From: thyme@sff.net Date: Sun, 31 Jan 1999 02:49:59 -0500 Subject: Black Car TITLE: Black Car AUTHOR: Thyme EMAIL ADDRESS: thyme@sff.net (this means that feedback would be very nice indeed) DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT: Gossamer definitely. Anywhere else, so long as I get asked first. SPOILER WARNING: None that I can think of, but it was written before Tithonus (or however that ep was spelled) RATING: PG CONTENT WARNING: Character death, but not on-screen CLASSIFICATION: S, and possibly a bit of H SUMMARY: While helping Mulder and Scully look for Cancerman, Byers meets someone just before dawn who changes his outlook on life. (note: not nearly as drippy as that sounded) DISCLAIMER: I'd only use them shamelessly if they were mine, so I gladly say that The X-files universe and all characters within that universe belong to Chris Carter and 1013 Productions, and no infringement on my part was intended. Everything else is mine. The original text is =A91998, though just barely. Brief notes follow after the end of the story. Enjoy. ------------ Black Car by Thyme ------------ I've had some pretty strange things happen to me, though you wouldn't know it seeing the face I usually show the world. I know; watery green-gray eyes, neatly combed brown hair. Constantly- trimmed moustache and beard that make me look like I'm trying to rebel against somebody, possibly my mother. The lackluster suit doesn't help either. Most people would think that this story belongs to a couple of FBI agents who work every day with the weird stuff, but they've got their own stories to tell. This one is mine, and I need to tell it to someone. It's one of those types of stories. Hi. My name is John Fitzgerald Byers, and I'll be your narrator for today. * * * Those FBI agents I was talking about. Their names, or at least the ones I'm going to give you, are Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. No one has a name like Fox? Well, that should tell you whether I made them up or not. They call each other by their last names: Mulder and Scully. Don't ask me why. Mulder and Scully were in Westchester county, New York state. A town called Bedford, near Connecticut. People there are rich, you know. And they like to pretend that they live in a place all nice and rural and New England-y. I don't tell many people this, but I used to visit an aunt who lived in the 'way up north' of New Hampshire. That was rural, New England-y, and not even blind-folded would you suspect it was 'nice'. Things live in the woods, and that's something a lot of rich city people looking for nature never figure out. The agents were investigating some paranormal sightings in New York City (you saw that movie, too? Yes, I suppose everyone has by now), and staying with some of Scully's relatives in Bedford. Her brother Charlie, I think, who owns a high-class restaurant called Bistro Twenty Two across from the Food Emporium. The FE's a grocery-store that bought out the A&P before it, and local word said that it was a downhill change. That and the tiny bakery beside the A&P, called Edelweiss, being sold and taken up by a more commercial place that didn't even make it's bread on the premises . . . Email and phone records are amazing things. So I like to investigate places I'm going. I don't go out so often that I need to do it a lot. Sorry. I'm skipping ahead. Stop me if I do it again; it doesn't make for a good story. So Mulder and Scully were staying in Bedford, and catching the train out of Mt. Kisco to make it to the city each morning. It was at Grand Central that they saw him. Him being William Sivad Hill, born in an American naval facility in Canada, and who went back and visited the country once a year on his birthday. He liked snow apparently. Later on, he joined the military, met people, did things he probably shouldn't have done, and started a very unhealthy habit, variations of which gave him a plethora of aliases. He was popularly known as Cancerman. Heard of him? Funny; the number of people who have always surprises me. He lived, then, in New York. Had a job as a freelance copyeditor when he wasn't plotting the deaths of all mankind. My comrades and I have already checked the texts he could have had a hand in, but we haven't found any evidence of hidden messages or mind-controlling phrases. Yet. Oh. My comrades? Frohike and Langly. Their first names are so unreal that you'd suspect I'd made *everything* up. But what I'm going to tell you, what happened to me that night, is true. And it's important. Not a lot of things are any more. Not for me, anyway. Maybe not for anyone. After I saw what I saw, did what I did, a lot of things came into perspective. Things in the woods and things in the sky and things that creep in the back of one's mind when all the lights turn off. They're all the same, and they're all shadows of the reality. And I've *seen* that reality. * * * Cancerman had been standing there, eating a salami sandwich from a deli in Grand Central Station. The agents, not quite prepared to see their arch-nemesis doing anything so plebeian as waiting for his train to show up, stood out of his line of sight and watched crumbs fall off his sandwich on to his suit for half an hour. They were going to follow him, see where he called home now. William Hill, according to them, should have had no idea that they were in New York. This had been one of the cases they cheerfully referred to as 'dead-meat material', or, for those less inclined to nicknames, a case that could get them fired if they were ever caught actually working on it. Their alibi was that they were spending their mutual two-week vacation with Scully's brother, so that Charlie could figure out whether he hated Mulder or not. Don't ask me why this is important to them. Bill Jr., Scully's other brother, hates Mulder with a passion that one would suspect to be brotherly concern if he 'wasn't such a prick about it'. I forget which one said that, but it stuck in my mind. Anyway, I think Cancerman must have known something, because he took a long way home. Either that or paranoia was so ingrained in him that he took a complicated route without consciously thinking about it. Five train changes before he finally ended up in Katonah, a town just north of Mt. Kisco. They couldn't follow him after that, something about no car and no taxi service if they wanted to get back to Charlie's. But they had a good idea of where he lived, so Mulder called us. Now, my esteemed partners and I are very good at what we do. But not that good. Some things need personal looking-to. After they called us, somewhat breathless, from Charlie's phone (which, they swore up, down, and sideways, was not bugged), we spent the evening booking flights and renting cars and checking out the background of fifteen international cities and forty- two small rural communities, along with the area we were actually going to. You never know who may be watching for that sort of thing. By morning, we had a printout of an economical route to three different states, including New York, a lunch hamper with generic Diet Dr. Pepper and the makings for cold burritos, and our van, gassed up and fake licence plates firmly attached with a rusting agent applied to make it look like the plates had always been there. We also had some old radio shows on tape. The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, with voices by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. Courtesy of Petri Wine, that taste brought about by the finest muscat grapes in California, made into fine wine by a recipe passed on from father to son, from father to son, and from father to son. We have a theory that the Petri Wine commercials were secret messages broadcast to the Russians to help them infiltrate America through wine exports back in the 1940s. We just have to break the code . . . No, actually, we don't travel a lot. * * * Bedford is a very nice place, provided you tell it ahead of time that it's fooling no one with its 'olde towne' act. We drove through it, or rather, Frohike twisted the wheel around and didn't hit anybody, which I suppose amounts to the same thing. Bistro Twenty Two was on our left, and the minuscule parking lot was empty except for one car. A Taurus. They *always* drive a Taurus. We also have a theory about that, the details of which I can't let you in on just yet. Here: write to this address, and you can get a subscription to our newspaper, _The Lone Gunmen_, which may shortly have the theory in print. It'll be very informative, I assure you. Anyway, they came out to lead us in. Charlie had a fairly good security system, though by the time we were done with it nothing less than a nuke could've opened that door if he didn't want it opened. But that was later. Just then we were paraded into the place's basement, there to make our home for the next couple of days. Mulder wasted no time in telling us everything they'd seen and learned, while Agent Scully actually helped us set up our equipment. Soon enough we were downloading information by the bushel about Cancerman. It's tough to hide that sort of thing when you're in New York. It's like there's a radioactive isotope in the water that just lights up everything when you're put under the right equipment. And we had the right equipment. Hmm. Radioactive materials in the water . . . What? Oh, sorry. Where was I? Ah. Mr. William Sivad Hill. They took what we found and made at least six copies on disk, sending the disks to locations and people that I really can't tell you. Of course, Langly and I took the opportunity to make a dozen more copies, which *we* keep in various places, though we never sent them by anything so unsafe as the U.S. Postal Service. The last disk they took with them, probably to confront Mr. Hill. I wouldn't know. Like I said before, that's their story, and if they want to tell it, they can. With the two agents gone, and Charlie and his family long asleep (it being around three A.M., not exactly an ideal hour for conversation), we were pretty much left to our own devices. Our devices included food, the needing of. While being in the basement of a restaurant would be wonderful during waking hours, it got old quickly. It was unanimously decided by Frohike and Langly that I should venture out and look for late-night snacks. After making pointed comments about the ownership of my robe and goose-down comforter, I left, hoping they wouldn't decide to 'borrow' any of my belongings while I was gone. Contrary to popular belief, there are amazingly few 24-hour delicatessens in the Bedford area. The number may actually be likened to a shape resembling an empty circle. Very similar, in fact, to the number zero. After making a thorough check of the entire area with our trusty van, I was ready to head back. And so there I was, at the exit of the Food Emporium's parking lot. It was a two way exit/entrance, with a small planted divider between, and a road that either went left or right. Behind was the store, ahead was the woods, thicker here than in most of the area. Swamp-land, really. And there weren't a lot of streetlights around. Three A.M., I said. Remember. In some parts of the world, that's nearly dawn. I thought I was the only one on the road. But as I sat flashing my left-signal, I saw a stream of cars come driving along the road, going right, or south, as the case may be. I could have driven out and been back at the Bistro before those cars passed me, but I didn't drive out. All I could do was watch the parade of cars stream past. Most headlights are bright, white or yellow affairs that shed little shots of light like a star in a Disney cartoon, one of the wishing types that look ready-made for the top of a Christmas tree. I mean, it's normal. And these cars had that type of light. But that was all that was real about them. White, blue, green, red, the cars, trucks, vans, all drove past, the sounds of their engines and friction of tire and pavement roaring in the night. It was only as they passed me that I saw the tires weren't moving. And the people inside would flash visible when they crossed my headlights, but the term 'people' was too generous. Corpses, really, some rotted beyond recognition, some just pale, and with suspicious bruises on their throats or a thin line of blood curving like tears from the corner of their eyes. Most looked straight ahead (the man in the grimy t-shirt, hairy, his nose broken too many times and his head broken just once), but some turned their heads and looked at me, just looked (beautiful girl, long blonde hair the color of wheat and flour, bloody baby in her arms that drenched her over-large white dress). And then they would turn back to the road, and continue on. I wanted to close my eyes. I nearly did. But then the last car came. You remember what I said about the headlights, right? The only things real on those other cars. And how I knew that this car wouldn't have anyone strictly dead in it. The headlights shone, but they didn't create the little shards of light like the others. It was just . . . like someone had taken an eraser and rubbed away all the colors where the lights were supposed to be. They were a pair of blank caves, things that sucked you down beneath reality and its colors if you touched them. And they still managed to convey the sense of cigarette stains and dead cockroaches. I expected the car to be white. I know that there are other, more traditional colors, but I expected white. Black. I should have guessed, should have known. Because the moment I saw those lights, I knew who was driving. Like a memory that's stays in the genes, like a nightmare everyone's had, like a scent that you know but don't remember ever smelling. I knew, like I knew that I was in more trouble than any government conspiracy could get me in to. * * * Continued in Part 2 (Thanks for reading this far, by the by...) Black Car (2/2) thyme@sff.net Disclaimers and introductions are in part one. Enjoy. * * * Death has simple tastes. No Corvette, no Learjet. No Jeep with vanity plates either, mind you. Not that I could see his plates. Light shined down on them, making you think that there were letters or numbers, but also making you completely positive that the flat white metal was blank. No, his car was a simple black vehicle with a large, square front and a huge, rusted, metal grill. Old, but not too old. He had lights on inside his car, too, but it didn't help me see him. I stared, trying to see features, but all I got was a feeling like with the licence plates; the impression of a large man in a shirt and vest, and with pit-bull cheeks, but at the same time nothing at all. I waited for him to pass me by like the others, but I suppose Death had other ideas. He slowed and turned right, drawing up alongside me on the other side of the planted divide. His window rolled down, and suddenly mine was down too, though I didn't remember lowering it. A smoky substance drifted from his car. It smelled like . . . imagine maggots, rotting meat, and red wine, all at the same time. It was that. There was music too, coming out of his car and filling the air. The song had a quality to it that set the spine on edge, like someone tapping the back of your brain with a needle. The words were the same. / I knew the red was there I should have seen it I thought you'd leave the site There's blood dried here. Taste the dark, my boy, but don't eat it. / How do I remember the words? Trust me; when you hear Death's choice in music, you don't soon forget. He tapped his fingers on his door in time to the music, then looked up at me and said, "Nice song, eh?" / I saw you layin' there Smoke curlin' round your tongue Think I was waitin' for the end? Boy, you saw it too and we're bound to keep it. / "Wonderful," I stammered back at him when another verse had passed. He nodded. "Always my favorite." He paused and thought for a moment. "Say, would you do me a favor?" "Uh, sure." "Well, I have this carton of boxes, all my traveling music y'see, and I think I lost the case for this song. Can you find it?" At the time, I had no idea why he thought that I could find anything for him, seeing as how I didn't know the name of the song or the band or the month or the President or the man who looks back at me every morning in the mirror. I mean, Death was asking me to arrange his music collection. This wasn't what I planned on when I left the happy life of the FCC to become a hacker extraordinare. He smiled and handed up to me a cardboard box. Inside were miniature CD jewel cases and cassette cases, all labeled with little white stickers and black ink. They all looked empty, though. I picked up one from the top and read the label. *jillian juanita nicola* That didn't sound like a band name. I picked up the one that had been next to it. *michael hughes* I closed my eyes and randomly picked one out of the bottom of the box. *dana katherine scully* Death laughed and said, "I've been listening to that one a lot, lately, but I don't think that's it." He looked forward and started humming along with the music as the next verse began. / Look boy, I've seen it all Including you / He wasn't paying attention to what I was doing. I quickly plunged my hand in again and drew out four others, all tied together loosely with white string. *fox william mulder* *melvin frohike* *ringo langly* *john fitzgerald byers* / And the book done closed on that. / I slipped all those cases, including Agent Scully's, beneath the car seat. I didn't dare look over to see if he was still caught in the music. / Shovels covered the hole I found you in / Without looking up from the box, I said, "I can't find what you want." His harsh whisper didn't sound in my ears, but instead went straight to fear center of my brain. "Boy, don't you know enough not to interrupt someone singing? Just wait; I'm sure you'll recognize the case as soon as the song's over." I didn't say a word until the music faded. / Should I have prayed there? With sap drippin' down wood all rotted through? I left you, dear boy, praise me for it. I need it all. Oh Lord, I need it all. / The music pushed the needle into my spine just a little harder before it stopped, leaving everything in silence. Death spoke. "Now tell me, did you find the case?" I don't know why I did it. It could've been anyone I pulled out, someone important to me, someone I hadn't saved. But still I put my hand into the mass and pulled out another random case. *william sivad hill* "Here." I handed the case over to him. "I found it." Death looked at the case, and squinted his eyes to read the faded little label. Then he smiled and said, "I knew you'd find it. Thank you. Mind giving me my music back?" I gave him the box, hoping he wouldn't notice the missing cases. He dropped the box beside him, listening intently to the clatter within. He frowned. Seeing Death frown was almost as frightening as seeing him smile. Though one did imply that you'd live to see dawn. The other . . . Then he shook his head and said, "Old ears. I almost thought . . . " He looked me up and down, taking in the eyes and beard and suit and measuring me up. He shook his head again. "No, I don't think so." He rolled up his window, backed out on to the street, and then continued on his way. The ghost train of cars reappeared in front of him, and they passed beyond my view as quickly as they'd come. * * * The agents Mulder and Scully came pounding down the basement steps at 5:33 A.M. according to our clocks. Collapsing beside the computer set-up, they wheezed out the news. Cancerman was dead. Which really wasn't much of a surprise, considering. They'd apparently broken the door open, waving their guns and shouting that any black-lunged sons of bitches on the premises should feel free to come out with their hands up. Mr. Hill had been sitting in front of a manuscript with a red pencil in hand, and, while he did put his hands up briefly, he also clutched them to his chest and died of a heart attack within seconds of their having found him. Scully still isn't sure precisely what set him off. It could have been 'his time', or it could have been the shock of their finding him. It might even have been because I'd picked his case out of all the others. Oh, the cases. Yes. Well, I brought the ones I'd saved out from under the van's seat once I'd parked by the Bistro. Remember that four that had been tied together? There was a note beneath the string. *hold on to these tunes for a while. they get better with aging. i'll pick them up again when it's time.* I don't know why he did what he did. Why he let me get away with it. Why he even rolled down his window that night. But . . . I still see the cars drive past every once in a while, sometimes right before the scanner picks up an ambulance call, sometimes for no reason at all. Maybe a reminder. Because these days, when the world is burning up and the sky is falling down, I need to remember my priorities. And maybe Death doesn't like what's going on either, what with the up- coming colonization and the things that send people driving with him too soon, so he gave me a little help. I don't know. But he said that he'd come pick up the cases when the time came, so I'll ask him then. Hey. Have a nice day. END ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Okay, brief notes. One: just because I write about it, doesn't mean I live there. Two: The name I give here (William Sivad Hill) is completely made up. I haven't a clue to what his actual name may be, and I doubt I'll find out anytime soon. Three: All lyrics I give here are my own creation, a pastiche of the actual music that pushes needles into my brain. Go forth and buy _Sackcloth 'n' Ashes_ or _Low Estate_ by Sixteen Horsepower. Way neat. Four: I've seen that damn car. Freaked the hell out of me. And I sincerely hope I never see it again. If you like this, try the stuff on my fanfic page, at http://www.sff.net/people/thyme/fanfic.htp