined her emotions in tightly, forced herself not to over react. She was walking a very fragile line. One misstep and he would shut her out again. "What can I do?" Mulder closed his eyes, took a deep breath. "I don't know." "I think. . .the dreams are getting worse, not better." Mulder opened his eyes, stared at Scully. "How did you know that?" "I've been watching. I am a government agent. It *is* my job." Mulder smiled. Scully let herself smile. They were on the road again that night. Five locations Meri had written about could be ID'd. And a body had already been found. They took the commuter plane to Houston, were on an almost empty American airlines flight to Omaha by midnight, spread out with copies of Meri's big chief tablets, reading, making notes, exchanging lists, making new notes. There were others reading and studying the Meri's record of course, but it couldn't hurt. And it was all they had to go on. The mighty force that was the FBI was poring over an eight year old's Big Chief Tablet with an intensity that more than equalled any other revelation or clue presented to it. He fell asleep somewhere over Oklahoma. They had taken over four seats on this nearly empty airplane, gotten comfortable. Scully smiled at Mulder, propped up by a pillow against the outer wall of the plane, knees slung over the armrest of his two seats and took his copy of the notes. A flight attendant got him a blanket. Scully put his notes away, reached into her portfolio and dug out the forensics on the bodies found and autopsied thus far. The child had been seven, born and raised in Stillwater Oklahoma. He had been killed in Merrick California, a tiny community in the northern part of the state. Scully glanced briefly at the faxed school portrait, flipped over to the meat of the report. A noise startled her. She looked over the top of her report, across the aisle, on instinct. Mulder jerked in his sleep. Scully eyed the flight attendant, so far the woman hadn't seen anything. Good. If she was fast and lucky, she could wake him; this would pass without incident. She edged over to where he sprawled. By the time she got there, the dream was in control. "Mulder? Wake up." Her voice was sharp. "Come on. Wake up. You're having a bad dream. Wake up." Mulder was crying, softly, without sound. "Come on. Wake up." Scully edged her voice with steel. "You have to wake up. Now." He jerked, hard, in his sleep, then sat up with a deep breath. "Okay." Scully brushed hair away from Mulder's face. He wrapped his arms around his chest. "You're awake now. It's all better. You're awake." He didn't hear her, just stared across the aisle blankly, crying silently, rocking softly. He did not look, not then, like her partner, Fox Mulder. He looked like a child, a terrified child. "Is something wrong?" The flight attendant looked over Scully's shoulder. At her voice, Mulder tensed, the rocking grew harder. "Mulder. Come on. Snap out of it." Scully said. She did not allow emotion into her voice. "Wake up and snap out of this. You're all right. I'm all right. Wake up." In a few minutes she hoped he would be better, he would focus, blow his nose. It would be all right. But somehow she knew it would not be all right. "It's all right." She grabbed his shoulders, tried to stop the rocking that frightened her so. "It's all right." She repeated. She had no idea how long it would take him to reemerge from the twilight. The only time she had seen, it had taken Mulder the better part of fifteen minutes to become lucid, then he had been useless the rest of the night, reticent, ruminating the dream, unable to focus on anything properly. Mulder had claimed five minutes and said he was a "a little depressed" and stupidly she had kept her mouth shut. He had also claimed that had been one of the worst times. She did not know whether or not he was lying. Meanwhile the flight attendant was looking terribly nervous. "My purse is over there. Get it." Scully said, finally. She did not want to do this, but she had no other options, not right here, not right now. A second attendant came and stood, made sure the other passengers did not notice. The attendants were watching, worriedly. Dealing with crazy--no, let's all be PC--dealing with "emotionally disturbed" people might be in the manual, but it wasn't something they were used to dealing with in real life. Scully fumbled through her purse. She had gotten this, and then cursed her own unprofessionalness, but she didn't want to be alone with his fear again. "Mulder. This is a barbituate, a major tranquilizer." Mulder was still in the darkness, lost somewhere. And he wondered why it scared her. She got a hypodermic, ripped it out of its little paper packaging, got the bottle out, filled it. . .50 mg a ml. 150-200mg usual dosage, not to exceed 5 ml, Scully recited to herself. 200mg then. He had taken off his suit jacket and was in rolled up shirt sleeves. Good. She pushed the sleeve up as far as she could. This would be much better in his backside, but circumstances warranted that she forego that convient muscle mass. It would take a few minutes now, but he would calm down once the drugs took over. Meanwhile, Mulder still showed no signs of emerging into the real world from his dream. "Mulder. Samantha is gone. That's true. But I'm not. I promise." She forced him to stare at her by putting her hands on his face, turning his head towards her, by not letting go when he resisted. "It's me. Dana. I'm here and I'm all right. I'm alive and I'm well and you don't have to be so frightened. It's Scully." The rocking began to still a few minutes later. Scully did not know whether it was the drugs or his waking. She knew she never wanted to deal with this thing again. She knew she had every reason to be frightened. Mulder calmed as the Nembutal began coursing through his system. Scully talked softly to him, about things that didn't matter. About how she was there and she wasn't dead, that it was all right. He listened numbly and she could still see the painful fear in his eyes. He had let their friendship go into the dark stillness of his soul without thinking about the idea that she could die. Scully wondered how desperate a betrayal it was for him to realize that she could die just the same as anyone else, to realize that he could be completely alone again. "What's happened?" The flight attendant asked Scully, once Mulder was again asleep, again sprawled across two chairs. "My friend and I. . .were involved in . . .some things. . ." Scully began cautiously. "We're federal agents." She tried again. "My partner has been experiencing the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, related to a past incident. What happened is perfectly normal. He would have eventually calmed down and begun acting rationally on his own." "What did you give him?" Another woman, the one who had kept other passengers from seeing their minor emergency. "Just a tranquilizer." Yeah, right. Thank god this woman had no medical training. "He'll be fine when we get to Omaha." "Does this happen very often?" "No. Very rarely. We're both extremely tired, that's all." Scully finished calming the attendants down and went back to her own nest, stared at the sleeping figure. "Come on." Scully shook Mulder gently. "Come on." He stared at her with confused eyes. "We're in Omaha." She added softly. She had waited until other passengers were gone. "Oh. I don't feel good." "I know." Scully smiled, took his hand, helped him up. When he came down out of la-la land he would be highly upset. She doubted he would remember being given a tranquilizer, but he would be able to figure out what had happened. She got him out of the plane and into a rental car without any difficulties, "I need two rooms, with a connecting door if that's possible." Scully requested, knowing how it sounded, not really giving a damn if some hotel clerk in Omaha, Nebraska thought two FBI agents were screwing like minks on taxpayer's money. "Umm. . ." The clerk, a middle aged woman looked through her reading glasses at Mulder. "We're pretty booked up. The Rodeo Finals are this week and we're the official hotel." She looked at Mulder again. Mulder was leaning against a wall, staring dazedly at a wall clock. "Why don't I just say that we only have one room open and make a note of the discount on your bill. Your beancounters may find it irregular but they won't say anything." Scully stared at the woman. "No, thank you." She said, flustered. "You're not going to be in the other room. Why waste it? We aren't going to have any vacancies when the night's over. This way I have to turn away one less traveler." The woman stared at Scully, eagle eyed. "Look, I don't think you're sleeping with him if that's what's got your panties in a wad. But he doesn't look too good, and he's not too with it or he'd be part of the conversation. I'm trying to do you a favor." Scully took a deep breath. "All right. Thank you. I'm sorry." "No problem." They went down to the other end of the counter where the credit card scanner sat innocently. The woman nodded in Mulder's direction, leaned over her forms and whispered softly, so that only Scully could hear. "My husband came home from Vietnam with it so bad he can't work, in and out of the VA hospital. At least whatever's happened to your friend isn't so bad he's getting a disability check from the government every month." "Come on." Scully helped Mulder out of his jacket, out of his pants and shirt. Mulder fell into the bed. "What did you give me?" He asked. "Nembutal." He nodded. "You were having a bad dream. Do you remember?" "No." "If I'd left you alone you would have come out of it on your own. But I couldn't leave you alone. There were other people." "I'm not crazy." "I know that." She sat on the edge of his bed. "But when we get back to Washington you have to see a psychiatrist." Mulder sighed, turned his face away. "This isn't going away." Scully sighed. "All right. This isn't the best time to discuss it. You go to sleep. I'm going to take a shower first. All right?" He nodded tiredly. "Okay." The next morning she woke to the sounds of Mulder showering. She got dressed while he took his time in the bathroom. "How are you feeling?" She asked, leaning close to the room's full length mirror as she applied make-up, watching from the corner of her eye as he emerged draped in a hotel robe. "I'm all right." He replied, going to his hang up, pulling out a suit and shirt, grabbing underwear from the side pocket. "I was going to be angry, but you didn't have any choice." "No." Scully stopped putting on mascara, stared through the mirror at her partner, surprised. He faced the wall and started getting dressed. "I don't remember anything until the hotel." Scully forced herself to finish putting on her mascara, got out a lipstick. "There's a window where you're awake but still part of the dream, and you may remember it as just a little out of touch, but even when you become aware of your surroundings, you're still not. . . normal." She said. "I tried to talk to you about it before, but you shut me out." Mulder zipped his pants, pulled on his shirt, and turned to face her mirror. "How long have you had tranquilizers in your purse?" "About three weeks." He nodded, tucked his pants in. "Why didn't you tell me?" He was upset, trying not to be. "Tell you what?" Scully turned to face him, amazed. "You arched like a spitting cat when I even mentioned your dreams. If I said anything you shut me out completely. I'm supposed to go in and tell you I got a prescription of Nembutal filled so that the next time you wigged out I could get you calmed down? You wouldn't have even let me into your thoughts the little bit that you did." Scully took a deep breath. "Mulder, I know you've been having a difficult time, and I know you'll make it through this. But when you wake up from a nightmare and I'm there I have to deal with it somehow. I don't have the physical strength to restrain you, and you are incapable of any rational thought at those times so I can't talk to you. I had to have some way of dealing with the aftermath of your dreams." She was suddenly sick to her stomach. "If you don't go see a psychiatrist--not just a therapist, I want you to see a medical doctor--when we get back to Washington I'll go to Skinner and I'll make it sound like you are about two steps from psychosis." She stared at Mulder unflinchingly. "You know he'll believe me. If I didn't care about you I wouldn't bother and you know that too." Mulder stared at Scully, not quite believing what he was hearing. Suddenly he nodded, defeated. "All right." "Good. Finish getting dressed." They were given a young woman to drive them to the site. "She has a Grand Cherokee and relatives who're members of Grace Baptist." Supervisory Agent McCall told them. "You'll need four-wheel drive to get out there. She had to drop out of Quantico, after her family--Mom, Pop, Bro's and Sis's got wiped out in a car accident. She'll be back next session." Mulder and Scully had both winced. The young woman, Becky Martin, was professional, however, except for her liscence plate, which read "Precious." The area was desolate and bitterly cold. The people working on the site seemed not to notice the winds gusting around them. Scully knelt beside another forensics worker, discussed whatever it was that a good pathologist would find to talk about. Mulder separated himself from the others. Martin, luckily, was not someone who insisted on talking. She left him alone, let him scope out the playing field. He stopped about fifty feet from the activity. Here. Meredith had said that this was the place. She stood here, bare feet burning cold on an ice strewn ground. A little girl, Meri's diary recorded, a blonde girl missing three teeth. He squatted, trying to see things as Meredith would have. It had been dark, and the moon had only been a quarter full, but very bright. Mulder squinted up into the morning sky, at the crystalline blue sky. Three men in a Bronco. They brought out shovels and dug a small hole, slid the body, wrapped in heavy plastic drop cloth, down into their shallow hole. Then they covered the place as best they could and moved on. Mulder stood. There was nothing really to be learned here. A stench began to assault him. He strode towards its source. Scully came to him at the edge of the excavation. "Was she accurate?" He asked. Scully nodded tersely. "Down to the placement of the missing teeth." She responded. "I'm going to stay here for a while." Mulder nodded. He'd seen what he came to. "I'll take Martin and go back then." "All right. I have some errands to run when I'm through here. I'll meet you at the field office around five." "Yeah, fine." The church had crime scene tape over the doors and a sheriff's deputy curled up in his cruiser reading a Ghost Rider comic book, but otherwise the area was deserted. A small church, not one to attract any attention. Mulder found everything as Meredith had said it would be. Folding chairs set up in loose circular rows around a small podium. A communion table set to one side. The only ostentation, only evidence this was a church and not a community hall, was a leaded glass window depicting a dove flying out of a fire. "It's not such a bad little church." Martin said. "Never been real big on church in my family." Mulder smiled faintly, wished he could say the same. Meredith had woken on the floor, facing the window. He moved around, trying to find her place. There. She sat there. So close she sat on the plastic covering. Mulder dropped down, considered how it would have looked. First, clad in their white robes, members of the coven had tied the naked child to the table, had carefully prepared the area. Then the leader and all the members of the coven assembled, all in white robes. They gathered around the child silently. Their leader stabbed deep with his knife. Blood spurted. The leader rips up, cuts through the ribs, up into the chest. Finished, he pulls out the heart, shows it to the child then squeezes all the life away. All right. He had a victim, he had a ceremony. That much was certain. Mulder put his knees up, apart, sat with his arms between his legs. Martin sat in one of the chairs, glanced at him, shrugged; she'd heard the stories about Spooky Mulder. This smacked of procedure rather than ritual. Ritual, define it. Mulder thought of what the word connotated. Doing things a certain way because it was comfortable, because it had been done that way before. Did it have to make sense? No. In a cult a ritual had a purpose. It had to be that way or something, some higher force would be highly upset. Procedure. Define it, he ordered himself. A way of doing things that has developed or been developed with a purpose. Procedures changed when they needed to change. People as a rule are scrupulous in the observance of rituals, they do rituals even when it isn't best to do them. Why? Because, that's the way a ritual is done. If you don't do the ritual right something bad will happen to you. Sometimes, because of repetition people got sloppy with procedures, procedures did not carry the same penalties. Rituals meant something. Procedures were just efficient. Five murders had been found because of sloppy procedure. There were no sacred words according to Meredith. No sacred rituals. They bound the child to the communion table, put down plastic wrap. The leader came and killed the child. All right. That was ritual. They did that the same way, perfectly. No. scratch that. Their leader did that perfectly. That was all he did. The coven did everything else. And sometimes they got sloppy. They were twelve because the thirteenth was Satan. Mulder stared at the leaded glass. No mumbo jumbo, no ritual involved in choosing places, just crafty planning. There should be ritual, there should sacred sayings, something. No. Just the leader cutting out the heart with business-like precision. Well, a heart surgeon uses procedure and never gets sloppy or people start dying. So the leader's actions could be defined as procedure too. So what were they trying to do and why didn't they act like a cult? Mulder put a hand to his face, thought about it. This was not a cult. No, this was a an organization working towards a practical goal. A goal? That was a new question. If they had a goal what was it? The killings were not killings for the purpose of killing were they? In a cult, the killings would be part of a religous ceremony. Not here. They had a purpose. If he took Meredith on face value, which he did, then this was not a cult. They would be impossible to catch. No, scratch that. They should be impossible to catch. Mulder had Meredith. He had a chance. "Let's go." He told Martin, standing up suddenly. Mulder was finishing a preliminary report when Scully showed up at the regional office. He let her read over his shoulder as he proofread the report. "Are the wounds identical?" He questioned. "I assumed they were." "Yes. Everything is depressingly the same." Mulder nodded, unsurprised. "Do you remember what Meredith said about the first church she witnessed a murder in?" Scully thought back. Nodded. "She had dreams about it before." "Dreams where she and an older man, a minister, went around the church. Played games. He taught her Bible stories and songs." Scully nodded as though she had the foggiest idea what was going on. "So?" She prodded. "I think if we could find the history of that first church we might have a clue as to the reason for these murders." Mulder paused. "There was some reason Meredith dreampt about that particular church. I don't know. Maybe she visited it when she was younger and didn't remember it. But there had to be a reason." Scully groaned. "What?" Mulder glanced up at her, surprised by her reaction. "This means we're flying back to Louisiana, doesn't it?" Mulder smiled. "No middle of the night flights, please." Scully told him. "Come on. Let me send this and we'll go to dinner. Martin told me about a great steak place." She pulled Nembutal into the syringe, sitting on the bed. Mulder pretended to ignore her preparations. "I'm not going to sleep tonight." He told her, coming out of the bathroom in his jogging sweats. "You've got to sleep." Scully replied, putting the cap back over the needle. "Here." She had gotten a prescription of Ativan at the druggist, not bothering to tell anyone why she needed to stop at a pharmacy. Let them think she was out of birth control pills or that her period had come early, let them think she needed Ativan because Mulder was driving her crazy. "No thanks." Mulder smiled, headed out the door. Scully sighed and pulled out her file on the little girl, as yet unidentified. It was not human. Scully's eyes opened and she reached instinctively for her gun. There on the coffee table. Darkness. She had fallen asleep on the couch, over paperwork. Mulder had graciously put the file away and slung a blanket over her. The sounds of the shower reassured her and she put her gun back. Mulder had come in, tidied up and was taking a shower. She lay a moment in the darkness, thinking she ought to get up, get undressed. The sound. Again. Scully sat up, questioning. A faint noise. She got up. "Mulder?" Rapped on the door. "Mulder?" She questioned again. "Hey? You in there?" She got no answer. The sounds were coming from the shower. Scully stumbled back to the bed and got the Nembutal. He'd fallen asleep in the bathroom. Wonderful. The door was not locked. Mulder had gotten his sweatshirt off and turned the shower on. He sat, huddled on the tiling, bleeding a puddle on the floor around him. "Mulder?" Scully knelt beside him. His hands and face were bloodied. The blood in his hair was drying in pockets of mats. She touched his face. "Shh." She said, considering him under the bright bathroom lights. She could not tell the extent of his injuries. They did not appear to be serious, but there was so much blood. She put the syringe down on the toilet seat. "How did you get this? Did you fall?" She asked. Mulder stared at her dazedly, shivered. Scully snapped her fingers trying to get his attention. Carefully, she took his face in her hands. There was no evidence of any drugs or head trauma though she could see a large cut on his temple. His pupils responded normally to light, his skin was not clammy. Pulse rate fast, but not dangerously so. He pulled away from her hands. She crawled over to the shower, turned the water down to the spigot, wet the bathmat, then turned the water off. "Do you know who you are?" She asked, sponging water onto his face. He did not respond, but jerked away from her ministrations. Scully sighed and pulled his face back to her. "It's all right." She held tightly onto his chin, cleaned blood away from a large wound on his right temple. It looked as though he had fallen, hard, onto something hard and sharp edged. She looked up, directly at a towel bar. No doubt if she inspected it she would find blood. That did not account for most of the blood though. Mulder jerked away from her again, rolled onto his side, tucked fetal, hands wrapped tightly around his chest. Scully could not explain this. It was not head trauma. It was not a psychotic state induced by his nightmares. She pulled, but he was completely tense now, unwilling to let her do anything. She reached for the Nembutal and injected it intramuscular, tugging the sweatpants down, cleaning a spot on his hip with alcohol. He had a headache. Mulder stared at the ceiling blankly. His head hurt and he was terribly thirsty. He tried to sit up. Someone gently pushed back, then let him push up on the pillows just a little. "Good afternoon." Scully swam into view, held a glass of water, helped him sip it. "How are you feeling?" She helped him push into a gentle recline, bolstered by pillows. "Head hurts." He said, licking his lips. "You've got a nasty cut on your forehead." Scully told him. "You were lucky it didn't need stitches." "What happened?" "I don't know. I was hoping you might remember. I found you on the floor of the bathroom completely incoherent." Mulder tried to think back. "Someone threw blood on me." He remembered. "What?" "When I went out jogging. I was coming back and someone threw blood onto my face." "Did you see who?" Mulder shook his head. "By the time I cleaned out my eyes they were gone. I came straight back. You had fallen asleep. I got you a blanket. I was going to clean up so I went to the shower." He paused, confused. "I don't remember anything else." Scully nodded, got up, returned with some aspirin and more water. "Here. This should help your head." Mulder took the pills, holding his own glass this time. "It's already noon. I woke up last night because I heard you moaning. When I went into the bathroom you'd taken off your shirt, you were curled up against the wall. You wouldn't let me help you and you didn't seem to understand anything. I drugged you, cleaned you up as best I could, got you into bed. You went to sleep. As soon as you're feeling better you need to shower and wash your hair. I changed the plane reservations to 3." She got up, dug around in her portfolio for an evidence bag and a small pair of shears. "If the blood in your hair isn't yours we need to find out whose or what it is." Mulder nodded, turned his head. Scully considered carefully before clipping. She didn't want to leave her partner bald in a patch. Carefully she clipped around the side of his face, catching two clots of blood into her bag. "It's conceivable that the blood is cow's or chicken's." Mulder said, pushing up into a higher sit. "But I doubt it." Scully nodded, looking at the two clots. "This means someone knows we're on the case." She said, sitting on her own bed. "Someone related to the coven." Mulder amended for her. "I know. It confuses me though. Why just throw blood onto my face? Why not kill me?" Meredith hoped her message had been heard, but she doubted it. She leaned over her schoolwork, frowned at the instructions Mrs. Andersen had sent. Uncle Kenny was busy with paperwork at his desk. They had set it up so that when Meri wasn't at home she was at the sheriff's office. That way the FBI didn't have to have agents out taking care of her. Momma got her schoolwork for her. Meri had gone to DeMarr elementary in Kindergarten. It was a big kindergarten. 8 teachers just for kindergarten. Now she went to Breaux High School, which was all the schools in one. There were only 11 kids in all of third grade. Momma taught at Breaux, so Meri went with her to school. Mrs. Andersen had sent all Meri's schoolwork. So Meri had something to do for about three hours. Uncle Kenny took her to the library every morning and Meri had all kinds of art supplies--crayons, pastels, tempera, watercolors and lots of paper. She looked up from the work on four number subtraction, sighed and watched uncle Kenny work. When there was something Meri shouldn't see or hear she went out to the dispatcher's office or to a detective's office. He was busy, busy enough he wouldn't notice if she took a break. Meri, curled up on a little rug, put her paperwork down and picked up her book. Mulder popped two extra-strength Tylenol into his mouth, swallowed with some diet coke. They were cramped into their assigned seats on this flight into DFW. He looked down at his copy of Meri's notes, looked at an annotation they'd gotten in from the bureau. Handwriting experts said the writing was consistent with the fine motor development of about a four or five year old. A child psychologist said that the writing style was more reminiscent of a third grader. A call to the Aimes confirmed that Meredith had been reading since preschool. A great deal of trauma present in the first accounts. A notation that it seemed as though someone was telling Meredith to write the first entries. Mulder scratched the back of his neck. Preacher's influence? How did Meredith's Preacher fit into all this anyway? From Meredith's account Preacher was the one responsible for leading her out of Schizophenia. Mulder pulled out the report on Meredith, read the nitty-gritty information. He'd heard it all before so he hadn't bothered until now. He knew what he would find. "Scully." She looked up from her perusual of photos of the sites they hadn't visited. "Hmm?" Mulder handed his partner Meredith's file. "Look at this." "What?" "Meredith was adopted." Scully groaned. "Now you're going to tell me she has some kind of psychic link to someone in the coven because that person is her genetic mother." Mulder gave Scully a hurt look. "I was not." "Well, what then?" "Her birth mother is a a close friend of the Aimes who got pregnant when she was raped. I was going to suggest that someone in the coven must be her birth father." Scully groaned again. Meri was glad to see Agent Mulder. As soon as she got him alone, she would see if he got her message. "Hi." She told the two agents, leaning against her uncle's car. "Hi." Both agents replied. From the window, Uncle Kenny watched. Now that she was with the two agents, he went back to his work. Meredith lead them into the sheriff's office, past the receptionist, past the first set of offices. There was a little room where they talked to people they weren't going to arrest. Meredith didn't like it much because it smelt nasty, but it was a good place to talk. Uncle Kenny'd told her they were coming in last night. But they'd gone to the Best Western and it was this morning before they saw her. They'd talked to her parents over the phone. Meredith heard Aunt Alexandra's name mentioned several times. She knew Agent Mulder hadn't slept last night. He'd done paperwork instead. Agent Scully had a drug in a needle to give him if he went to sleep and had a nightmare. It was odd that she saw him. It was odd that she had seen him before. She'd been listening to him cry for a long time. Since a couple of months ago. Before she knew who he was. Aunt Alexandra was nice. Babies came out their mother's uterus, which was a place in a woman's stomach, another way of saying womb. But Meredith had come out of Aunt Alexandra's uterus because Momma couldn't have babies. That was why she didn't look like her Momma or Daddy, because you looked like the person whose womb you came out of, and like the person they loved. Aunt Alexandra liked to spoil Meredith. Aunt Alexandra was in college, getting a Master's in psychology but when she came home she would take Meredith to the Mall in Alexandria and spend lots of money on her. Momma pretended to get upset, but wasn't. Daddy didn't even pretend to get upset, just admired all of Meredith's new outfits and laughed at the gag gifts Meredith and Aunt Alexandra bought Momma and Daddy. But now Agent Mulder and Agent Scully were here. She told them about how she wasn't allowed to go to school for a while. But it was pretty cool because Uncle Kenny or Mr. Grant, one of the detectives, took her out to eat at a fast food restaurant for lunch. "It's cold in Nebraska." She finished. The agents exchanged looks, Agent Mulder shrugged. "Yeah. But it'll get colder." "Mhm." Meri smiled. "Did you get my message?" "Message? No. Did you send me one?" "Last night. Late. I wanted to tell you about Preacher. I didn't know you were already coming." The two agents exchanged another look. "How did you send your message?" Mulder asked. Meri frowned. "Special way." She said. "I've never done it before. The books say it's ESP. Daddy thinks ESP is horse hooey, which is a nice way of saying horse poop." She decided not to mention knowing Agent Mulder's dreams. Another look. Agent Mulder fingered a bandage on his forehead. "I got it." He said. "But I couldn't hear what you were saying." "It was about Preacher." "The one who taught you." "Mhm." Meri bit her bottom lip. "I don't understand. But I think Preacher's the reason I see the Murders." "What can you tell us about Preacher?" Mulder asked. Meri frowned, bit her bottom "My daddy has a picture of him in a photo album. I found it last year when I had the flu. He was really nice. He taught me how to read and how to write. He taught me about manners and lots of games. He had a big orange cat named Ba'ar." "There he is." Meredith pointed to the photo of three men sitting around a small table, eating ice cream.. "That's him." Reverend Aimes pushed up his reading glasses, stared at the photo, glanced around his church office nervously. "Meri, why don't you and Agent Scully go outside." Mulder suggested. "You can show me the church." Scully suggested, taking Meredith's hand. "Can you tell me who this is?" Mulder asked, when they were gone. "That's a distant cousin. He was a minister in Mississipi, Jim Kelly, we grew up together, real close friends. This was taken before Meri was born, in Glorieta, a Baptist conference center. Before Meri was born, Ellen and I went every year. We'd plan it out so that Kelly would be there at the same time. Then we'd all go up to Colorado for a week." "Did Reverend Kelly ever have a Cat named Ba'ar?" Mulder asked. "Yeah. He used to smuggle Ba'ar into hotel rooms; cat went everywhere with him." "Where is Reverend Kelly now?" "Umm. . .about seven years ago he was killed in an auto accident. Ba'ar too." Aimes frowned. "That's when we stopped going to Glorieta. There were too many ghosts." Mulder nodded, glanced down at the first page of Meredith's notes. "This is from your daugther's notebook. Does this describe any church Reverend Kelly pastored?" Aimes took the highlighted material, read it. "This is Kelly's last church." He said, surprised. "It's a really nice church. He was full-time, not bivocational." Going back to their hotel, Mulder and Scully discovered that the media knew that the FBI had gotten psychic help, that the psychic was a child, and that there were 29 murders. So much Mulder and Scully watched on CNN before going to lunch. Bernard Shaw reporting. "At least they don't know who she is or where." Mulder commented wrily as an FBI spokesperson dedicated to not saying anything, appeared on the screen. He was part of the "official" taskforce. "They will." Scully replied reading through their messages. "Have you tried to use your cellular?" "Nope." "Well, apparently there isn't any cellular coverage in DeMarr Louisiana." Scully held up three notes. "What do you want to bet that we're supposed to get Meredith Aimes and her family under Federal Protection before Ted Turner's hounds find her?" Mulder took the pink notes, frowning. "Wonderful." Scully sighed, picked up the phone, called D.C.. "I'm going over to my room to change." Mulder said. Scully nodded. He came back before her call had gone through. "That can wait. Come over here." He ordered, face pale. Scully hung up the phone, followed him out. Scully wrinkled her nose at the stench. Mulder stood just inside the door. Blood, urine and feces covered the walls, the floor, the bed, the furniture. Obscene words had been scrawled in blood and feces on the mirror. The television had been smashed as had the toilet, to judge from the water spilling onto the floor. Mulder's files had been strewn about the long lowboy and shredded, then covered in blood and urine, his clothes covered in feces. His laptop lay in several violent pieces on the floor. "They know we're here." He said unnessesarily. "They probably know where Meri is." Scully added. They left the room before either agent could follow through on the stomach's command to vomit. Scully called Sheriff Aimes from her hotel phone, described the scene, then called D.C.. They sat in the Best Western's restaurant as darkness began cloaking the world of DeMarr Louisiana in her soft blues. Agents Mahoney and Greer from the New Orleans office sat with them. Mulder was tired. He wanted to curl up on his couch at home and watch a really bad horror flick. Meredith was somewhere else, a safe house Mulder supposed, though he didn't know where right now and really didn't care. Scully watched him, concerned. She was of the same two minds as the FBI was. They were in danger and needed to be taken off the case. But Mulder's work had made more headway into this case than the work of all the other agents combined and the public was demanding a solution to the case. Janet Reno was promising a solution to this case. So Mahoney and Greer had been sent up. In the morning the pair would be replaced by two other special agents who would, essentially, babysit. Mahoney and Mulder had gone to a J.C. Penny's and bought Mulder some other clothes. He sat in new Levi's and a rugby shirt, new hiking boots. She knew that in deference to her sex no one would try to stay in the room with her. Mulder she wasn't so sure about. His room, his things had been targeted. "They're not going to try to kill me." Mulder said for quite possibly the twelth time. The waitress brought their orders out, glanced nervously out the window at their motel room now festooned with yellow police tape. Scully frowned at her broiled chicken and baked potato, tried to eat. Mulder didn't even glance at his hamburger, but sat thinking. "Eat." Scully told him after a couple of minutes. "Hmm?" Mulder looked at her surprised. "Eat something." "Oh." Mulder glanced down the table at Greer who was busy with a Rueban. "Hand me the ketchup." He asked Mahoney. Mulder covered his fries, stared at the ketchup, lost again in his thoughts. "You haven't been without sleep long enough to get this spacy." Scully said, swallowing a bite of potato. Mulder looked up, played back her comment mentally and then smiled. "No. Maybe not. I'm just. . .Meredith's birth mother is in school down in Baton Rouge?" "Mhm. She's taking graduate courses in psychology and teaching high school English." Scully replied. "But she lived in DeMarr when Meredith was concieved." "I guess so." "You know, when I was growing up the minister of our church asked friends of his to preach our revivals." Scully's eyes narrowed as she caught his train of thought. "Are you suggesting that Kelly was Meredith's father?" She asked. Mulder shrugged. "Was Kelly ever married?" "I don't know." "I think I want to talk to her." Mulder talked the other two agents into driving them down to Baton Rouge that night. Scully was against the idea whole heartedly, but decided not to argue too strenously. They rode in the back of the agency Taurus. Greer and Mahoney talked with each other about Louisiana problems, riverboat gambling and how financial support for state colleges and universities was drying up. "If you start having a nightmare" Scully told Mulder softly "I'm drugging you immediately." Mulder considered this and nodded. It would be best if the agency didn't have to get involved with his emotional problems, at least not right now. It would just be SOP to remove Mulder from the case and put him on extended leave. There would be no argument, no appeal no matter what the reason. Mulder settled back in the dark. Scully did not have to see him to know he was thinking, mulling things over in his mind. She thought back to a professor she'd once had in Med School, she forgot the class; the professor had come in one day on a rampage about something, about some incident that had nothing to do with the course and proceded to give them a lecture on Post Traumatic Stress. "A survivor of extraordinary stressors suffers because he behaves normally to an abnormal event. The stressful event imprints a mind hard" the professor slapped his lectern sending a rousounding pound through the hall "deeply, so deeply that all behavior from that point on relates to the experience. When a person has had such an experience all thoughts lead back to that one event. All thoughts." He had paused for thought. "When the indivdual ties his shoes, his mind is wondering, did I tie my shoes before? Is that what lead to it happening? When he orders the veal instead of the chicken his mind is wondering, was it the veal last time? Did I order veal sometime before it happened? Should I order chicken? "The mind will avoid that horrible incident if it can in any way, so the mind is constantly challenging any new experience for similarities. It doesn't want to ever, ever, ever let anything like that happen to it again. "If similarities between the stressor and a current happening are found the survivor reacts strongly. Chemically, there are differences between someone with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and someone without the syndrome, which indicates that the incident has been imprinted. Indicates that the person is obsessive because they cannot stop being obsessive. "You've all seen a movie where a Vietnam vet has bad dreams. Well, hell yeah. If every thought that ran through your brain went back to one horrific event you'd wake up in the cold sweats too." The professor had paused, thought, gotten to whatever was bothing him most. "When someone like this comes into an emergency room or walks into your office don't patronize, don't judge. *THEY DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE.* They're stuck with the constant thinking. The best you can do is try to help." The lecture had remained with Scully. Dealing with Mulder you had to remember that. All his thoughts led back to Samantha. He hadn't said her name this entire case, but Scully knew that dealing with the murders of children the same age as Samantha, dealing with a child Samantha's age who bore a resemblance to the child in Mulder's photographs, must be hell. All right. This was not Dream Anxiety. This was not Sleep Terror. Were these, as Mulder assumed, severe flashbacks? She moaned. Not her speciality. Mulder was quiet, ruminating. Scully knew better than to try and draw him out. They were on I-49 when he surprised her by speaking. "I'm beginning to understand our Coven." He told Scully. "I don't know why they're doing this, but I'm beginning to understand some of their procedures." In the darkness Scully could see him wipe his face with his hands. He would need to buy toiletries in Baton Rouge, as well as more clothes, she thought inanely, giving him a kleenex. He hadn't bought any hankerchiefs. "They scare me." Scully tried to make out Mulder's features, but they were hidden. "They're not doing this from deluded notions. They have a plan. They have money. They have anonymity. I think we're dealing with twelve professionals. They've been drawn together for a purpose. They have a recognized leader. "Do you believe in Satan?" "As a being? I believe Evil exists. I believe Good exists. But not a fallen angel named Satan." "What about Demons?" "A couple of years ago I would have said no." "Now?" "Now I don't recognize them as part of my belief system. That's all I'll commit to." She could feel Mulder's smile through the darkness. "I don't." Mulder replied. "But I'm beginning to wonder. If you look at the ideas behind most theological descriptions of evil, it reduces to this--the purpose of evil is to defile good as much as is possible. Evil can only gain power through the plundering of the natural power of Good. That's what the whole mythos of Satan being a fallen angel is about and that's why most cultures have a fallen angel myth." "All right." Scully could almost agree to that. "Meredith is a catalyst. She has a great deal of power. She told me Preacher was sent to her to teach her how to connect with the outside world. This was during the periods when she was classified autistic and schizophrenic. He was gentle and loving and a perfect mentor. His going away coincided not only with the start of the murders, but also with the time period when most of Meredith's true problems ended. What's going on now is Post Traumatic Stress. "All right." Scully could understand that they were on Mulder's mental highway, but could not make out where he was headed. "What if the thirteenth is supposed to be Meredith?" Scully frowned. "They're trying to take over Meredith?" "No. Nothing so gothic. Just keep her from becoming whatever it is she has the potential to become. The forces of good have invested a lot in her--parents firmly committed to raising her well, even though it appears she will have limited abilites, a second ghost father who counsels her. A peaceful envirament. Meredith has great power. If they can take even little bits of it they can use it to their own ends. Plunder." The last word sounded obscene. Scully nodded. "Of course, it's just a theory." Mulder finished. He leaned towards Scully. "Give me some of that Ativan." He said softly. "No water." "I don't care." Scully took the small bottle out of her purse, handed him a couple of 2 mg. pentagonal pills. Great shape to put them in guys. She thought as he took it without water, swallowed it dry. Like we need any more dealings with pentagonal shapes: military, magical, or medicinal. Scully watched as he closed his eyes, crashed against the seat, legs eventually moving and taking over her foot space. She caught Greer's eye in Opelousas. "I see why they call him Spooky." Greer said. "And I don't mean it in a bad way." Scully smiled, glanced at her sleeping partner. "Imagine being his partner." She replied wryly. They were put up at the Hilton. Mulder roused druggedly. He was lucid, but stumbly. It looked as though he'd gone too long without sleep. At least Scully hoped it looked that way as she let Greer and Mahoney check them into rooms. Mulder didn't have any bags--his one surviving suit, the one he'd been wearing, was tucked in among Scully's hang ups. He fell into a bed the moment the bellboy left. Greer had a room next door to Mulder's room. Mahoney was across the hall and Scully's room connected with a door to Mulder's. Mahoney was going to take this room but she intervened. "No. We're not sleeping together." Scully took the key from Mahoney's hand with an ironic smile. "But unless you want Mulder waking you from a sound sleep with a new theory on UFO's at Roswell I wouldn't reccomend letting him have full access to your room." "He does that?" Mahoney asked. Mulder smiled, yawned from the bed. "No. Usually it's a new theory on Genetic Mutations among FBI agents. I'm of the theory that they're injecting us with DNA from J. Edgar Hoover and that's why I have this sudden attraction to feather boas and high heels. Scully believes it's from Eliot Ness and that's why she keeps wanting to carry a bigger gun." Mahoney and Greer smiled nervously. "Mulder." Scully said, shaking her head. "Hmm?" "Get to sleep before someone takes you away to a padded room." "Yes ma'am." She curled up on Mulder's couch after taking a shower, comfortable in warm-ups, pulled out paperwork, but it was only for show. She glanced through some files, then pulled a blanket over her shoulders and curled up like a cat. He was crying, softly. Scully woke, sat up, grabbed for the Nembutal. The bathroom light was still on and she made her way to his bed guided by this. She shook him gently. He rolled over, stared up, at her, then past her. "Come on. Wake up." She said gently. Mulder woke but did not sit up. He continued crying. "You're not dead." He repeated over and over again. "No." Scully replied every time he said his rote phrase. "But Sam is?" He finally asked. "Sam is still gone." Mulder nodded, swallowed, burst into sobs. "I dreamt you were dead." "I know. It's all right." "No. I. . ." Mulder trailed, but his crying lessened. He touched her hand, as if to assure himself that she were real. "Was Sam really abducted by Them?" He asked. Scully gently put a hand to Mulder's face. "I don't know." She said simply. "Possibly." "There were voices." "I know." "I heard the voices again once." "Oh?" Scully kept her voice gentle and soft. "In Puerto Rico." "What did they say?" "Not to be afraid. But I was. I don't remember anything else." Scully nodded. This didn't surprise her any. "Are you going to be able to go to sleep?" Mulder nodded. "Do you want any more Ativan?" "I. . ." He paused. "Yes." She nodded, got up and got another pill, filled a glass with water from the sink. "Here." Mulder took the pill, held the water glass himself. Scully tucked him back in, relieved. There were no dream terrors this evening. Just ordinary nightmares. Alexandra Breaux was animated when she described Meredith. Alexandra reminded Mulder of her daughter. Small and delicate, but alive with vibrancy. The same deep-set, moonstruck eyes, the same dark, curling hair. He let Scully do the interviewing, sat back on the woman's comfortable Ethan Allen couch and listened. Scully led Alexandra through basic questions about Meredith. Finally, she dropped the bombshell. "Who was Meredith's father?" Alexandra faltered. "I thought that you knew. I was date raped. No way to make a case, so I never reported it." Mulder leaned forward then. "The father was Jim Kelly. You met him during a revival." Alexandra's eyes opened, she sat a moment, speechless. "We don't want to embarrass anyone. We aren't going to spread this around. There's no reason the Aimes even have to know." "I. . ." Alexandra shut her eyes. "Who told you?" "No one." Scully replied. "It was a wild guess." Alexandra leaned back in her wing chair, composure lost. "I really loved him. He never knew about Meredith. I had just found out I was pregnant when he was killed. I thought about an abortion, but I couldn't. I actually made an appointment, but I couldn't go through with it. "So I made up a story and went to the Aimes. Kelly and Robin were best friends. I knew Ellen couldn't have children, I thought it would be right for them to raise the child." Alexandra sighed, closed her eyes, began crying softly. "Kelly's wife died of leukemia when he was in seminary and he never remarried. He. . .we met when he came to DeMarr for a revival and we just. . .fell in love. I know how silly that sounds, but it was true. We went back and forth between DeMarr and Lysander for about eight months. He was going to marry me. He gave me this." Alexandra touched a large cameo, in an ornate gold setting, pinned to her blouse. "It's nineteenth century, hand carved, of neptune's daughter. We went to the beach just before he died. That's where Meredith was concieved--at the beach, in this nasty little cabin. There were supposed to be two cabins, but the dumb owner. . ." Alexandra shrugged miserably. "He gave it to me on the beach. No one knew we were in love. It was like this big bad secret because he wasn't sure how his church would react--I mean most of the unmarried women in his churches were hot after him, so he like was introducing me to people as the `dear friend' of his best friends, the Aimes's. To get everybody used to me." She shrugged. "Meredith is just like him. Sweet and gentle. She even talks like him--uses Kelly's expressions. She likes the same kinds of jokes. I spoil her outrageously when I get up to DeMarr." Alexandra caressed the Cameo. "I've always meant to tell them who Meredith is. But. . . I just haven't had the courage. Why is this important? I know Meredith is the psychic in the Church Murders--Ellen called me so I wouldn't be worried. What does it have to do with Kelly?" Mulder smiled easily. "We believe one of the first murders may have taken place in Kelly's old church. If so it would be one of the few connections we have in this case." Alexandra nodded dumbly, lost in her own private thoughts. "Thank you for being honest." Scully told the woman gently. "No. It's all right. I. . .what matters is Meri. Not my pride. Did anyone tell you that Kelly's ghost has been seen in Lysander First Baptist? His old church?" Scully and Mulder exchanged uneasy looks. "No." Scully said. "I've only heard rumours. But for about. . .Oh I don't know, three or four years people used to say they saw him and his cat, Ba'ar. It stopped maybe two years ago. They say they hear children screaming there at night now." Alexandra shrugged. "But you know how people are." THE SACRIFICE - part 2 By Amperage@aol.com 2/1/95 Greer and Mahoney were replaced at lunch with Turner and Keyes, both of whom looked extremely disappointed to be brought in for the express purpose of babysitting the pariah. Both had been briefed on the case. "Just don't get in my way." Mulder said after an uncomfortable meal. "Don't interfere with our investigation. The agency sent you here to keep me from getting killed. Not to do my work." He paced the floor of his hotel room. "We're going to Lysander, Mississipi today. Commuter plane from Baton Rouge to Natchez, then take a car." "The place they found the latest body." Keyes said. "Actually it was the first murder, but our latest find." Scully replied. "From the kid's notebooks?" "Yes." Mulder did not elaborate. Scully could see the signs now, things that pissed most other FBI agents. He was getting high, that was all, but he would be terse and sardonic with everyone else in the Bureau from now until the time he finished this case. He didn't act that way with Scully because he knew what side she was on. He knew he could trust her. Briefly Mulder filled the pair in on his current working theory about why the murders were occuring. He expected ridicule and in most situations would have gotten it. No doubt when Keyes and Turner were alone together they would ridicule Mulder and their reports would echo this, but for right now Mulder was the senior agent: it was his show. "We need to go shopping right now." He told the pair. "I don't have any other clothes." Scully silently gave thanks for her mother who had fed-exed her four more suits, otherwise she would be in Mulder's boat--she had not planned to be in the field this long. "How do you work with him?" Turner asked as Scully perused the limited book and magazine selection of the Hilton gift shop. "Hmm?" Scully picked up TIME and Newsweek, Life, Discover and on impulse the New Orleans Picayune newspaper. She planned to take a long soak in a hot tub and read until they went to the airport. "I mean, he's so. . .weird." Scully smiled as she put her purchases down on the counter, and added a pack of gum, breath mints and a candy bar to the stack. "Don't forget I was abducted for a month and have no memory of the encounter." She said wickedly. "But you don't believe in UFO's or Little Green Men." "Who do you think abducted me? They and secret governmental forces." She tried to keep from smiling and did not succeed. "Oh, ha-ha." Turner replied. "No, really. I had an alien baby while I was gone. It was Elvis's love child." It was funny to read about yourself in the newspaper. Of course they never gave any names. But the story kept coming back to "a pair of dedicated FBI agents, including the FBI's expert on Satanic rituals, who found the psychic lead and have identified several locations where murders have taken place." The media would get their names eventually. Scully could just see a movie about their `quest to find the horrific Coven Murderes'. Maybe they would get Jody Foster to play her. She sank down into the steamy water and let it immerse her to the very tip of her nose. She would never get a life at this rate. She sat back up, embarrassed at her thoughts, then shrugged. At some point you had to stop thinking of everything seriously. Just for a while. Otherwise, one day, they found you with the back of your head blown out. Lysander wasn't a bad little town. They were used to nice little towns. Except they got to see the bad things, the bottoms where the worms and bugs hid. When they drove up the church was empty. No reporters, no parishoners. The minister let them in and Scully got rid of their two bodyguards by foisting the minister off on them. Mulder went into the auditorium and sat in the back. "It all started here." He said softly as Scully sat beside him. Scully nodded. Mulder pulled out Scully's copy of Meredith's notes. They were minus some notations of course, but still useful. "A murder. I sat in the back. They put down plastic, like painters use. They had a boy tied to a table. The man cut him. There was blood everywhere. In Preacher's church. There are long stained glass windows of Jesus dying. The organ has pipes. The carpet is dark blue. The pews are light. The piano is a white baby grand. The leader told them what to do. He sat two rows ahead. He looked at me. He did not say anything to me." Mulder sighed, wrapped his arms around his chest. "They know." "Know what?" "They know Meredith is there. They know she's watching. They want her to watch. Or he does at any rate." "Their leader?" "Yes." Mulder hit the pew with an open palm. "Why are they keeping me alive? I'm getting too close." He put his fingertips to his mouth, thinking. "They know that tossing blood in my face, trashing my hotel room, they know that those things won't scare me, won't dissuade me. It's. . ." He groped for a word. "It's just a smoke screen." "For what?" Scully asked. Mulder shook his head. "I don't know. I don't know." Mulder was moody and withdrawn the rest of the day. He didn't order any supper, only drank coffee. They all had seperate rooms. Scully had to wait until eleven to slip over to Mulder's room. She felt vaguely embarressed, sitting on Mulder's bed, flipping through the television channels, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom. When he did emerge he was draped only in a towel. Scully didn't know what brought on the foul mood, but ignored him until he had put on a pair of boxers and spoke to her. "I'll be all right tonight." He said. Scully snorted in disbelief. "You'll all right yourself into a psych ward." She replied. "I'm not going to bed tonight anyway." "So you're going to obsess about why you haven't been killed?" Scully stopped herself suddenly. She was getting catty. Just because Mulder was argumentative that was no reason for her to arch her back and hiss. She took a deep breath. "There's nothing new in this case for you to read up on or write a field report over." "I know why now." "Yes, but at this point anyone reading that report would dismiss your thinking as paranoid and unfounded because you've been threatened recently. I know you're dedicated to the truth, but at this point, you shouldn't do anything to jeopordize your standing on this case." "I still have to do the profile of the coven and the leader." Mulder shrugged. "I might as well get it over with." Scully sighed. "If you decided to kick back and watch t.v. or if you get stumped you'll come to my room and wake me." It was not a plea. It was a demand. Mulder nodded. "As long as you'll give up your powerbook." "Sure." Scully led him out. . . .The leader of this "coven" is a white male, between the ages of 30-50. His I.Q. is at least above the third Standard Deviation. He has, at minumum ,a master's degree from a prominent university. I suspect multiple degrees. The main focus of his training has been philosophic or theologic. . . . . .It is obvious that this person possesses a good deal of money. I doubt this fortune was amassed by the indivdual, nor is he of the "nouveau riche" class. He is comfortable with his wealth and not given to excesses of taste. He is also a neat individual and a compulsive planner. The churches have all been chosen with regards to location, ease of entrance, and possibility of being seen, as well as speed in returning all church furniture to exact original placement: for this reason he favors evangelical churches. Every detail has been taken care of. . . . . .He is a charasmatic individual and has no history of psychiatric difficulty nor has he ever been accused of breaking a law. . . . . .The "coven" under their leader's tuteledge will consist mainly of caucasians. They will possess either a minimal or no religous background and training. Several may be avowed athesits. Ages will vary, and members will be both male and female. I.Q.'s will fall somewhere in the upper 2nd Standard Deviation. For the most part they will have some college, a few completing a B.A. degree at a local university or college. The coven members will not have accomplished as much as they believed they were capable of before "working" for their leader. They are not anti-social in any way, but have instead been carefully trained and desensitized. Their thinking will be highly similar to that of the German guards who served in death camps. . . . . .They are well-paid and comfortable with the amount of money they make. They know enough of their leader's plan to make competent self-justifications for their work possible but do not know all the details, nor will they question his leadership. . . . . .None will have a criminal or psychiatric record and will have been judged by their families, past friends, and past co-workers as well-adjusted people. . . Mulder was sending his profile over the phone line when Scully came over, ready for another day of life on the road. He looked up at her from the door, went for his watch. "Damn. I got to working." He said, racing to a Goudcheaux's hang-up bag for a new suit. "Profile's done." He told her, getting a towel. Scully nodded, sitting down on the couch, in front of her computer. "Good morning to you too." She said under her breath, waiting for her chance to read his analysis. "You don't mention occult powers or Meredith Aimes." She commented when he emerged from the bathroom, buttoning his shirt. "That's not part of a profile." Mulder replied. "It's in my field reports." Scully nodded. "You don't give any clues about how to catch them either." "Well." Mulder tucked his shirt in, buttoned the top button of his pants, sat beside her on the couch to put his shoes and socks on. "I can't very well tell them how to catch the murderers when I don't know that myself, now can I?" Scully peered at Mulder through her reading glasses. "You don't know?" Mulder focused on tying his shoes. "You have an idea." Scully sighed with exasperation. "What's going on in your skull, Mulder?" Mulder looked up at a non-descript pastel print hanging on the wall above his bed. "I think it's time to head back to Washington. We won't learn anything new from chasing around to new sites. And as much as I hate to say it, we can't do anything else for another week and a half. Do you know where Meredith is?" "They're putting them up in Lafayette." Mulder nodded. "I need to talk to her, but not for another couple of days." "Why?" Mulder rubbed his face. "I think that if Meredith tells the the leader something--if she makes a demand--he'll have to give an answer." Scully nodded. "Also, I need to get back." He smiled crookedly. "What are you going to do?" "I don't know. What should I do? I have to go to an FBI psychiatrist, not a private shrink, because. . .well, as much as I hate to admit it, this relates directly to my performance. I think we need to rehearse our stories, minimize the damage to our service records." Scully nodded. "Tell them that you had no reason to worry until this trip. Then you argued with me, thinking it would be much more theraputic for me to go voluntarily. Also you were blinded by your devotion to justice. You knew I was the best agent for the job. Now clinically the syndrome I'm suffering from is closer to Night Terrors than nightmares." "I know that, but sufferers usually have no cognition of any dreams. Later on, you do remember your dreams." Scully replied. Mulder grimmaced and shrugged. "Atypical pattern, obviously not Sleep terrors. We've been calling them nightmares." He closed his eyes and rubbed them tiredly. "All right you discovered my dreams were causing such distress *on this trip*." He emphasized. "No evidence before that." Mulder shifted on the couch. "My butt and my shoulder are still sore, by the way." Scully smiled. "What are you going to tell them?" "I'm having nightmares. When I wake I experience intense, extended flashbacks." Scully nodded. "What do you think they'll do?" "Skinner will call us into his office and act terribly worried. He'll rant and rave about Agent safety and tell you that you acted irresponsibility but that he understands how you got carried away and he's letting you off with an informal warning--nothing in your jacket. In normal times he'd make me take an extended psychiatric leave and my career-what's left of it--would effectively be over." "But now?" "He needs me too much." Mulder stood, went for a tie. "He'll tell me I have to attend mandatory therapy and take my medication like a good little nutcase. If they want to hospitalize, he'll make them wait to make that recomendation until after I've outlived my usefulness on this case." "If you get better?" "Then I'll have a notation about being in therapy." Mulder shrugged. "So? I have three such notations already. Some people consider it part of the `Spooky' Mystique." "I'll make the call for you." Scully said. "I can get you in to see Stephanie Richards." "You know her?" "Vaguely. I carpooled with her to a symposium once." The next morning in DC they met with the other agents assigned to the case. Everyone had read Mulder's profile, everyone agreed it was impressive. There were no snide comments about "Spooky" Mulder. ". . .But we still don't have a motive strong enough to fit your profile, even accepting all these New-Age Ideas." Agent Barnes, who'd made the first connection between a murder and a church, spoke up. Mulder nodded. "I don't know." He replied. "As my profile and field reports state, this man is not your usual nut-variety Satanist. If he does consider himself a Satanist--which I doubt highly--he won't even have read books such as the Satanic Bible." Mulder rubbed the back of his neck. "He's more versed in Cabbalistic theories, in Medival Alchemy, the worship of Bahomet and other dieties secretly worshipped by Europeans in the middle ages. Hell, he could even have knowledge of Eastern black magic stories and AmerInd sorcery. And what he knows he won't follow, not in such an easy straight line that we'll be able to pick it up. So I don't know. His thinking is his own." "But the killings in the churches are highly symbolic in a traditional way." "Are they?" Mulder yawned. "If you accept that he has some sort of control over Meredith, then he kills in churches because Meredith associates Churches with power. She's a minister's daughter and the Church is the holy place--especially a Baptist church or some close variant, which is where most of the murders have taken place. If she were a druid's daughter he'd kill out in the woods. If she'd been taught to worship Coca-Cola, then the murders would take place in bottling plants. Besides, the church is where she was taught by Preacher." "Is there anyway that we can figure out this man's thinking any better?" This from Task Force leader Aarons. Mulder shrugged. "If I had gotten a PhD in Comparative Religon as well as my PhD in Psychology, we *might* be able to find part of his pattern of thinking. You could run a detailed description of the slayings, along with photos and diagrams of locations to someone whose lifework has been Medival Mysticism. There are several good people in Italy. If that's even where he's gotten his ideas about power from. If it isn't, you could send your materials to whomever's tops on Black Magic in Non-traditional American Folklore and see. It's really a stab in the dark. I'm guessing Mediveal mysticism, because of what I know of his heritage and because of the secondary evidence. "Look, as I've said before. We're not dealing with a mainstream nut." Mulder closed his eyes. "This man has too much education and is too intelligent. His experiences are from vicarious sources--books, manuscripts--his behavior patterns are not easily revealed." "So there's no way to know? I find that hard to believe." "You mentioned secondary evidence as your best idea that he is at least partially following European tradition." Mulder paused, let the first question drop, addressed the second speaker. "The sacrifice of taking a heart from a still living victim can be traced to almost any culture. But the number of initiates indicates European origins." He wondered if these people had brains. They'd completely missed Meredith. Any high school kid could tell you about the number required for a coven. He was conscious of Scully beside him, willing him to act decently. He wasn't the wunderkind anymore. He had to play nice. Yeah, right. "Besides, the spot is a rather sick joke." He smiled, striving for a light touch. Their blank faces annoyed him. "If your brand of religon has a Communion table read the titling on the table next time you're at worship and the minister's getting boring." He said. "`This do in Rembrance of Me'." Richards nodded as Scully finished her description of Mulder's behavior. Scully did not mention the incident in the bathroom. Richards's face had creased in worry the further Scully went into her description. Richards was an older woman. Rumor had it that she had been a housewife until 38 when her doctor husband dumped her for a twenty something nurse with big tits. Usually Richards did not look as though her life had been anything but happy, but right now Scully could see the lines from sadness. Familiar lines, accustomed to appearing on her face. "When did this start?" Richards asked Mulder. "I don't . . .Maybe two months ago." "You weren't worried?" "I've been living with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder all my adult life. Some times are better than others." Richards nodded, closed her eyes, and massaged the bridge of her nose before speaking. "Has Agent Mulder ever tried to harm himself?" She asked Scully. "No. Not to my knowledge." "Is he able to care for himself at other times?" "Yes. There's no question of that." "What about his moods, is he acting normally? Is he excessively moody?" "Mulder is always moody on a case. I don't know." Richards took a deep breath, exhaled. "Let's lay our cards on the table." She said. "Clinically, I'm keeping the diagnosis of PTSD as the primary diagnosis. I'm adding a diagnosis of My gut instinct is hospitalization, but I have been told that is not an option unless you are, in fact, hurting yourself or completely unable to care for yourself- -guidelines for immediate involuntary in other words." "My choices are limited. You need to talk to someone, probably two times a week minimum. I'll get that set up, but you're still jetting around the country, so you'll have a hard time seeing a therapist." She took a deep breath. "And as for drugs. I don't know." She looked at Scully directly. "What good does that Ativan seem to do?" "It makes it easier for Mulder to sleep. But other than that, I don't know." "My first thought was Imiprimine, because that seems to reduce panic attacks during sleep, and has been recognized as having beneficial effects on persons with PTSD, but I don't think it will help a great deal, not if the dreams are as bad as you say, and also the time it takes for the drug to be effective isn't. . .well, it takes longer than I can afford, what with your superiors breathing down my neck." "Listen, what if I continue to moniter his behavior?" Scully cut in. "It's not your purview. I can't ask you to. . ." "You're not asking me. I've been taking care of Mulder for seven days now. What if we start on imipramine combined with injections of Nembutal when nessessary after psychotic dreaming episodes? He can sleep on my couch, where he slept last night. I know that in clinical studies the MAO inhibitors and tricylics have taken around eight weeks to show significant effect, but at least it might help eventually, and isn't that what we're really after, bosses or no bosses?" Richards's next question was unexpected. "Agent Scully, are you having sex with your partner?" "No." Scully replied, tired of the assumption that caring for a person of the opposite sex meant that intercourse must be taking place. There were many partnerships in the FBI that involved a man and a woman. Was theirs the only one where she had to combat a constant assumption that they were involved sexually, breaking a huge taboo? No one assumed two male partners were having sex, even if they didn't have steady girlfriends or didn't go tomcatting around. Richards stared at Scully a moment. "All right. Along with intensive therapy. Since Dr. Scully's willing to live with you and deal with your terrors." Skinner behaved on cue. He ranted and raved, expressed disappointment, and showed sympathy. He did not take Mulder off the case. No disciplinary action or reprimand was given. As long as Mulder followed the recommendation of his primary therapist he would be given leeway. "How are you planning to catch them?" Skinner asked, having dispensed with the meat of their conference. "Sir?" Mulder questioned, giving Skinner a wide-eyed look. Skinner took off his glasses and stared at Mulder. "I know you have an idea. You always have an idea. That's why people are scared of you, Agent Mulder." Mulder considered playing dumb, glanced at Scully and decided against it. "Meredith Aimes is going to make them tell her." "Your psychic?" Skinner replied. "Yes sir." Scully moaned in ecstasy as she took her first bite of deep dish supreme gourmet pizza from Tony's. Mulder grinned at her reaction. "The last time I had pizza. . ." Scully defended herself when she could talk "was two months ago and it was horrible. Now shut up or I'll sedate you." "I didn't say anything." Mulder protested, taking a sip of diet coke, wishing for beer--Scully's veto, even though a "moderate" amount of alcohol is "permissable" for someone on tricylics. Scully decided to ignore her partner and concentrate on the pizza. The last time she'd indulged, she'd rented *Gaslight* and ordered pizza, planning to have a cozy evening at home, but the pizza could have been put to better use as a manhole cover and *Gaslight* had broken just as Ingrid Bergman was about to discover that her husband was trying to drive her crazy. Scully remembered the next morning Mulder had drug in looking miserable. She looked up from the pizza suddenly. Ingrid Bergman's husband had tried to drive her crazy. Two months ago Mulder's dreams had started. "When was the first corpse found?" She asked. Mulder stared at her, puzzled. "About eight months ago, why?" "Nothing." Something important had happened in the case two months ago. What was it? "When did they connect the deaths together?" "About two months ago, when the third body was found." "When did your . . .problems start?" Mulder stopped eating and stared at his partner across the polyurethened table of the Pizzeria. "You're not suggesting. . ." he trailed. Scully wiped her fingers on the generous red napkin in her lap and considered. "I don't know." She said. "Could be a coincidence." "If I had gone in for therapy before being assigned to this case. . ." Mulder paused. "I'm known for my work dealing with Satanic Cult slayings." Scully took a sip of her own diet coke. Now that she had suggested the link, she wished she hadn't. She stared hard at the pizza, suddenly not hungry. "I was doing fine." Mulder told himself. "No major problems. Not like when. . ." "When what?" Scully asked. "Nothing." Mulder looked up, drawn from his musing. "Like when I was abducted?" "Yes." Mulder admitted easily. "I didn't sleep then." "Did you wake up from your dreams psychotic?" "No. Crying, my stomach knotted into cramps, in a cold sweat, but not psychotic." Mulder pushed his slice of pizza away, fingered the cut on his forehead. "Do you have bad dreams, Scully?" "You know I do." Mulder nodded as if this confirmed something. "Do you ever dream about what they did to you?" "No." "I don't dream about what happened to me at Ellens Air Force Base either. Except sometimes I dream about this white light and running from red lights." Mulder stared at his partner. "What are the dreams about?" Scully asked very softly. Mulder looked away, towards a family: Mother, Father, a school age child and a baby. The father was dishing up pizza, the mother dealing with the baby. They looked happy. He looked back at Scully. "About people disappearing." He replied. "I . . .I . . .I think men like Deep Throat and Cancer Man and Mr. X, they were all like you and me once. Dedicated to the truth. And then the search killed something or someone and it made them the way they are. I can't become like them, Scully. I thought I could, but I can't." Scully digested this in silence. "I'm not hungry." She said. "Let's just go." They got a box of leftovers and paid. Scully drove home. "If I died, what would you have done?" She asked half-way to her apartment. "I don't know." He sighed. "Yes I do. I would have tried to go on. I would have done my best." "Mom says you were going to make her your next of kin. What were you scared of? Waking up one day and rolling over and deciding there is no Truth?" Mulder stared straight ahead and said nothing. "Is Samantha out there or not?" Scully asked very softly. Mulder clenched his eyes shut very tightly. He did not want to cry in front of her. Scully let him be. She knew he cried in the shower, long painful sobs that drug their way on barbed spurs through his lungs and esophagus, clogged up his nose so that he couldn't breath. She'd cried like that before. After her father died, after Jack died. She gave him the imiprimine when he got out, watched as he took it, then sat with him in front of the television set. Scully popped in an Indiana Jones movie and they watched without speaking, Mulder curled up under a quilt Scully's grandmother had made. He was quiet, but otherwise all right. "How do you feel?" Scully swept the used needle, the alcohol pad into her trash can as Mulder sat up the next morning. He shrugged. Scully had done what was, at this point, routine for them both. He'd woken with his sobs, she'd administered Nembutal. "I want to go see Meredith as soon as we can." Scully nodded. This was expected. She'd wondered how long they'd have in Washington before Mulder wanted to go to Lafayette. "All right." She replied. Meredith had a new Barbie house, Barbie pool and Barbie ice cream shop. "The agents bring her something new every day." Ellen explained, leading Mulder and Scully through the small house. They were 18 miles outside Lafayette, in the country. "Trying to win her trust I guess. I'm sorry about your things." Mulder smiled. "The Agency's pretty good about reimbursing for that sort of thing." "Still." She pointed down a hallway. "Meredith is in the room at the end. I suppose Agent Scully and I should go sit and have coffee." Meredith was sitting on the floor in front of a television set, watching cartoons. She did not acknowledge Mulder, who took a chair behind her. "Agent Scully is giving you drugs." She said after a few minutes of silence, still facing the television. "Yes." "Sometimes she does it like you do with a little kid. In your bottom." "She doesn't have much choice." Meredith nodded, but did not turn to face him. "I like talking to you. I don't have to lie. When I grow up, I think I won't be as able to read." "I don't know." "I won't. I learned to do it because I had to. Because I was going to go crazy if I didn't. But as I grow older I won't need it." She swivelled around, finally facing Mulder. "I can't see most people. Preacher because I needed to. Why can I see you?" "I don't know." Mulder swallowed. "I can see your dreams. I saw them before I met you, but I didn't know they were you. I didn't know until I tried to call you." "Why didn't you mention it last time we saw you?" Meredith shrugged. "I didn't. . .it isn't nice to listen in." Mulder sighed, thought a moment. "My dreams started right after the bodies were connected to the churches." He told her. Meredith thought about this. "Your dreams aren't real." "No." "You don't know what's real after you have them." "No." "My dreams aren't dreams are they? They're something else." "Yes. It's called OBE. Out of Body Experience. Yours is probably the best substantiated case I've ever studied." "Oh." Meredith thought about this. "I think that you aren't there just because they picked Preacher's church as their first. I think they picked that church to start because they knew you were having OBE's in it. Preacher is the ghost of your father's best friend." Mulder paused, thought about what he was going to say next. The truth? Which truth? What part of it? "Somehow, the leader knew about you. About your power. He's calling you to the churches, making you watch because you are his thirteenth." "On purpose." "Yes. He wants you to watch. I think he may be using you." "He's making you have your dreams. That's why I can see them." "I think so." Meredith was silent a long time. She reached for the remote, turned off the VCR and TV. "What can I do?" "Well, I think if you decide to, you can make him talk to you." Meredith nodded. "Like I did to you." Mulder touched his cut self-consciously. "Yes. Exactly." "Oh. Why?" "He's using your powers, your. . .ability. I think that he may have to do things. He's nothing but a thief and he knows it. Now, most theological people who believe in the devil say that if you tell the devil to go away he has to. I don't think our leader will stop killing children because you tell him you won't let him steal from you anymore. But I do think that if you demand he tell you where the next victim will be he will tell you." "The devil is the father of all lies." Meredith replied, proving she was her father's daughter. "That's true. But he wants to keep you. He wants your power." "He can't read my mind." Meredith said suddenly, looking aslant at Mulder. "I know he can't read me." "So you have to act really coy. Do you know what coy means?" "Mhm. Daddy says that just because you know you have clean underwear on it doesn't mean you have show everyone you meet your drawers." "Exactly." Mulder smiled at this description. Meredith nodded. "Listen, I want to talk just for a minute." "All right." Meredith looked at her Keds, then at Mulder. "You're not bad because your sister disappeared. You're not bad because Agent Scully disappeared. I know you think it's all your fault. But it wasn't. It never was. You just tried to do what was right. You loved your sister. You did everything you could. You love Agent Scully. You did everything you could." Meredith sighed. "I can hear your parents yelling at you. It's so loud." She winced. "But they were wrong. It wasn't your fault. Never was." She stopped herself, bit a lip. "I don't know what to tell you. But you need to talk to the shrink. You have to talk. I don't know how I know that, but I do. Because someday, maybe she will die." Mulder stared silently at Meredith until Scully came into the room and found them locked in their reveries. She waited until they were back in the Hilton, with its view of the Vermillion river. "What was going on between you and Meredith?" She asked, taking off her jacket. "Nothing." Mulder smiled easily. "Don't give me that." Mulder's response was to take off his tie and shirt and wander into the bathroom. Scully sighed and went through the door to her own room. "I'm going jogging." Mulder stood in her doorway, looking unseasonably comfortable in a cut-off sweatshirt and grungy shorts, and old black baseball cap turned backwards on his head. Scully surveyed him skeptically. "Want to come?" "No. Thanks. It's after 11. I'm just winding down with my laptop." She smiled. "Do you ever jog any other time than the middle of the night?" "Yes. Fairly often too." "Mhm." Scully leaned against the door. "This is how rumours of mental instability get started." "Very cute." "When will you be back?" "I don't know. . ." He checked his watch. "Maybe an hour." "Well, don't stop by when you come in. Just open the connecting door." "Yes ma'am." Mulder saluted and jogged down the hall. Scully's travel clock had to be wrong. She woke, sat up. It was 2 something. Mulder would have woken her opening the door when he came in. She glanced through the shadows. The door was shut. Damn him. Men. With a groan Scully got up, wondering if it would be childish to tell on her partner to Dr. Richards. She opened the door, looked in. And was suddenly wide awake. Her first phone call, made with her stomach doing flip-flops, was all she needed to make. They kept her on hold an interminadble amount of time checking her credentials. Then came back on line. "A man answering your partner's description was taken to Charity around one." A new voice informed her. "What? What are you talking about? He went out for a jog." "He was seen in the parking lot of a local bar. . .um. . .two patrol officers were called in. Subject was hallucinating and psychotic, they called for back-up and an ambulance. He kept talking about the devil coming down in human form and saying he would follow the devil to hell in the church. . . The paramedics determined he was not under the influence of any hallucinogenic drugs and took him to the Charity Hospital." "How did they determine that? Did they do a blood work-up on the spot? Did they do a gas spectography right there in the parking lot?" Scully asked, indignant. "Ma'am. I'm sorry. I'm just reading the report." Scully calmed herself. "Look, officer, can you tell me where the Hospital is located?" He did so. Scully forced herself to write the directions down. "All right. Can you call them and tell them I'm coming? I'm Agent Mulder's listed next of kin. They have to let me in to see him, so make sure they're ready for me." "They're just the night ward. . .I don't know. . ." "Fine. Then I'll argue them down when I get there." Scully hung up the phone, pulled on her blue jeans and a shirt, rammed her feet into jogging shoes without worrying about socks, got her purse. Ran back in the room for her gun, shoved it underneath her oversized plaid button down. Scully managed to argue her way through the building, using a combination of threats and her badge, to the doctor on call. "You have Fox Mulder." She told him, cutting through any preambles. "And I am listed as his next of kin. I want to see him." The doctor tried for the rational approach. "Agent Scully, your friend is still in isolation. We've given him some drugs and he really doesn't feel like. . ." "Drugs? What drugs have you given him?" Scully stared hard at the short, rabbity man in front of her. "Just some drugs to calm him down, control the agitated thinking." "What? Antipsychotics or Sedatives? What?" "Your friend is suffering from some form of psychoses. We gave him. . ." "What?" The doctor held up his hands. "We gave him some Haldol." "How many milligrams?" "12." "Twelve?" Scully stared at the man, stunned. "You gave him 12 milligrams of Haldol?" "Agent Scully, he was violently psychotic. I felt it would be best to calm him down." "Calm him down? That much Haldol will probably make him catatonic." Scully stared at the man with distaste. "Did you take any blood?" "Blood? No. Why?" "Because," Scully took a deep breath. "My partner has been attacked in the past four days by people trying to intimidate him into dropping a case. A case which requires special expertise very few people have, but which my partner is very skilled in." "Three days ago, in DeMarr, his hotel room was trashed. The perpetrators used urine, blood, and feces to do their work. It is not unreasonable of me to assume that he was given some sort of drug in a continuing effort to induce him to drop this case." "Now look." Scully stared at the man. "I am getting very agitated and I pack a gun. A very large gun. I want to see my partner. I don't care if he's upset, I don't care if he's violent. I want to see my partner. Now." He was curled under a blanket. The restraints had been taken off, but still hung from the metal railing around his bed. An aide sat with him, stroking his hair. "Hi." Scully took the aide's seat, watching as the rather ponderous black woman moved back, into the doorway of the tiny room. Mulder stared at her; he was awake, just barely. Scully put a hand to his face. "Do you know who you are?" She was carefully slow. He closed his eyes, licked his lips. "Hi. Scully." He said softly. "Did some one give you something?" She asked. Mulder closed his eyes. "Mulder. I need to know. I know you're confused. I know. I know everything seems scary." A pause. "I know it's hard to talk. They gave you some drugs to try and make things less scary, but the drugs are really heavy, so it's hard to think." Another pause. "I need to know this." Scully finished, wondering if he understood. The amount of Haldol they'd seen fit to pump into Mulder was obscene. Mulder stared at her thickly. "Meredith." He managed. Scully sighed. "Meredith." Mulder repeated in a whisper. "OBE." His eyes drifted. Scully leaned back, leaving one hand on his arm, thought about this. "Is Meredith trying to contact the leader?" She asked. Mulder's eyes were on a far point. Scully snapped her fingers. "Come on. Mulder. Come on. Is Meredith talking to the leader?" Mulder tried to focus. Found he couldn't. Blinked. Blinked again. "Scared. Flying Lights." He said softly, closed his eyes again. "All right. I'm going to take some blood." She might as well have been talking to a brick wall; Mulder's powers of concentration had been taxed past the limit allowed him in this state. "It took six men to move him." The aide told Scully as Scully cleaned her partner's arm. Scully thought about Mulder's last words. "Did he mention anything in particular? Repeat anything?" Scully asked. "He kept screaming about seeing a UFO and about the army." "A military UFO?" Scully asked, peering at the woman. "Did he mention Budahauss or Ellens Air Force base?" The woman thought as Scully filled three vials with blood. "Yeah. He kept saying Budahauss. I thought he was talking about that religon. And Ellens. I remember that girl's name. And another girl's name. I remember this one because I got a little godchild named it. Aurora." "What did he say?" Scully pulled the needle of out Mulder's arm, applied pressure to stop the bleeding. "What can you remember him saying?" "I don't know. . .somethin' about a hangar. And a ambulance. A triangle in a hanger. People givin' him shots and tyin' 'im down." Scully stared at Mulder, stared at the vials. If he had been given something she wanted to take it, screw the cost to her career, screw being tossed into the violent ward of a psych hospital. If it brought back all the memories it was worth anything. "I think Agent Mulder was given something." Scully explained over a hospital phone to a cranky, sleepy Assistant Director Skinner "I don't know what, but something. . .No. They gave him more Haldol than is indicated and didn't take blood. He's still there. In the morning I'll take custody and. . .They're saying what? No, I did not threaten anyone. If anyone's got a right to be upset it's me. . .don't tell me to calm down, I am calm. . .they're the ones who have acted. . .all right, but he's my partner. You know it's our responsibility to cover each other's butts. . ." Scully stood, paced the tiny, generic office.". . .I got several samples of blood. I don't know if we'll get much of anything useable, but it's worth a shot. No. I think I need to stay on this case. I know Agent Mulder was the primary agent, but I'm the only person to whom he confided his theories. . . .Well, we're working with Meredith Aimes. . .The flashbacks? No. I doubt it. What does Richards say? . . .Well, then trust her." Scully switched ears on the reciever. ". . .Yes sir, Agents Mahoney and Greer would be great as agents to help me escort Mulder. At least Mulder's met them, they won't be quite as strange. . .if he's not lucid or at least calm, I'll have him transferred to a private hospital here in Lafayette until he can be moved. . .I really don't see any options. . .I don't know." Scully sighed with frustration. "All right. I'll call back around noon and I'll get in touch with Dr. Richards as well sir." Mulder woke around noon, sluggish. "Hi." Scully said, gently. "Hi." He replied. He could focus again, a little. "Where am I?" "Hospital." Scully told him, not bothering to say more right now. "Do you remember anything?" His eyes clouded with some forgotten pain. "There were doctors. Made me forget. I. . .and then that man with the glasses. . .he was saying something, but I never found out what. . ." He trailed, looked off. "I'm scared." His voice was childish with the weight of Haldol. Scully sighed. "I'm here. I got you out of the other time. I'll get you out of this. You just go back to sleep. All right?" Mulder nodded. "Okay. Just close your eyes. Go back to sleep." Scully chanted, hoping he would be okay, hoping he wouldn't be like this when the Haldol wore off completely. "Good evening." Scully said to her partner, as he woke. She lowered the railing on the bed, then handed him a glass of orange juice, hoped it wasn't too warm. "My head feels like. . ." Mulder moaned, sat up, took the o.j. "It should." Scully told him, getting up from her seat. Mulder sipped at the juice, made a face and handed it back. Scully put it back on the bedside table. "Where am I?" He asked, groaning. "The psych ward of the local charity hospital." Mulder pulled his head out of his hands, stared at the walls, at the aide hovering in a doorway. "What did they give me?" "Enough Haldol to stop a tank." "Shit." "Succinct and intelligent as usual. Yep, you're lucid." Scully said, crossing her arms. "What do you remember?" Mulder sighed, closed his eyes. "I remember you coming in. I couldn't think. I remember . . .Meredith." "That's what you said last night." "Meredith contacted him." "Their leader?" Scully asked concernedly. "Yes. And. . .I don't know. . .I saw it." Mulder stared at Scully. "I saw him. You remember when Meredith called before. Well, this time she was. . .terrified." "Do you remember anything else?" Scully asked concernedly. Mulder shook his head. Scully nodded, deciding not to remind him. "Mulder, listen, think back." Scully interupted the flow of words. "You went jogging. You got to Halloran's. It's a bar. Someone gave you something or injected something. A hallocenoginic drug or something." Mulder stared at Scully. "I saw him." He repeated in the tone of voice used to address slow children. "He saw me. Meredith tried to contact the leader." "I know that's what it seems like. But Mulder. You hallucinated. You were psychotic and violent. It took 6 men to wrestle you into restraints." Scully took his face in her hands. "You were given something. I don't know what because they pumped you full of Haldol and didn't take any blood." She glanced at the orderly and put her lips to his ear. "And if you don't stick to that story they won't let you out of here." "Oh." Mulder nodded slowly. He agreed to Scully's version of events until they were in the back of Mahoney's Taurus. "I remember his face." He told Scully, glancing forward at Greer, smiling. Scully stared at Mulder. "He saw me." Mulder finished. "Meredith called me and I came." Scully told Mulder the plan on the plane, a comfortable two rows away from Mahoney and Greer. "Dr. Richards managed to get you a bed in a hospital in Georgetown." "Hospital? I'm not. . ." Mulder searched for the right word. Scully made a motion, to say `wait, let me finish'. "It's a completely open ward, no locked doors. It's the only alternative open. "I'm still on the case, and you cannot stay alone. Even if there were someone for you to stay with, I don't want you to and neither does Dr. Richards. Your dreams are frightening, and worse, they're very hard to deal with. Also, for the moment we are assuming hallucenoginic drugs were involved. In that case, you need continued care, at least for a few days." "They weren't" Mulder protested. "If they weren't, then you *really* need sheltered care of some sort, because then you're having psychotic episodes." Scully leaned back in her seat. "Look, this is the best alternative Richards and I could find. You're already off this case and have been ordered to take a leave of absense. If you refuse admittal, that's your business, but the FBI will look at that refusal when you want to come back to work. If you have another episode like this past one you'll be put into a locked ward and held involuntarily. That won't look good on your record." Mulder stared at his partner, betrayed. "You've really thought this thing through haven't you?" "Yes. I spent most of the morning trying to figure out some way to keep you out of a hospital. I even thought about putting you up with my mom, but Mulder, I don't want to make her have to deal with any of it." "Where is this place anyway?" "It's the Cloister." Mulder nodded. "It's very good." "It's one of the best. Your ward is completely open, no locked doors. Richards managed to get you in. You need to thank her profusely." Mulder nodded. "What happens on the case now?" "I'm still on it. Skinner wants me to pursue everything you were planning to. He didn't say, but I think he wants me to run things by you." Mulder nodded. "You need to see Meredith." "All right." "No. You don't get it. See Meredith as soon as you can. According to the pattern we have a little less than a week left before the next child is killed. Meredith established some kind of link last night. She may know the leader's name or where he plans to kill the next child." "You think." Scully qualified. Mulder shrugged. "See Meredith." "All right." "Fox Mulder?" The speaker was a tall, black woman dressed in a conservative suit. Mulder stood up, glanced around the overly chic reception area, then looked back at Scully. "Hi." The woman extended her hand. "I'm Janice Davis." "Hi." He was conscious of Scully beside him, standing with her trench held protectively in front of her body. "You must be Dr. Scully." The woman added, extending a hand to Scully. "I'm your case worker, Fox." "Uh." Mulder didn't think he could handle "Fox" for very long. "It's Mulder. Just Mulder." The woman frowned and looked at her record. Mulder wondered how badly he'd pissed in her Cheerios, but he was not about to be called Fox. "All right. Mulder. Let's get your bag and go on back." She led them past a receptionist desk and down a glassed in breezeway without a further word. "The Cafeteria is across the atrium." She told them, pointing across a large open area made park-like by a variety of potted trees. "The Activity center is on the other side. We have an indoor track-- there's also an indoor pool, but we're having some work done to it." Mulder nodded. She led them down a third corridor, to a last set of doors and smiled awkwardly as she pulled out a small card, put it flat against a reader. "These things are persnickity." She explained, watching a red light. It turned green and the door clicked, unlatching. "We'll give you a card as soon as you're admitted." She finished. "You have to slid it in, make sure it's flat and then wait for the green light before you take it out." A low desk seperated the nurses station from a large open area. Several doors edged the area. Everything had been decorated in expensive, careful pastels. The prints on the wall were French and American Impressionist. It strived for a decorator comfortable, but Mulder noticed that here, as in every other psych hospital ever built, they were careful about the materials used, about the lights for example, which were built into the end tables, constructed with plastic shields so that it took a maintence worker with two different kinds of screwdrivers to change a light bulb. Davis led them into a small, tasteful, office. There were three wing chairs and a small desk. Papers had been opened and spread across the desk. "Dr. Richards has already called and spoken with our Dr. Simoneaux. He's agreed to be your psychiatrist here if you don't have any objections." Davis told them taking a seat at the desk, turning sideways to face them both. Scully nodded to Mulder. "That's fine." "All right. Good. Have you ever been hospitalized for psychological problems before?" "No." Mulder said, shifting in his seat. "All right. As I understand it, you've been experiencing something close to Night Terrors. Can you describe your behavior?" Mulder shook his head, stared at Scully. "After the worst dreams Mulder remembers about five minutes of crying and confusion upon waking." Scully said. "But this period is usually preceded by about 10 or 15 minutes of. . .atavistic behavior that he doesn't remember. He eventually becomes aware of his surroundings." "Lucid?" Scully hesitated, "he's aware of what's going on and can react to his enviroment. But his behavior is not normal." "Dr. Richards says you've been helping Mulder through these periods by giving him injections of Nembutal?" "Yes." A nod. "When you say `atavistic'. . .could you explain?" "Umm. . .he rocks and sobs; he displays rigidity and complete unawareness of his enviroment." Davis nodded, flipped through a page and made a note. "If no medication is administered, he eventually does return to normal however?" "I did before everyone got involved." Mulder replied. Davis looked up at the touch of hostility in his voice. "And this has been going on two months, getting progessively worse?" "Yes." Scully replied quickly. "Another concern Dr. Richards notes is your lack of sleep. How many hours of sleep did you get before these dreams started?" "Mulder's always had bad dreams." Scully interupted. "Is that true?" "Yes." Mulder considered his partner, decided to tell the social worker before she could. "And, it's also true that a few months ago I was getting two or three hours of sleep maximum." "A night?" Davis blinked. "Yes." Mulder shifted in his chair. "Dana was. . .abducted. . . she was thought to be dead. . ." "Dana? That's Dr. Scully?" Davis asked. "Yes." Scully replied. "And I understand you're partners?" "Yes." Davis put the loose report she was working on away and looked through several other papers. "You have Dr. Scully listed as your next of kin. And Dr. Richard reports high personal level of involvement. Also that your dreams center around Dr. Scully's dissappearance." "And the dissappearance of my sister." Davis put her finger on a xerox of handwritten notes. "Samantha Mulder." "Yes." Davis considered her papers, looked at Mulder and Scully. "If Dr. Scully is out of pocket and we need to contact someone, is there anyone else?" "Margaret Scully." Mulder replied. Davis tapped her pen against the desk. "What relation is she to you, Dr. Scully?" "My mother." "I see." Davis considered this a long time. "I'm sorry for being so intrusive. It's been a while since I saw a case so classic." "Excuse me?" "I did my first work in a VA hospital." "Oh." Mulder smiled awkwardly. "Who was your listed next of kin before you knew Dana Scully?" "Reggie Pardue. He's dead now." "I take it he was another FBI agent." "Yes." "All right." Davis flipped back to her original file. "I note that you've been in therapy required by the FBI and in voluntary therapy at various times." "Yes." "Including regressive hypnotherapy." "Yes." "To remember your sister's abduction?" "Yes." A nod. "All right. The main focus of your admittal is the incident which took place last night. The consensus of your friend, Dr. Scully, and of Dr. Richards is that you need some sort of sheltered care, at least until it can be proven that you will not experience any more psychotic episodes. Also, according to Dr. Richards, both she and Dr. Scully feel safer knowing that several people will be able to help you manage your problems at night. "Let's get back to an earlier line of thought. About your sleep. How many hours a night?" "In normal times. . .I don't know. 5 hours max." "Where do you sleep?" Davis reached into a desk drawer, pulled out a sheet of lined paper, began to make notes. "On my couch, in front of the television set, mostly." "How much now?" "Three or four hours." "So you go into one REM cycle and wake." "Yes." Davis scratched notes furiously across the paper. "Do you ever have periods of depression?" "Moodiness maybe." "Dr. Richards makes the working diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is apparently the same diagnosis made by your other therapists. You suffer all minimum criteria established to be classified under this category?" "Yes. Flashbacks, nightmares, exagerated startle response. I've had various phobias relating to my sister's abduction and I try to avoid thinking about it, even though I can't stop." Mulder paused. "But by the same token, I'm drawn into circumstances which show similarities to the abduction. I have periods of irritabilty, I have hallucinated my sister. Umm. . ." "That's enough for me." Davis held up a hand. "Have you ever thought about suicide?" "Not seriously." "What about now?" "No." Davis nodded, flipped through several pages of forms. "All right. Dr. Richards asked that we authorize you to have your Powerbook and paperwork. There's no problem there. The people on this ward are all here voluntarily. None are psychotic or a danger to themselves. No one on this ward is chemically dependent. We have two rooms close to the nurse's station. We'll give you one of them and put a moniter in that room. "We're very structured here. It gets pretty busy." Davis pulled out a chart. "This will be your schedule. Paperwork. . .the patient phones are turned off at 10. There are only three phones, local calls unless you use a calling card. We don't enforce a bedtime or anything like that, but the ward lights dim at 11 and the t.v. goes off at 10. Now, I understand that your normal bedtime is probably what. . .2?" "Something around there." Mulder acknowledged. "We'll have to work something out on that score." Davis slid her three forms over. "You need to sign on the lines I've x'd. The first form says that you understand and agree to your treatment plan. The second says that you are voluntarily entering the hospital." Mulder looked at the form. "I want an informal voluntary committal form. Not a formal." He handed back the form. Davis stared at Mulder nonplussed. "There's really no difference." "Yes. Yes there is. The first gives me the right to leave if I feel like it, as long as I say I'm leaving. The second makes me wait twenty-four hours while you marshal forces to keep me here." Davis glanced at Scully whose emotionless stare let her know that Davis would recieve no support on this fight. She thought a moment. "All right. I'll get another form when we're through and we'll use that one instead." Mulder nodded, satisfied. "All right. The third form asks for a next of kin and states that you understand that if we upgrade your treatment plan we will call the listed person and inform them of this change." Mulder signed this without comment. "All right." Davis smiled. "When are usual visiting hours?" Scully asked. "Um. . .for this ward? 4-6 on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If Mulder asks beforehand he can have visitors at any time. And as Mulder's listed next of kin, we'll also arrange for you to see him whenever you feel nessessary. Mulder can go off hospital grounds at any time, however, we insist that he preplan such visits with either his doctor or with me. In Mulder's case I'll want someone responsible with him at all times. Scully nodded at this. Big deal. "I may be forced to call after 10." "That's fine. I'll give you the number of the nurse's desk." It was a small room, very dormish in style and appearance, with a small, open wardrobe, a comfortable chair, a wide desk and a bed. A window faced a carefully landscaped courtyard. Another impressionist print had been bolted to the wall. Scully left after getting telephone numbers. She had a plane to catch. Back to Dulles to Atlanta to New Orleans, a commuter plane to Lafayette. Mulder wondered where she planned to go on her frequent flier miles. "Hi." The voice was masculine. A tall balding man, in his early thirties, dressed much younger. "Hi." Mulder finished putting away his jogging shoes. "I'm Dr. Tyler Simoneaux. You must be Fox Mulder." They shook hands. "I read your work on the Clear Creek slayings." Simoneaux told him. "I did my residency at Willowmarch." "Davis and Cohen." Mulder replied. "Yeah, I used some of their responses to questioning in the creation of my analysis of the Clear Creek killer." He thought back. "How did you get a copy?" "It made the rounds among all the residents who ever did a turn up in the Grey House." Simoneaux could not contain a shudder. "Willowmarch is a great place, don't get me wrong, but. . ." "The Grey House. `For 90,000 a year for the rest of his life, your beloved psychopath can avoid a lengthy trial and possibly the death sentence.'" Mulder said mockingly. "`And keep your name out of the paper.'" Simoneaux added. "For that they could double the fee and no one would blink." He shook his head. "Dr. Richards asked me to take your case." "I've been told." "I know, technically, that you're here for custodial care. The FBI is picking up your bill in exchange for baby-sitting services until they feel confident you won't pull another psychotic episode, scare the neighbors and the yokels. But I think we can help you." "How?" "Look, I know you've been in and out of therapy, probably most of your life. Most people with PTSD are. What are the dreams about?" "My partner dissappeared for over a month. No word, nothing. They combed the mountains. The man who kidnapped her. . .I was involved in a situation. The man took me hostage. He. . .I got him to trust me and then betrayed him. He believed he was abducted by aliens. He took Scully in hopes they would take her instead of him." "What do you think happened to your partner?" "There are people in the government who have. . .I've been involved in cases some people would just as soon forget exist. I've seen people executed, had my own memory wiped, had files dissappear, had corpses get up and walk out of morgues. My division of work was shut down, Scully and I reassigned. We continued with our investigations." Mulder shrugged. "And then Scully was gotten rid of;" pause. "No one knows where she was or what happened to her." "Including Dr. Scully." "No." "But you thought she was dead?" "There was a stone in the cemetary with her name." Mulder considered the nurse's station across the hall. "I don't know. I was still looking. I dream about that. About her. I dream Scully is dead. And my sister is dead. And all I'm doing is running in circles." "I think maybe you need to talk about that. About your partner." Mulder nodded. "A friend told me recently that I had to accept that this is a dangerous business and Scully could die." "How close were you to Reggie Pardue?" "Not like with Scully. There's. . .It's been a long time since I trusted anyone like this." "Before you were twelve?" "Probably. I've thought I've been in love. But I never trusted like this. For both of us. . .we can't trust others, not any more. Can't tell them what goes on, even if we do care about them." He smiled. "Scully's always making comments about how neither one of us has a life." "It sounds like it could be dangerous for anyone to get close." "Exactly. Dangerous for us, dangerous for them." Mulder shrugged. "It's hard when paranoia becomes your only means of survival." It was six thirty when Scully arrived. Meredith was coloring, spread across the floor with a big box of crayons. The kind of box with the crayon sharpener built in. Scully sat on the edge of a recliner, not sure what to say. "I hurt Mulder." Meredith said, pulling up, sitting on her knees. "I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry." Scully stared at Meredith, not sure what to say. At this point she had to put her own thoughts away. Her own feelings. She had to believe. "Agent Mulder says you contacted him last night." "I. . .we talked about it. He said that they were using my powers. My powers, not theirs, and that if I wanted answers they would have to give them. So I reached out. I found him, their leader. I found out as long as he's on a churchground I can reach him." Meredith's eyes' narrowed. "I can see him and he doesn't have to know I'm there until I let him know." "What did you see?" Scully asked, mouth dry. "I was in a church parking lot. It was an itty-bitty church, and it didn't really look like a church, but it was. It used to be somebody's house. But they built a front onto it, an auditorium. They painted it white. He came to make sure everything would be right on the night they kill the next child. I walked around. He didn't know I was there. Then I let him know I was there. And I asked him who he was and why. And he came towards me. He scared me." Meredith dropped her face. "I screamed. The only person I could think of was Agent Mulder." She looked up, crying. "I saw him." "Agent Mulder?" Scully asked. "Mhm. I called him and he came. He was there. Their leader saw him too. Agent Mulder got really mad at the leader. He started screaming something. I think he wanted the leader to look at him and not at me. Like you do with a snake or something. So I let go." "Of Mulder?" "Yes. I woke up." Meredith tried to stifle her sobs. "Agent Mulder was. . .I don't know. I couldn't talk to him. He was seeing things. There were things. . ." she wiped her eyes, looking throughly miserable. "There were people strapping him to a table and there were UFO's he wasn't supposed to see. I don't know. . .I couldn't talk to him. I tried and tried." "He's all right now." Scully told Meredith. "He's doing fine. He's somewhere safe now." "A hospital." "Yes. It's really nice. They'll help him when he has nightmares." "Will they make him talk about things?" "I don't know. I hope so." "He's scared. He doesn't want to ever lose you." Meredith stared hard at Scully, still crying, but less so now. "I know." "I know where the church is. It's the church they're going to use." Scully stared at Meredith, not sure if she should breath. "You know where?" Meredith nodded. "He doesn't know I know. He thinks its okay, because I didn't see enough. But I saw." "What did you see?" Scully barely breathed. "I saw the name. First Tabernacle Gospel Lighthouse of Faith, it's on a sign out front. And I saw an old ticket somebody left in the parking lot. It was to a Point of Grace concert last Thursday at someplace called the Centroplex." "Point of Grace?" Scully asked, mystified. "They're a gospel singing group. They came to DeMarr and everybody went." Scully took a deep breath. "Point of Grace. Centroplex. Last Thursday. First Tabernacle Gospel Lighthouse of Faith." "Momma has one of their tapes." Meredith offered helpfully. Scully nodded. The ward really wasn't that bad. 15 residents max, 14 current census. Mulder thought he would mind the badges, little laminated things with The Cloister's logo and their name printed in blue. There had been one with Fox on it, but Davis had traded it out for "Mulder," for which he was grateful, but at supper he understood the reasoning. The Ward ate together. A girl name Margot making sure he took a spot at their table. "Self defense, right." Margot said. The others nodded. Mulder considered the food he'd gotten from the buffet line, sighed. "That's why God made salad bars and frozen yogurt machines." An older woman, Kim, told Mulder with a grin. She had nothing but a salad on her tray. "Green ward comes in at the same time we do." Margot told Mulder, cutting up her salisbury steak. "Technically we're on the same level." "But we all have our own keys." A youngish man with red hair, Alex by tag. "For which we pay through the nose for liability insurance." "And they'll put anybody who's not ready for closed ward levels in Green." Margot again. "What are you here for?" Kim asked. "I'm post partums." Mulder stirred his zuchini around a moment. "I have nightmares and flashbacks. I. . .last night, I had a psychotic episode. . .my partner thinks I was given some kind of hallucinogen." "Partner? Wife? Boyfriend?" "Partner." Mulder replied. "I'm FBI. They're paying for the Cloister to babysit me until everyone's sure I won't hare out again." Silence descended and everyone looked at everyone else. Then green ward came in. There was recreation after supper. The recreation room was large, multipurpose, with rubbery floors of the sort Mulder had mostly seen used on volleyball courts. There was exercise equipment and about an eighth of a mile indoor track and the "recreational therapist" had an activity they were supposed to do. But there was also a basketball goal. There was a wire hamper full of basketballs. "Can I play?" He asked the rec therapist "intern" a petite creature who had obviously been a gymnast in another life time. She narrowed her eyes, gestured towards the activity. "Please?" Mulder was not accostumed to begging. She went over to "Bob," the rec therapist, came back. "No. In the morning, if you want instead of aerobics." "I'd like to jog in the morning. I try to do four miles a day." The intern whistled. "Yeah sure. They've got a great track if you don't mind the boredom. Listen, I've got a radio we don't use for morning aerobics. Why don't I leave it out? It's better than running in circles listening to yourself." Mulder smiled at this description. No one pried. They knew who his doctor was by the coding on his record book that was kept with the others in a rack behind the nursing counter. They played card games and watched television. Mulder was invited into games of Uno, hearts, and five-card-stud- for-pennies, but declined all invitations, wandered back to his room. "I need Fox Mulder." She said. "Yes, I know it's after ten. Yes. It is an emergency. No. I'll wait." "Scully?" It was Mulder, sounding breathless. "We know." "Know what? Scully, make sense." "Meredith told me where the next murder will take place." Scully outlined their conversation. "Point of Grace was in Amarillo last Tuesday." "And?" "We found the church. It's in Maurice, Texas, about 20 miles south of Amarillo." Mulder leaned against the wall, stretching the phone cord. "Skinner wanted to call and congratulate you on cracking the case, but I think he was scared to." Scully told him wrily. "Finally, a positive side to being here." Mulder replied. "Meredith made me promise to ask your apologies. She says she caused what happened to you." "Tell her it's all right." "I already did." Mulder stared at the head nurse who pointed to her watch. "Listen, I can't stay on. Where are you?" "Lafayette Hilton. I'm flying to Amarillo tomorrow though. I'll call and give you my hotel." "Great. Scully, take care." Sitting on her bed, over a burger, blouse hanging out, shoes and hose strewn about the room, Scully smiled. "All right. You too." He lay on the floor, cooling off. A shower would feel good, but he was too hot for it. For now, the best thing to do was lay back and enjoy the high from running. "Hi." A voice announced. Mulder lifted his head. Simoneaux. He put his head back down, took a deep breath and sat up. "Hi." He acknowledged. Simoneaux took a seat at Mulder's desk, opened up a file. "Morning rounds." He told Mulder, almost apologetically. "I see you were up around three." Mulder shrugged. "And they note you went to bed around eleven-thirty. That fairly typical?" "Yeah." Mulder got to his feet, sat on his bed. "Has been most of my life." "Any nightmares?" "That also is fairly typical." "Bad nightmares?" "Yeah." "Our moniter didn't catch it?" Simoneaux looked at the blue and white Fisher-Price moniter on Mulder's beside table. "I don't think anyone was listening that closely. But it wasn't bad. If it had been bad, they would have heard." Simoneaux nodded at this, but Mulder knew there would be comments to the night staff. "Janice seems to think we can't offer you very much." Simoneaux said. Mulder searched. Janice Davis. Right. "Why? Aren't many people here experienced in dealing with the kinds of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome found in Law Enforcement and military personnel?" "Most people don't know what you go through." Mulder agreed. "And it scares the general public. We're supposed to be protecting them. Not terrified of memories." "I understand you're still working." Simoneaux nodded towards Mulder's laptop. "Not officially." Mulder replied, wiping sweat from his brow. He was cold. Now was the perfect time for a warm shower. He shivered. "Richards didn't tell me you were on the Church Murders." "I'm their expert in Satanic Rituals." "The blood tests came back." Simoneaux added. Mulder looked up. This was leading somewhere. "The results were inconclusive. They found Haldol." "No hallucinogens?" "No." Mulder nodded. "What do you think? Did I flip out?" "I don't know. We accepted you onto this ward in the belief that you had been drugged." "Ah. `Has my anxiety disorder gotten so bad that I'm unable to cope with reality? And do we need to move this psycho to some place with bars on the windows?'" "We've spoken with Agent Scully." "And?" "She was quite defensive." Mulder smiled. Translation: Scully had gone into Bitch Mode, which she was quite good at when properly motivated. If she hadn't packed a gun, Scully would have been formidable. Packing a gun gave Scully the confidence to be absolutely terrifying when upset. "If you called Agent Scully you wanted to change my placement." "We've decided to leave you where you are for right now." "Ah." Thank God for the temper of a red-head. "She seemed convinced you had been given something. Possibly something either not tested for or something untraceable. She refered to an incident last year? Somehow amnesia was induced?" "Oh." Mulder nodded, outlined the clinical details of the case, his own experience. ". . .Scully had a friend at Georgetown University run blood tests privately. Nothing. But I had several puncture marks from needles and some irriation in my eyes, as well as marks from struggling against leather restraints. Apparently during my . . .episode. . .I ranted and raved about the supposedly `wiped' memories." "Agent Scully has almost no memory of the entire time she was abducted. We suspect similar chemical agents were involved." "Ah." Simoneaux nodded. "She wasn't quite clear on that." "She doesn't like to be reminded." Mulder replied. "And she was mad, which tends to cut down on her clarity factor." ". . .so if you remembered anything, it would be likely that chemical agents were involved." "Exactly. And they would be things that would not be tested for." "Unlike LSD or mescaline." Simoneaux nodded. "Is that what you think happened?" Mulder thought about giving a non-committal shrug. "Don't you have rounds?" "I made them all while you were running around like a gerbil on a treadmill. What do you think happened?" "Does this get recorded?" Simoneaux considered the pen in his hand. "Is this an off-the- record-fireside-chat-with-Spooky-Mulder?" It had been years since Mulder had heard that expression, since he'd started working with the X-files and turned from star to kook. He stared at Simoneaux dumbfounded. "I know Robert Maxwell at Quantico." Simoneaux explained. "Maxwell thinks I'm a loon." "Someday, after Maxwell is dead, I'm convinced they'll find out the man wrote porn novels or wore wedding dresses to bed." Mulder smiled, shook his head. "Yes, this is an off the record." "Okay, done unless you start ranting about really being an alien from the planet Reticula." "Deal." Mulder explained the case, explained Meri, explained the timing of his nightmares. "So she called out to you and you came?" "I was drawn." Mulder stood, paced. His jogging shoes felt clunky on the carpetting. "I can't guarantee it won't happen again. And I think. . ." He paused, realized he was putting himself over a thin line. "I think that things are going to get worse. This man, the leader. He's very intelligent. He's very careful. He's not going to let me wander around fouling up his plans, whatever they are. I saw his face. I'm more dangerous now than I have ever been to them. Meredith can read people. He can't. But he can attack those things which he already knows about. That my sister disappeared, if someone chose to hunt around, is public knowledge. With that information, most of my actions make sense. It would be logical to deduce that the incident did cause me to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. My partner was abducted and returned. Again public knowledge. He plays on it. Lets me fill in the details." "Only God can read minds." Simoneaux said. "What?" "My Grandmother used to tell me that only God knows what we're thinking without asking. The Devil just makes damn good guesses." Mulder laughed aloud. "All right." Simoneaux rubbed the bridge of his nose. "For right now I'll leave you on this ward. If there are any problems we bump you. Me, Dr. Richards, Janice Davis and your partner if she's in pocket, Margret Scully if Dana isn't. We'll make a decision on level of care." Mulder moaned to think of Scully's mother helping decide his placement in a psych hospital. But he hadn't had anyone else. Scully'd suggested it, and at the very least, Mulder could trust Mrs. Scully. "Going past Scully to her mom won't help you very much." He warned Simoneaux, lying through his teeth. "Scully got most of her temper from her mother." The basketball court was empty. In the time that was supposed to be Lunch, after occupational therapy, Mulder snuck over to the rec room. The lights were off, and it was empty. He hadn't played a good pick-up game in weeks. . . .15 and Varsity squad, the only sophmore. The feel of the ball against his hands. The spontaneous thought of strategy as players moved, as each second brought new patterns to be overcome. There was only the feel of the ball in your hands as you made the perfect shot, ran the perfect layup. Only the adreneline and roar that came from the crowd, from inside your head, from the pumping of your blood. It didn't matter who was in his mother's bed. It didn't matter about the blood that trickled down his ear the last time his father hit him. It didn't matter that he woke up at 4:30 every morning after going to bed at midnight, that his sheets were usually sweat drenched. It didn't matter. Only the feel of the ball, the patterns, the adreneline. The isolation and the unity rolled into one timeless piece of reality, when he could forget. . . "Hi. No one's supposed to be in here right now." The sudden lights hurt Mulder's eyes. He held the basketball in his hands, stared at the short woman in her leotard who stood in the doorway. The woman tossed back a long braid. "What ward are you on?" She asked. Mulder bounced the ball, deliberate in his motion. This was the way it had been. `I don't think you need to play sports anymore. I need you.' His mother. `How the hell can you play a game? How can you live with yourself?'" His father. "You're probably Green ward?" The woman asked helpfully, striding over to him. It was obvious that long years of ballet had changed her body. Her feet pointed outwards and she walked from heel to toe as comfortably as most people breathed. She searched for his badge, the badge hidden away in his pockets. Mulder stood, let a droplet of sweat roll off his nose. "I'm Miranda James. I'm the Yoga and Dance therapist." She held out a hand. Mulder did not take it. "I'm sorry to interupt you. I have a class in here in. . ." She checked her watch. "Five minutes. Yoga. For Closed ward." "Oh." Mulder finally spoke. He shook his head, clearing cobwebs. "I'm sorry. I was told I could jog in here. I just thought no one would mind if I played basketball during lunch." Reassured by his talking, the woman smiled. "Well, it's not standard procedure, but I guess it's okay. You're pretty good." "I played in high school." "Ah. Do you play any other sports?" "Um. . .Baseball. Swimming. Soccer. I can play a mean game of Cricket, but generally don't unless forced." "Cricket?" "College." "Well, why don't I walk you back." "No. That's all right." Mulder considered the ball he held. James smiled, held out a hand. "I'll put it up. Listen, why don't I call a tech? You were pretty out of it when I came in." "No. Just. . .startled." Mulder smiled. "I'm just across the atrium in Blue ward." "All right." She watched as he went back to his own ward. No one was happy with Mulder. He missed Encounters Group, and Encounters Awareness group by playing basketball. "I didn't realize how late it was." Mulder excused, sitting in front of Janice that afternoon. The rest of the ward was gone to something called horticultural therapy. "You played for three hours and didn't know it?" Davis asked skeptically. "Yes." Mulder replied, realizing how stupid it sounded. "Mrs. James was worried about you. She said you just stared at her for a long time." "She startled me." "Did she?" Davis stared at Mulder. "I think you lost yourself in the game. Mrs. James brought you out of it. She's probably lucky you didn't hit her upside the head with a basketball." Mulder bit back a laugh. "I thought so. Listen. Right now, you're in the ward on sufferance. Don't make waves." Tonight. Mulder paced the floor. Three days in the hospital and tonight was the night Scully was outside the Amarillo Church waiting. This would all end tonight. Capturing a monster would get Mulder off his leave of absence and back to square one. No problems there. If he was right, if the dreams were caused by this nemesis who was at least no longer faceless, then the dreams would lessen, would go back to their normal place in his psyche. "Hi." It was Kelly, one of three Rec Interns. She was tall, loose boned and carried herself like a jock. "I was wondering if you'd like to play a game of basketball." Mulder considered. It was 10 p.m.. Kelly came on at 2, went home at 9 on her duty days. He wasn't doing anyone any good here, pacing a worn spot in the carpetting. "Sure." "You looked like you needed to sweat." Kelly got a ball out of the hamper. "Yeah. Our case ends tonight. Swat Teams and Federal Agents." Mulder replied, letting her take the first lay-up. She was good, fast, made the shot without any problems. "You're not into it." Kelly complained, tossing him the ball. "My partner's out there." Mulder replied. "I can't stop thinking about it." "Well, you can't help her any." Kelly replied practically, stopped moving. "If you want to just practice, we can do that." Mulder stopped, drippled the ball, thought about it. "No." He said, finally. "No. Just give me a minute to get into this." The game was good. Kelly had obviously played in college. Probably gone on a scholarship somewhere. She knew how to guard, how to steal a ball. Being 4 inches shorter than him had little if any effect. It was 16-21 when it was over; Mulder collapsed onto the floor, panting. Kelly smiled, sweat dripping off her face, sat beside him. "I think I just got suckered." Mulder said when he could talk. "Who'd you play for?" "Georgetown." Kelly admitted with a shrug as though being part of the premier women's basketball program was just something she did to keep from getting bored. "Did you play college ball?" "Got offered a scholarship." Mulder admitted. "But I went to Oxford. An uncle was willing to pay for it." Kelly nodded. "You're pretty good. You'd be better if you played more often." "I'm an old man." Mulder replied. "I play pick-up games when I can get them, but that's all. He lay back, stared at the rafters. "How'd you go from Oxford to FBI?" "PhD in Psych. Got recruited." He heard the ball bounce a couple of times. "So you're more qualified as a shrink than most of the shrinks here." Kelly said easily. Mulder sat up, smiled. "I trained as a clinical psychologist, but I mostly work with behavioral models to explain actions. I don't try to counsel people." "But you could?" "I have some training in that area." Mulder admitted. "But it was a long time ago." Kelly nodded thoughtfully. "You tired yet?" "Why?" She shrugged. "I don't feel like one-on-one any more, but how about running some patterns before we cool off? Unless you don't feel like it." Mulder nodded. "No. No problem." They began running patterns, tossing the ball to each other, <> doing layups. Mulder shook his head to clear the cobwebs, tossed the ball to Kelly across the room. Kelly made a perfect arcing toss that kissed the rim indecisively before spinning out of the basket. "You're slipping, Georgetown." Mulder mocked, dribbling the ball across the room <> making his own toss that also spun a moment on the rim before deciding not to take the plunge into net. "Oh yeah, Old Man?" Kelly replied, taking the ball. <> Mulder ran back down the half-court, let Kelly pass it to him smoothly. Then tossed it back to her at the last moment, when she least expected it. Kelly caught the ball smoothly. <> She tossed the ball back to Mulder, to let him make a layup. Mulder did not catch the ball. He let it hit him in the chest and stood a moment, shaking his head. "What's wrong?" Mulder shook his head, listening for the voice. Nothing. He smiled. "Nothing. Getting old, that's all." He grabbed the ball, ran with it. A perfect, hotdogging lay up that sent the ball straight into the basket, smooth and sure. He had a picture of Sam in a plastic frame on his desk beside his laptop. She wore a dress their mother hadn't bought Sam because it was "too dear" and "inappropriate." So Mulder and his father had gone down to Macy's and bought it for Sam's birthday. It was red satin and somewhat gaudy, but Sam had contended that she felt like a princess in the dress and worn it on every occasion possible. When she outgrew it she had given it to the preacher's daughter Katie, who was two sizes down from Samanatha. After Samantha disappeared, Katie had put the dress away. Mulder wished he had told Katie to keep on wearing it. He would have liked her to. <> He argued with the nursing staff for nearly a half an hour before finally getting a phone line. "Scully?" "Mulder?" He could hear her confusion. "He's not coming." "What? Mulder what are you talking about?" "The Killer. They're not coming." "Mulder, you can't know that. You're just. . ." "Scully, they're not going to be there." "Mulder, what are you talking about. . ." "That child is dead already. They knew that site was compromised somehow. But they have another child." As he spoke, Mulder knew. "They're going to Chillmark." "What? Your hometown. Why?" "Because I'm the threat. Meredith is secondary now. They have an eight year old girl. With dark hair. With dark eyes. With. . ." Mulder stopped. "It'll be tonight. But not in Amarillo." "Mulder, how do you think you know this?" "I heard it." "In your head? Mulder, you were given drugs. Your thinking. . .it's probably screwed up. You're not competent . . ." "Scully, I just know this." Mulder cut through her words. "You have to trust me." She was silent a moment. "I'm getting out of here. " "You can't just leave." "Why not? I'm here on an informal voluntary committal. I can leave any time." "Mulder, I'll call the hospital and tell them that your thinking is disordered. I'll get them to hold you for 72 hours." "Scully, I know this." "How?" "I don't know. I just know. Because they want to scare me. They want me huddled in a ball somewhere in a locked ward screaming, to keep me off the case, to get revenge for finding Meredith, for figuring anything out. Scully, I know this. I'm going." "You don't have any backup. No support." "Neither does that child." "You don't even have your gun. Or a car." She was at the desperate point where she let herself be talked into things. Mulder could smell it and pressed his advantage. "I've got to go. I don't care. None of that matters." He heard her sigh. "I'll call the Chillmark police, have them check things out tonight. How about that?" "No. Call them, have backup ready. Scully, you have to trust me." He heard her swear. "All right. All right. If you don't find anything you know you don't have a career." "Since when has that ever stopped me?" Her car was outside. He paid the taxi with trembling hands, ran inside. Scully's new apartment was still unfamiliar. He barely remembered to disengage the security system her brothers had bought and insisted upon installing when they made it in from Guam and Alaska for Christmas. His gun was under a pile of lingerie that looked as if it had been deserted for a long time. Not much time for sex or lacy underwear when you're chasing down mutants and UFO's. Mulder smiled grimly, put the clip in his .45. He had not told Scully which church, he realized suddenly, driving in excess of all speed limits. Of course not. He was supposed to screw up. He was supposed to go in alone. He was supposed to watch. First Methodist of Chillmark Massachusetts. The church where they'd had the service for Samantha. The prayer service his mother agreed to in leiu of the memorial service the pastor had wanted. The church he'd grown up in. There were probably still teeth marks in the fifth pew from Samantha digging her mouth in as she waited quietly through the hymn service. He prayed he wasn't too late. Of course not. They would wait until he was there. Until he could watch. With a chill he suddenly realized something important. It did not frighten him as much as it should have. Death was very close. Like a cat it nuzzled him. It would jump in his lap soon. "Mulder?" Hankins stared at his partner. "They want us to go around to every church? Looking for a Fox Mulder?" Gregg nodded. It was odd, but orders were orders and these came from the FBI. "Fox Mulder. Well, I can tell you what church he's at." "Hmm?" "When I was seven, a girl was kidnapped from Chillmark. Made all the papers. Taken right out of her living room around eight o'clock at night. My momma was scared to death. Name of Samantha Mulder. Her brother was Fox. He was a basketball star in high school. Kind of touched in the head, but good on the court and real smart. They went to First Methodist." "Down on Main?" "Corner of Main and Wilson." Hankins nodded. "Might as well call and tell the other squad to meet us. If he's still weird as he was, no telling what he's up to." The church still didn't have any parking worth a damn. Mulder pulled Scully's Taurus into a no parking zone and got out. The old elementary school was across the street, the Courthouse on the third corner and Old Man Henkin's drugstore fronting the fourth corner. Only now the drugstore was an Antique shop and the elementary school housed an Adult Education center. The door was heavy. And open. Dying in a church was as good a place as any. She had been tied with black nylon straps. A little girl. Samantha. Plastic sheeted the front. But no people. Mulder twisted, looked. No one. Only the girl. What was this? What was going on. A figure knocked the breath out of him. Mulder fell hard against the edge of a pew, then down onto the thick red carpetting. The gun was in it's hands. Mulder looked up. A small, neat beard. Balding head. Congenial eyes. "We finally meet." It said. "Where is your coven?" Mulder asked, wincing involuntarily at the pain in his kidneys. "Coming." The man smiled. "Why don't you have a seat and I'll call them. We can dispose of her." "Why are you doing this?" Mulder did not move from his spot on the carpetting. He watched as shadowy figures came into the auditorium. The man considered Mulder's gun, then kicked Mulder hard in the ribs. "Get up and stop arguing with me." "Why?" Another kick, this one with a great deal of force. Mulder screamed. For a while he was unable to see for the pain that descended, that emenated from his side but covered him entirely. The man grunted, kicked again. Mulder couldn't breathe. The pain screamed at him to shut up, to do what was required. Then the man kicked again. This time it *really* hurt. "I will continue to hurt you until you do what I say." Mulder tried to get up. Someone, a coven member, grabbed him, pushed him into the nearest pew, he nearly fainted with the hurt. His ribs were broken. He knew the feel, he knew the hurt, the sharp way it was impossible to breathe through it. "I tried so hard to make you go away." The man told Mulder. "But not you. I gave you an out. Agent Mulder's going crazy with Bad Dreams. His hotel room is trashed. But you just will not go away." "Look, I know you're probably getting some sick pleasure out of this conversation" Mulder paused, the man stared at him "--the kind of thing a cat gets out of playing with a mouse. But I'm not enjoying it." Mulder looked at the stained glass window, refused to any other questions. A deep, regretful sigh. He felt the slap roll across his face, blur his visions, bring involunatry tears up. Mulder did not respond. A moment later a woman and a man approached him, holding two rolls of duct tape. Mulder was prepared to fight--they would not kill him, not just yet. He kicked, bit, fought madly. Screw the pain, screw it. It didn't matter if it made their job more difficult. Eventually five people were sitting on him, holding him. They were careful though. Keep him conscious. He had to watch. Then he could be killed. They sat him up, taped him against one of the pews where he would get a good view, where the Samantha's blood would splatter onto him. He sat tiredly, heaving in the pain. They would kill Sam for him and then kill him for Meredith. You see? His mind asked. It makes sense now. Samantha struggled on the altar, knowing her death was at hand. Hankins considered the Taurus. Virginia plates. "We don't want to spook him." He said, finishing the last of his bag of diet microwave popcorn. The other three officers nodded. "There's a door in the back. It might be open. We'll go around front." They walked quietly. Hankins wonderd about Fox. What had he done that the FBI was so interested? Hankins remembered a tall skinny kid. He remembered a single-minded face. The scene disgusted Hankins. He knew though. Hell, he watched the seven o'clock news just like everybody else. A child lay tied to a communion table. Hankins did not allow himself to think, to react to the scene in front of him, to the twelve men and women in their robes. He pulled his gun and fired without a word. Screw the damn manual. Screw the criminal justice system. Some times, some places, it's just better to kill and save the taxpayer a few hard earned dollars. The cat jumped into Mulder's lap and started purring. Mulder looked up surprised. It wasn't that he didn't like cats. But cats in courtrooms? Past the guards who had managed to even keep microcassette recorders out of what was still the headline news? Scully stiffened. The large, orange, neutered tom looked up at Mulder wisely. "What the hell?" Scully whispered. Mulder shrugged. They were still under subpeona but had finished giving testimony. The prosecution hadn't needed them as much as it might have because an extraordinary thing. The extraordinary thing was a 38 year old woman with two children. In exchange for her ex-husband and children being placed in witness relocation, being given new identities where they would not be known as her family, she had confessed to all the murders, been precise in her details. Lewis Maxwell Harrington died despite a trauma team's best efforts. The leader of what the press insisted on calling a coven, had held a post at Covington College, a haven where the indecently wealthy send their children off to school. Head of the philosophy/religon department until three years ago. He was Harvard educated and came from a wealthy family. It could not be said that anyone really mourned his death. He had a country house, a nice large two story house hidden back in the woods with several outbuildings. Here, the woman told investigators, they had trained. He lead them deeper and deeper into research concerning a ceremony suggested by a German Alchemist in the 12th century: if a child with "invisible powers" were to be brought forth, watching the slayings of "heathens" his own age, he would absorb more power. The power might be used as a weapon. Harrington had been convinced he could channel the child's powers into his own being. Sacrifice the few for the good of the many. It had been proven to work. An Italian Nunnery where many, many bastards had been born to the irreverant nuns and where these bastards had been killed upon birth, was destroyed in 1445 when a child with such powers had not been strangled at birth. The child absorbed the strength of his dead cohorts and destroyed the Nunnery. Two hundred years later a Cabbalist had come by chance upon the haunted ruins and used the essence of the power-filled child to destroy a village. It had nothing to do with religon. The powers just were. The religous words, the fear of blasphemy and of evil were dismissed as irrelevant supersticions. Things were relevant to the situation. How many children died every day from causes that were pointless? So then, why not use the procedure, why not grab the powers? The coven had practiced the procedure in Harrington's house on five children until Harrington was convinced they knew their work well enough to do the first church, to call the dream-child who played in the walls of the church. It was a church because the child believed in church, knew churches had power. Harrington could steal her abilities in a church. Or so the woman had told prosecutors. Mulder read her testimony over and over and it still didn't set right with him. He still didn't understand Harrington. He went down to Harrington's home, rooted around the man's books and notes, didn't say much about it. Scully figured that in a few months Mulder would write one hell of a profile on Harrington, but for right now this work was secondary. The killers were caught and would be executed following the prefunctory trial. Of course no one knew who had thrown human blood into Mulder's face, who had trashed his hotel room. The woman claimed no knowledge, and was believed--after 30 murders, a little blood and shit isn't going to bother you. It bothered Scully a little, but didn't phase Mulder. "Hired help." He dismissed out of hand. "They faded back into the woodwork." Faded into the same woodwork, Scully sometimes thought before she could dismiss the thought, that Mulder's dreams had faded into. After Harrington's death Mulder had had no more psychotic dreaming episodes. Nightmares yes. But nightmares were normal for him. No atavistic rocking, no unawareness of self, not anymore. Those things just stopped. No other member of the coven died the night that Hankins opened fire, which was more expensive for the state, but also a great deal more satisfying for the thirty sets of parents still mourning their children's death. The little girl, abducted in Dallas, to be killed in Chillmark, was back home. Her name had been Stacy. Word was that she was still having horrific nightmares. Her parents had been at the trial, they had talked to Mulder, thanked him. Mulder seemed amazed at their thanks, had ducked out embarrassed, leaving Scully to make up something comforting to say. The first case was being tried in Florida because that state still used the electric chair. Of course that was not the Federal Prosecutor's official reason, but everybody knew it was the real reason. If they were lucky all twelve would be sentenced to death and this would be over. If they were not sentenced to death, there were plenty of other states with a death penalty, and these states were already clamouring for the opportunity. The defense was arguing, quite persuasively, that the eleven had been brainwashed into obeying orders, that they had come under the influence of a hypnotic leader who had lead them out of reality and into his own insane world. On the stand Mulder's reply to this defense had been simple. "Bullshit. It didn't work at Nuremburg and it won't work here." The prosecutor had been more than pleased. The press had been delightedÑ ß The cat made itself at home. Mulder was at a loss of what to do. The purring was incredibly loud. Scully bit back a smile at his predicament. It started washing itself. It was quite large and he was stuck with it. Thk3 was implausibly irregular. What do you do with a cat in a crowded courtroom where the judge is a cranky old bastard? Nothing. You just let itßsit and purr while itßwashes things you'd rather it didn't. "Sorry." The man was tall and somehow familiar; a moment after recess for lunch he towered over Mulder, scooped up the cat. "I don't know how Ba'ar follows me to places like this. Silly cat." He wandered off before Mulder could ask the man anything. He opened his mnutl but the man disappeared into the crowds, past the news crews and reporters. It hit him suddenly. He turned to Scully. ß "Just shut up Mulder." She said warningly. For once he took her advice. Finis Author's Note--- This is something I wrote before The Woods, so any similarities are because I was following similar trains of thought. One of the worst memories I have of my childhood is waking in a pew of my father's church in the middle of the night. I thought I sew the plot of Abraham enacted before me, except this time there was no goat to take the place of Jacob. I know I sleepwalked as a child,ßand it is not unreasonable to assume that I made my way from the parsonage to the church one night. The sacrifice was probably my imagination at work: I had just "been saved" and had taken the Lord's Supper for the first time. My father made sure I understood why we ate the bread and drank the wine (or being Southern Baptists as we were, `drank the grape juice'( so the idea of a sacrifice and the Communion table were freshly interwoven in my head. Sitting in the dark, cold and trembly, watching the knife's pattern fall, I fainted for the very first and very last time in my life. When I woke the next morning I was in my own bed, with dirty feet and the church keys. When I first saw Pet Sematary, I had to run to the theater restroom to vomit when the main character woke up in bed with dirty feet. Also, sorry for: 1. The "Mulder totally losing it" repetion of theme. I'll try not to make it happen again, but when there's such fertile ground it's hard to stop. 2. The stupidity on the part of the FBI. What few experiences I've had with them they seem very intelligent, very well trained, very quick to pick up on patterns. Except when it comes to computer crimes. (Which is how I got my $200 cordless speaker phone for $10. But that's another story.) Amperage