From: "Jesemie's Evil Twin" Date: Mon, 25 Oct 1999 14:13:34 PDT Subject: xfc: NEW: Kith (1 of 2) by JET Source: xfc From: "Jesemie's Evil Twin" Kith by Jesemie's Evil Twin jesemie@hotmail.com Category: A fairy tale for autumn, oddness, M/S UST Disclaimer: I own only Lyle, and I'd be happy to give him away to a good home (or a bad one) Feedback: Is better than a plastic pumpkin filled with Hershey's Almond Kisses jesemie@hotmail.com For Liza, Shari, and Jill, for everything. Thank you. - - - Part One of Two - - - Came to me now a murmuring cry, stilling the crystal notes. It was articulate -- but as though from something utterly foreign to this world. The ear took the cry and trans-lated with conscious labour into the sounds of earth. And even as it compassed, the brain shrank from it irresistibly, and simultaneously it seemed reached toward it with irre-sistible eagerness. - from "The Moon Path" by A. Merritt - - - It sounds like someone is bending chords in the basement; the floor seems a flimsy filament of marble tiles strung between the slick lime walls of a cavernous depth, and the music rushes beneath her feet like powerful rapids crushed against cold rock. "Mr. Morgan is in the middle of his afternoon rehearsal," the terse butler says. "So perhaps you could come back in an hour or two. I'll tell him you dropped by," he adds with some exasperation. High-pitched piano-produced notes plink against the windows, and there is a moment of repetition that sounds like shrill hail is pelting the entire interior of the foyer. Scully winces as glass vases rub and ring on their precarious shelf above the open basement door. She will not admit that coming alone was probably not a good idea. "FBI," she says, flashing her badge with a precise wrist. "This will only take a few minutes, sir. I'd appreciate interviewing Mr. Morgan immediately." The butler does not look amused. He stands up straighter, as though preparing to march into war, and says, in a taut manner, "I see. May I ask what this is regarding, Agent?" "Not really." "Of course. And was Mr. Morgan expecting you?" "Not really." "Indeed. I'll tell him you're here now." The butler turns and takes two steps away from her, then pivots to face her again. His expression has lost some of its haut grimness. "Your name again was?" "Agent Dana Scully. He'll know me." "Why is that?" The rhythm of the audible work downshifts, slows and settles into a thick lava pace. The relative minor key picks up terrible tones of unspeakable woe on the pianist's behalf, before reverting to a happier major key and melody. "Mr. Morgan believes he has been wronged by . . . someone to whom I am loyal. My name should not go unrecognized." "You are right, Miss Scully," a new, frail voice inserts. "But you must not blame my son for feeling persecuted. You must understand," the woman says as she takes Scully's hand in her grating grip, "he was misplaced for such a long time, like Samantha in some ways. I'm lucky to have found him. He and Melissa became very close. A shame she didn't come back, isn't it, dear? Or rather, I suppose she did, but not as you would have liked, I'm sure." Scully tries to jerk her hand away, but the music has halted, leaving an echoing hush to reverberate like aftershocks through the domed hall, and the butler has disappeared, and the basement door gawps, revealing nothing but barely visible steps of muted charcoal hues, like a sketch of stairs. The old woman has become older than she first seemed, as though her flesh is losing its agility with frightening, unnatural speed. She holds Scully's hand with a cruel clutch and leans forward, speaking closely enough Scully can feel the crone's corpse-breath on her own paled face. "Of course, you were returned. And very few children are. But tell me, dear, for I've always wanted to know: what was it like, to be considered practically dead and buried, to be almost eradicated, like a plague, to be plundered like a robbed grave?" The crone smiles, baring her decay-streaked teeth, and whispers, "What was it like to be lost?" Someone found me, Scully thinks, fear sweeping her limbs like sleet. Mulder, she thinks, stifling a gasp, the fear tripling. She feels tears wash her eyes, but as she allows herself, as though in a trance, to be lead down the twisting, slanting wooden staircase, she understands the filth that has produced those tears will burn her vision if she blinks. Each drop left to drip mars the dirt floor with splotches that look, in certain lights that never fall in this particular prison, exactly like blood. Minutes, hours, days later, a score, a thin wet gash along her cheekbone stings, and Scully is dismayed to hear a whimper escape her angry throat. A single candle flame ignites momentarily, and the old woman, hovering somewhere in the distance, says, with the indulgent tone of grandmothers and ghouls, "We'll have a good game of hide-n-seek, won't we then?" "Why?" The wall is slippery beneath her spine, and her breaths feel clinched and stressed. "We are happy today," the crone says, and snuffs the light. "He is coming, coming, coming. Any idea who he's searching for?" A percolating tread as the captor ascends. "Any idea what he'll find?" Scully stares into the darkness, feeling herself vanish with an awareness all the more horrifying for being somehow completely familiar. - - - Samantha is twirling in his memory, her white and purple flowered dress blurring the way a ceiling fan, when rotating, seems to be made of one solid circular blade, like a buzz saw. He is remembering being eight years old and standing on tiptoe to rip at wrung-raw leaves pendulant on the deformed trees. Autumn has doused the late afternoon with dry sunlight that rustles like stiff saffron skirts. The foliage appears cheery from a distance, but up close the leaves are listless, their colors caked on like oily foundation applied to cover liver spots or grim wrinkles. He is bored, stretching to pluck another leaf, when he hears a woman's voice clap and ebb through the subdivision. He looks over at Samantha, who pauses, shrugs, and continues spinning. "Lyle! Lyle! Where are you, Lyle?" The voice is recognizable enough; they've heard it screamed from the neighbor's front door often, and they've learned to ignore it, mostly. He thinks Harriet Morgan may as well keep her son Lyle tied to a rope tied to a stake stuck in hard dirt, for all her attempts to keep Lyle from straying out of the yard. He can see her stomping towards his mother, demanding to know if anyone has seen Lyle, where's Lyle, why the hell can't anyone help her out and leave the boy alone, not lure him away from her sight, what are they trying to do, give her a stroke, Lyle's a special boy, he mustn't be allowed to wander all over like a vagabond for chrissake. Samantha is giggling, sugary wispy laughs, and she curls her arm around his and hides her forehead against his left elbow. "What?" he asks, squinting down at the top of her small brown head. She keeps giggling. He rolls his eyes and sighs with the melodrama he knows she enjoys. He taps her shoulder. "Hey. Hey. _What_?" "I know where Lyle is," she says around her fingers. The hand over her mouth does not conceal the bubblegum-lipgloss grin, and he imitates her giggles. Across the lawn, Harriet's index finger stabs the porch rail behind which his mother, he can tell, is trying not to get angry. "Yeah? Where is he?" Samantha collapses in the grass, shrieking with glee. "He's lost! He's lost!" He laughs, thinking she's kidding. Sam's happy yelps decompose until they sound like small hands smashing piano keys in a high octave, a metallic wreck of thin pinched notes. Harriet's eyes turn on Samantha and him, slide into his vision like scorch marks. He gasps. She'll burn us down to teeth. She'll turn us into monsters. He pulls Samantha up and drags her to the house, running around Harriet. Once inside the house, he is ridiculously relieved that he recognizes his gawky reflection in the old mirror at the end of the hall. It is only now, so many years later, holding a photograph of a tiny dark-haired girl in a floral dress, he remembers the sensation of seeing Samantha's reflection that day. Her bleary and warped counterpart, when she skipped into her bedroom, had seemed to billow and contract itself before blinking out of the frame entirely, like a collapsed ghost. Photographs everywhere though, and they could perhaps conjure a thousand similar memories. He isn't certain it's Samantha in the picture, but his instincts feel spiny with static. There's something here, something he's supposed to find. He spills the glossy paper squares in a half moon around him, digging into the box like a trick-or-treater scratching through a stranger's presented dish to find the perfect piece of candy. He flips the photographs, fanning them out. The ASAC is at the back, growling grisly boss commands for the other agents to search the rest of the house. She sounds congested, giving orders through a nasal drone of phlegm. The rest of the house is empty. Dust tattoos the spaces where paintings hung; one end of a shelf over the basement door dangles drunkenly. The front door has been left open, inviting bitter breezes into the foyer where he kneels penitent before the piles of pictures. Children, children, playing, crying, hitting balls, tugging hair, sleeping, sneezing, glowering into the camera lenses like dares. Girls, boys, in all sizes and shapes and colors, flat against the illusion of two-dimensional life. A breeze thieves a stack of photographs, scurrying them away almost to the top of the basement stairs, across the hollow marble room. He springs to his feet, stumbling to catch them. His hand crumples the three pictures and he stills - piano music somewhere, just the edge of it, as though it bubbled up from far, far beneath the ground. He tries to control his breathing, smoothing out the creases on the photos and leaning against the doorframe. Something terrible expands within his chest. The music stops. He looks at the three photographs. One features a little boy with a red screaming face. The child's t-ball uniform is embroidered with the name Lyle. One features an older boy, a kid snatching autumn leaves, the face in the memory mirror. He pockets the two pictures. He jogs back to the larger mess of photos and grabs the one that might be his sister and slides it in the pocket also. He tries to remain silent. Don't think it. Don't say it. He turns the third photograph over in his hands. Pretty girls, prettier than he would have guessed. Sisters, with the same astonishing hair. The elder girl is smiling, bright as lightning, but it is the smaller girl, probably two or three years old, who interests him. She is not smiling. Her eyes are vast and mellifluous, binding him, and her expression is startled-scared but somehow courageous, as though she knows all the ocean secrets, as though she is waiting not to be saved but to be discovered. - - - Upon arriving, the first thing she learned was that sheet music fluttered like snowflakes when ripped into very tiny pieces and tossed into the air. She spent months perfecting the technique. The second was that Lyle practiced unmemorized compositions whether or not she turned the sheet music into a blizzard. It was easy and took only a few seconds to understand. The third thing she learned was that trying to take Lyle with a grain of salt was impossible. She'd need the world's largest salt shaker. Besides, something was going wrong. She tried to laugh it off. Fear poured slowly. When she heard her sister moan, she realized the situation had completely lost its humor. That was the fourth thing. It was the hardest lesson, but it took a much shorter period of time to master. She finds him slumped over the keyboard, left hand splayed on a bass triad. "You can't keep going back." "My mother wants me at home. We obey her." "You obey her," she snarls. "I didn't listen to my own mother most of the time. I sure as hell won't listen to yours." Lyle turns and shakes his head. "She'll hurt her. This is mother's favorite game." She slams the keylid. "My sister can take care of herself. And quit saying things like Norman Bates would." Lyle glares at her. "She'll. Hurt. Her. You won't be able to save her." "Maybe he will," she says, but she is worryingly unconvinced. Lyle grins and begins to play. "He's the one we were luring in the first place. Two for the price of one. Brilliant. Had no idea it would go so well. Pure coincidence she was running interference for him, trying to protect him from big bad irritating me." He missed a note, stepped out of key, and stopped abruptly. "Whatever happens, he at least will get exactly what he deserves." "You don't believe that." He looks at her almost with fondness for a moment. "It doesn't matter. It's still too late." They are both silent. Then she asks, "Was this anything like you expected?" "What?" "Death." "Of course, Melissa. I always knew." - - - "I'm sorry, the number you requested has been disconnected. Would you like me to try another number, sir?" He falters at the operator's gruff voice. The stiff phone cord is wrapped around one hand, scoring the flesh between his first and second knuckles. The cord shifts. He stares at the shallow red notches left behind, at the fist cinched shut like a purse hiding one polished coin. His other wrist aches, supporting his fatigued weight, palm flat to the booth's glass wall. "No," he says, "thank you." He assumes there is the polite unseen professional nod for goodbye on the other end, because the disconnect click follows a dip of silence before the phone line blasts its dial tone. The receiver in his hand is a density he feels even in his spine, a weight twined at a nerve somewhere in the middle of his back. Headlights hit the phone booth like explosions. Mulder sticks his head out the door as his boss exits a nondescript vehicle. Skinner's hard-nosed anger is betrayed by something close to panic in his voice. "Where the hell have you been?" "I --" "Is your cell phone on?" Skinner barks. "Yeah, that's why I'm using this pay phone." Skinner squares his jaw. "I lost it, ok?" Mulder mumbles. "I've been following a lead all day, didn't have time to stop by Sprint PCS and check out the latest replacements." "That's a great attitude you've got for someone whose partner is MIA." Mulder grimaces. Don't say it out loud. If you say it, it's true. "Who told you?" "ASAC Hooper, who the hell do you think? And your deferment to her on this investigation is commendable, really, but I'm a bit curious about a few other things." Mulder doesn't respond. He sidles past Skinner, heading back up the block to the abandoned building. Skinner matches his pace. "Who were you calling?" "Friends. You've met them." Skinner looks incredulous. "They changed their number. They change their number a lot. It's always unlisted, and I don't remember the latest edition. Anything else you wanna know?" Skinner grabs Mulder's shoulder. "Don't think I haven't noticed that you've gone completely over my head on this, that you are here without official permission." He pushes up his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. "One warrant was issued for a Lyle Morgan. Who is that?" Mulder shrugs him off and speeds up. "Old friend." "And the other warrant is for Harriet Morgan?" "His mother." "What's your interest?" Skinner sighs. "Lyle Morgan was harassing you." Mulder glances at him. "A few letters, a few phone calls. We knew each other as kids." "You think he's somehow involved in Scully's disappearance." Mulder grits his teeth. "He is. I'm just not sure . . ." Hooper stands on the front porch, her right foot propped on a window ledge while she ties a shoelace. "Nothing?" "Nothing," she agrees. "Good evening, AD Skinner. Aside from the box of photographs - none of which seem to have fingerprints besides yours on them, by the way - there's nothing in there but grime, and there's no sign of any recent visitors to this humble abode. Sorry. Got anything else?" "This was the return address on the letters; bureau records said Lyle's last call to me came from a number the phone company says it bills to this address." "Well, they're denying it now," Hooper says. "And we can't even find a phone jack." Mulder closes his eyes for just a second. "Okay. I'll gather up the photos and take them back to the office." Hooper wanders away, yelling for her crew. "You need to go home, Mulder," Skinner says. He steps inside the house, peering around at the dusty darkness. Like an afterthought, he asks, "You're sure Scully is really missing?" Mulder crouches beside the scattered photographs. "I'm sure." "How --" "I'm sure." He practically shouts it, and Skinner flinches. Out of the corner of his eye, Mulder can see Skinner thinking. "You found something, didn't you?" Skinner finally asks. "I don't know." He is tired, and beneath the weariness he is scared, and beneath that . . . "But I can't go home yet. I have to find her." The agents are swarming out the door and Hooper pauses to tell him, "This investigation is ongoing, Agent Mulder, but we need to regroup and start over. I expect to hear from you first thing in the morning. Get some sleep." When they've left, Skinner says, "I won't pull you off this case. And I won't mention that you've obviously lied through your teeth to get this far in the first place. Be very careful, Agent Mulder. You are very close to expulsion. I would have no problem yanking you immediately if you step over the wrong line." "You wouldn't if you knew she was dead," Mulder retorts. Skinner jerks as if hit. "Is that what you think? That she's already been killed?" Mulder drops his eyes. Beneath the fear . . . "I don't know," he whispers. Skinner walks away, and in the entrance of the house, Mulder is left alone, trying not to grieve. - - - There is a fleck of ginger light far in the distance of the creaking clawed shadows surrounding her. Her feet are freezing, and she hasn't any idea where her shoes are. It has been such a long time since she left the basement, since she forgot to escape. Piano scales are rising and falling with a sort of tangled winding moan. She cannot be certain she isn't the vocal accompaniment to the uncontrolled composition. She lets the music strike at her, surge and drown her. The water is warm, warm, warm, curled around her. Let me sink. "Dana," Melissa is saying, "all you have to do is let go of the raft and you'll float. Just let go." "No!" "Danes, you're being a baby again. Let go of the raft. You won't drown, silly. God." Melissa forces Dana's hands away from the inflatable alligator, but Dana is quick, grabbing the tail again and hanging on with desperate panic. "Go inside and dry off. I'm sick of babysitting today." The anger bursts so quickly it almost hurts. "You're just like Billy. You're both just mean." There is fervor behind the words, but only to Dana's ears. She will not start crying. Choppy water splashes when Melissa tumbles, muttering, off the raft into the pool. Her freckles seem to jump around on her shoulders, crisscrossing between the straps of her yellow bathing suit. The water gives her hair an odd olive tint. She stretches her arms over her head. Double-jointed, her spine seems to bend perpendicular to her neck and shoulders. To Dana, she looks a bit like an angry seahorse. Melissa grabs her sister's wrist and tugs it away from the raft. "Stop it!" "Quit splashing around. You'll drown us both." Melissa laughs now, sputters actually. "If you weren't so stubborn, you could have taken lessons at the Y instead of telling mom you'd teach yourself, you know." "I don't like the Y. The locker rooms smell funny." She flails, losing balance even as her sister keeps her grip on her wrist. "All locker rooms smell funny. They're locker rooms, Danes. Now c'mon, we're getting out." The water blurbles and rises, as though displaced by an enormous serpent - dark blue under the chlorine waves, huge and horrible, wrapping around her ankles, dragging her under, under, under. Burning in her eyes, nose, and she is being swallowed. Missy wraps her arms around Dana's waist, yanking her head above water. "Anyone can float, you know. Just let it happen. If you keep struggling like that of course you're gonna go to the bottom of the pool." She pauses a moment, like she's timing Dana's heartbeat. Then she asks in a rather calm voice, "See anything down there?" "Like what?" Small little shivering words. "Charlie's goggles. Old leaves. A monster?" She laughs, "Not that you'd ever believe in monsters or anything. Now," she says, pulling Dana's arms straight out, "lean back." "No." Melissa slides one arm under Dana's back, leaning the girl back forcibly. "Do it. I'm not going to drop you. Besides, you'll float." "No." "Is that your favorite word? Okay, then I _will_ drop you." And she removes all contact, scooting back through the water towards the white metal ladder at the end of the tank. The world goes hollow and ghostly in Dana's ears, her body suspended at the surface of water. She senses each molecule and the tension holding her, a pressing up from beneath. She floats, dissolved to adhere, to mold to the membrane of the liquid. Just let go. The sinuous monster undulates against the backs of her legs, arms, head, and she imagines her skin sloughing off in one long fillet. Meat. Can't move or it will get me. Be brave. Don't move. "I told you you'd float," Melissa says, her words water-warped and fading as she climbs out of the pool. "Don't leave me here," Dana says, but receives no response. She squints at the cloudless high noon sky and listens to the water boil black. She coughs until she wakes up on the cold solid ground. So dark here, and the copper illumination far in the distance still flickers, like smothered sunlight. - - - End Part One From: "Jesemie's Evil Twin" - - - Part Two of Two Please See Part One for Disclaimers, etc. - - - It is too quiet in this house of shadows, but outside the wind threatens like an inebriated guest barred for bad behavior. Mulder is creating a passage of footprints between the front door and the basement door. His steps make no sound, not even a shuffling accentuation of the downbeat that is beginning to emerge beneath him. He stops, hands dropping to his sides. Yes, there it is. Piano music, and his mind tunes it in slowly, as though the melody is a radio wave corkscrewing through space to come out the other end of a wormhole, the other side of a galaxy of melting stars. He walks to the basement door. The flashlight batteries are waning, and the beam is blurry, clambering useless yellow down the wooden stairs. There's nothing down there, right? Hooper and the team checked it out. Dirt floors and a quick dead end. An innocuous pit walled up after twenty feet. The music grows louder, happily devouring the drunken gale. The flashlight tumbles out of his hold, and the beam is snuffed. In the darkness, the stairs are inconceivably visible. Mulder carefully descends the first three steps. The piano music is deafening, smashing and circling like a maelstrom, lapping against the bottom of the stairs. Despite all common sense, he continues to walk down. As soon as he sees the pattern of crimson, the deep red stain blossoming under the wall he encounters, he understands that he is being led. The blood on his fingers is still warm, and when the music halts his sight is extinguished. Then there is nothing but the solid barrier, and the scent of her on his hands, cooling. - - - The woman's eyes are alternating earth tones and her smile is the color of russet clay. Despite this, she doesn't seem particularly solid. Lyle is somewhere over a hill, varying "Chopsticks" with "Good Golly, Miss Molly" on a shattered electronic keyboard. Melissa thinks maybe it is battery powered; the notes are sluggish, molten and unsavory. "I need you to know something," the woman tells her. "Who are you?" "Someone who isn't supposed to be here. Like your sister. Like my brother." "Samantha?" "I was once. It's irrelevant now." The hell it is, Melissa wants to scream. My sister is here because she works with your brother who is the way he is because of you, because of what happened to you. "I know that," Samantha says angrily. "I don't have time to explain. But you have to tell her-- You have to make her understand that she can leave. They both can. Just like I can." She pauses. "I stole something from this place." "Wait, wait." Melissa feels the Scully family temper flare behind her eyes. "How did you get here?" "It isn't important! You have to tell her to check the mail." "What? What's that supposed to mean?" Melissa can hear Lyle trudging up through the baby dogwoods, the snapping vine and underbrush, the soft seedling sumacs on the hill. "You almost ready, Mel-Mel?" he calls, the obnoxious nickname leered like a warning. "I left the photographs for him, but I sent her the music. It has better applications than snow," Samantha says, backing away. "It will be all right. But they need to know they can get out." "Melissa!" Lyle bellows. "I'm coming," she yells in a huff. The woman in front of her wavers, steps behind an ancient pin oak, and evaporates. Melissa thinks she sees her wave goodbye, but she can't be sure. It might have been her imagination. Lyle cheers for himself on top of the hill as though he's conquered a mountain. He appears to be even more enamored with the idea of causing pain, and any confidence Melissa may have had that she can save her sister dwindles. "Let's go," he says, pulling Melissa up by the sleeve of her dress, "I can't wait to see the looks on their faces." - - - The line of trees reminds her of the tapered trail she once walked to a lake. Did she go out in the rowboat that time? There was a dock, Scully recalls. She wants to know if the lake is still there. It is cold enough now she thinks it might be frozen over, a single plate of glass. She ponders whether she is heavy enough to crack it, if it would slice her as she fell through to the icy depths beneath the delicate veneer. She rests for a minute, remembering silent people who watched her from a harbor as she drifted away, of that calm, sweet sorrow. And she remembers a contrast of terror, of ice tied and stapled inside her belly, her throat, a glacial line ripped out of her, snapping her connection to a hostile life that bled inside her a virulent fatality. She remembers Mulder hovering around her, shocked into fear greater than any she'd ever felt and a protectiveness and reverence that was stronger than her death. - - - The wall is gone and he is running. This world is striped dark and light like a time-lapsed rotation of sunshine. The forest is lush and cold, colder the further he goes. Piano music is echoing backwards through the trees, and he wonders idly if there is a secret satanic message to be deciphered. Somehow, he decides, that would be entirely too mundane. Best to leave such trifles to Ozzy Osbourne. He almost smiles at that. He remembers the forests with Samantha, teaching her to hang upside down from tree limbs. He has seen this sky before, has felt himself lifted into it on beds of grass and heat and sand. He knows this ice, knows the press of Scully's hand on his, that simmering strength. Frost sears his lungs. When he stumbles, and closes his eyes, he can hear her, the catch in her breaths, the terror. He wants to call for her, but there isn't enough time to force out the words. He keeps running. His fingers rub together, numb under the dreadful stains. - - - They walk until they come to an old baby grand waiting under a sycamore. Lyle is delighted. While he pecks out the syncopation on the splintering piano keys, he sings flatly, "'Well, the night is upon us, it's time to turn blue; better put on your masks and your camouflage too.'" The deer antler candelabrum suspended from the tree dribbles as lit votives melt, wax drizzling on the piano's weathered varnish in incomprehensible patterns. Melissa stands away from the piano, turned away from Lyle. She peers into the thick midnight forest and suppresses a shudder. "You're sure this is the place?" Lyle launches into a feisty, swing-time rendition of "Moonlight Sonata" before answering, "This is the place." "Why the piano, anyway?" Lyle leaves his bench and climbs up on the log against which Melissa is resting her elbows. Flecks of bark crumble with his shimmy into a straddling position. He twists around and grins at Melissa. She stares back at him stonily. "Mother forced me to take piano lessons when I was little. Hated it. The teacher looked like Woody Allen, and she spat when she'd say, 'You haven't been practicing your scales, have you, Mr. Morgan?' She was also fond of slapping my knuckles with a ruler. Real old school gal. Just be thankful I wasn't taking banjo lessons instead." He smiles again, and in the dappled gloom his teeth look mottled and pointy. Melissa doesn't react, though her stomach spasms and she nearly gags. Lyle narrows his eyes and brushes one nail-bitten finger along the quirked arch of her left eyebrow. His smile tightens. "What do you really want to know, Melissa?" She steps away from him. "Why Fox Mulder?" The smile dies. "Something went wrong." "What do you mean?" "I was taken. And he wasn't. But he was supposed to have been taken as well. It was arranged." He shakes his head. "I suppose you think I should have gotten over it by now." Melissa says, "What are you talking about? Taken too? When?" An idea solidifies in her mind and she tastes bile. "When Dana was taken?" Her broken sister of wires, paper eyelids taped shut, memories sleeping like dormant viruses, or-- Oh, god. Which is worse? "Samantha was taken instead. Last minute change of plans, from what I understand. Only she never came here. No one here, in fact, seems to know where she went." Melissa clenches at the log in front of her. Hide it. Hide it. She does not pry out a response before Lyle speaks again. "So both of the Mulder brats managed to escape all this, basically," Lyle scoffs. "Mother never did like me playing with them, but she promised. She promised. But I hid well in those days, got away from her for larger chunks of time. It's only recently I've discovered how shorted I really was in the entire deal." He scowls at Melissa. "Of course, Dana was supposed to be here instead of you, but hey, those are the breaks." He jumps down from the log and saunters back to the piano. On the bench, Lyle shifts to make better use of the damper pedals. He begins to sing in his untrained voice, "'And I don't do tricks and I don't do treats, the world doesn't need another freak.'" Melissa kneads her hands on her skirt and wonders if killing someone who's already dead is a punishable offense in this underworld, and if it isn't, if the victim's childishness is a good enough reason for post-mortem homicide. "Why bother trying to get rid of him, Miss Scully?" a familiar voice drones elegantly. "Then you'd have to lure your sister and Mr. Mulder all by yourself. That would be a large chore for such an inexperienced girl. You might be tempted to let them go. You might be reluctant to fulfill your obligations as my latest acquisition." Lyle cackles over a butchered chord, "'You see, I've left my broomstick and my witch's outfit in a state-patrolman's trunk.'" With a sharp fingernail, the crone cuts a slender wound along the edge of Melissa's eyebrow. "You might squirm when they scream," the old woman says. "I simply can't allow that to happen." She pats Melissa on the cheek. "I promised my boy." Melissa lunges for the woman but envelops only night and the scents of an autumn-rotting forest. Leaves crunch under her feet. "Quiet!" Lyle yells. "Your sister is coming." Go back, Dana, Melissa thinks. I think maybe I've lost my mind in the afterlife; I've been talking to dead girls again. You don't want to play with us. Please go back. "She can't." Lyle grasps her by the waist and spins her around, as though they are going to square dance. "There are no other dead girls here today." His breath is foul on her face and his eyes are wild and wretched. She will not cry. "I can smell her bleeding. "And what's best, he can too." She considers hugging her, or smiling as though it's wonderful to see her again, but it isn't really. Her sister is wounded. There are long, deep scratches down Dana's left arm; more, shorter lacerations wrap around her right ankle. Something tells Melissa that Dana doesn't even register the pain. Maybe it's the way Dana seems content to watch the blood weep off her fingertips. Finally, she speaks. "Have you been here all this time, Missy?" Melissa grimaces. "No. I think I lost the bet." "Who is this?" Lyle steps forward, hand outstretched formally. "Lyle Morgan. Pleasure to meet you. I understand you're the best lure in the land," he says, jolly and conniving. "Can't express how thrilled we are that you decided to play our little game." He scratches his ear and grins. "It was actually by chance you happened to be so damn nosey, but here you are and, well, thanks, Dana. You can't know what it means to me." He looks behind her expectantly. "Is he coming?" Dana falters, her knees giving way under a vehement exhaustion Melissa can see cloaking her like a bruise. "Lyle!" Melissa says. "Why don't you let me handle her?" He frowns, suspicious. "No. I think not." "Can I have a minute, please? After all, she is my sister. It's been a while since I saw her." Lyle sighs his crazy sigh. "One minute. I'll be working on my latest aria." Melissa kneels beside her crumpled sister and smoothes back a sticky lock of Dana's hair. "Dana, listen to me," she whispers, "I've been told there is a way to leave." Dana looks up, distress making her slight, younger, more frail. "I was told to tell you to check the mail." Lyle comes back, poking Melissa in the shoulder. "Time's up! Do you think I should burn her or cut her? Or both?" he asks conversationally. "Which would get him here the quickest?" "Wait. Please," Melissa pleads, practically singing the words, trying to keep Lyle out of her thoughts as she races through ideas. "Why?" Lyle asks, smoothing a lecherous hand over Dana's collarbone and almost purring when she recoils. "She seems quite ripe." Dana knocks his hand away. "Are you going to hurt him?" she hisses. Lyle rolls his eyes. "Well, of course." "No!" Melissa starts. "She'll make a deal." "What kind of deal?" Lyle wants to know. "She'll stay here - alive - if you let him return unharmed." "I don't think you can broker those sorts of deals." "I can. This is all you really want, isn't it, Lyle? Someone to stay. She'll stay. I'll stay too. Let him go." He seems unsure. "I don't know. I think I'd rather kill them both." An idea catches at Melissa. "No. No, you wouldn't. Your mother would rather that, wouldn't she? She's the reason you're here in the first place." She glances at her sister, hope bolstered by the renewed intensity she notices in Dana. "Please let him go." Dana says it quietly, eyes downcast, as though she does not deserve to ask this of anyone, and Melissa recognizes it as a masterful bluff. Lyle straightens. "Well. I must say it's a fine offer. I'd like to discuss it with mother, if you don't mind." "Go on, Lyle. Go home and see your mother. We'll be here," Melissa soothes. She waits until he is out of sight before she speaks again. "Get out of here, Danes." Her sister stands. "I don't know where he is. I can't leave without him. I don't know how to leave at all." "Check the mail," Melissa offers with a shrug. "I have it on good authority. Maybe the post master is precognitive." Dana turns, then halts. "What is this place, Missy?" "Death, I think, or something like it." "Is Emily here?" Sadness and relief swamp Melissa. "No. No, Danes. She's somewhere safe. I promise." "Who _is_ Lyle Morgan?" "He's just a dumb kid." "I don't want to leave you here," Dana says, anxious. Melissa embraces her sister and kisses her forehead. "Go home." She pushes her out into the forest. She watches Dana walk away on a path that swallows itself behind her, her pace picking up speed the further she gets, like music spinning with energy. - - - The ground has been flayed here, and the exposed rock juts out in tiny dowels as though it were scattered with incisors. He feels the sharpness through the soles of his shoes. On an incline, he slips, catching himself with one hand. The palm burns with the sensation of hundreds of superficial punctures. He is examining the damage when she rounds a corner of holly trees, and suddenly they are within ten feet of each other. He would run towards her, he really would, but she is not real, cannot be real, is impossibly velvet as she steps so close he can feel the heat of her skin, as though she is draping herself over him like a blanket, tucking him inside her permanently. She draws him into her arms; yes, he thinks, draw is the right word. There are lines and shading and color and depth being added to this incomplete picture: the interlocking angles of her throat almost hooked over his shoulder and his face turned into her hair, his hand splayed on her hip, and even without swaying he feels a motion. It is too much and not nearly enough. She shivers. And then she pulls away. He feels the snare on his thin shirt when she drags her fingers down his back out from under his suit blazer, the lonely sensation of being left. But he does not release her, and it must startle her. She looks into his face. He paints clouds on the nape of her neck, and he sees it, the warm storm grief expanding in her eyes. Something is terribly wrong, isn't it, Scully? He fights a tremble as he softly drags his thumb over her cheekbone, where she is marked. She lists into the contact. "Mulder," she whispers, closing her eyes. "Are you okay?" "I think I'm in better shape than you are," he says kindly. "No, no," she reassures, lacing her fingers through his. "I'm fine." She rubs her eye. "You're here," she says, more to herself. "Do you know where we are?" "I think so." "But we aren't dead." "Not yet." "We have to go back," he says. "We can't stay here. There has to be a way home, but I admit I'm at a bit at a loss. For one thing, I left my ruby slippers under my bed. Sorry." She shakes her head, suppressed fright and exasperation marring her features. "I was told to ask you about the mail." "By whom?" Scully almost squirms out of his grasp, but he reaches up and cups her jaw, forcing her to answer. "Melissa," she says. "You saw your sister here?" The words hang awkwardly, and Mulder realizes he asked the question with more than a little jealousy in his voice. She nods her head. "She said she was told to tell me there is a way for us to leave." "In the mail?" She nods again. "We're in a forest." A cold and colder forest, with light that finally seems to be abandoning us to total darkness, like a shorted out lamp, he thinks. But abruptly he remembers putting a letter in his jacket pocket, something Scully had received at the office. A letter he'd never bothered to open. He fishes it out and holds it in front of Scully's face. "Mail," she breathes, reading her name on the address. A photograph is stuck to it. He removes it, but not before she spots it. He shows it to her. You have the exact same eyes as you did then, Scully, he thinks. She doesn't speak, as though waiting for clarification. "Someone left photographs in a box in the house, which was otherwise completely empty by the time I arrived." "Who would have put them there? Lyle? His mother?" "I don't know. I don't even know if they were really supposed to be a lure. There were others." "Lures?" "Photos. Me, and Lyle, and Samantha." He puts the photo back in his pocket. "It probably doesn't matter now." Mulder slides his thumb under the seal and removes the contents of the envelope. The unfolded paper is enormous, sprawling out as large as an entire person. "Oh my." It's almost too ridiculous for words. "Piano notation. A lot of it. Handwritten. Know how to play?" She shakes her head, but her fingers move over the page like a virtuoso flexing her hands and wrists before a performance. "I remember a little bit about how to read music, though. This is in C major, common time. That," she says, pointing to the oscillating black notes on the treble clef, "is probably the melody line. The bass part looks like the triad - see how the notes don't change as often, have a simpler pattern?" He is watching her face too intently, as though her explanation will yield perceptible music. She stops. "I could be wrong." "Who would send you this?" "There isn't a return address?" "Nope." "I don't know, Mulder." He smiles anyway, though. They are together, and they're bloody and torn and have slipped into investigator mode without even getting hysterical. He hasn't cried once this whole time even though her blood is the most beautiful, horrible color he has ever seen. And she's here. Her head is cocked. "What if the music we keep hearing is in fact the only thing detaining us?" "I thought of that. I mean, I know I was, I dunno, motivated to seek out the music, like it was baiting me, like a pied piper." Now Scully smiles briefly. "Death has an official dirge?" He blinks. "It's more like a jingle." "Wait," she gasps. "Turn the paper over." On the other side of the parchment, in the faintest print, is a map. A small red X is marked in the very center. /You Are Here/, it reads, /and You Do Not Have Much Time/. "If we know where we are, Mulder, then we aren't really lost anymore." Scully says it at the same time he thinks it. "You've been here before as well, haven't you? That's what the photographs were - pictures of people who've been lost." "I think we've both overstayed our welcome. Race you back." "I'm not letting you out of my sight." "Then you'll have to catch me." "You say that just like you wouldn't let me." She brushes her lips over his eyebrow. "I might be persuaded." "You're too easy." "On the contrary, I thought I was frustratingly obscure." "I missed you," she says softly. He can't speak. "You came for me," she whispers, again almost to herself. "Thank you." "I missed you too." You do not have much time. - - - "Mother is very mad, Mel-Mel," Lyle says, his lips close to her ear. "I'd like you to explain to her what has happened." He wraps one bony hand around her throat. "How it is you've managed to save your sister and _him_." "I don't think you understand," a new voice interjects, and Lyle's frigid body is ripped from hers. "In the end, regardless of helpful intervention and suggestions from outside sources," a pause for a small doting laugh, "no one else can do what they do best. They always save each other." Melissa opens her screwed-shut eyes. Lyle is gone. She is alone in the forest. - - - Someone has left candles burning on the lowest tree limbs along the path. The small flames point a clear trajectory to the series of steps, at the bottom of which she grabs his arm. She and he run up, each stumbling over and pulling the other along. Skinner and Agent Hooper pounce on them, an orchestration of noise escalating around them. "Get an ambulance here, now!" "What the hell? Where have you been?" "You've been missing for over a day, Agent Mulder. I thought I made my orders very clear. God. Is everyone okay?" "Back off, Walter," Hooper strong-arms. "Let them through, let them through. Agent Scully, I presume. Nice to meet you." Scully does not let go of Mulder's hand. They burst out of the house. The street is lit with jack o' lanterns that wink from neighboring porches. Masked children in groups troll back and forth, plastic sacks full of sugar hitting their legs. A crowd of parents has stalled in front of the house, curious about the three police cars, the FBI van, and the local news team. "Happy Halloween, Scully," Mulder mutters. "These guys have more elaborate costumes every year." An ambulance is making its way toward the house, sirens blaring, lights flashing like the strobes in a haunted mansion tour. She can hear Hooper arguing with Skinner about procedure and protocol. Scully and Mulder sit on the porch and soak in the waking world's dusk while various authority figures huddle and swarm around them, swabbing and poking and asking unanswerable questions. The chill and bustle of autumn is a drug in her system, heightening everything. The night air smells like spice, like something rich and smoky and alive. It blissfully sounds nothing like piano music, Scully thinks. She stands up and Mulder follows her. They begin to walk, enjoying the moon that peeks through the trees like a mischievous child, a spy full of sprites and laughter. After a few minutes, Mulder asks, quietly, "Was that our trick, do you think?" She considers this, his arm wrapped around her waist gently. "No," she says, reaching up to brush a leaf out of his hair and letting her fingertips trail across his jaw, his mouth. "I think that was our treat." - - - an end End Part Two - - - Author's Note: The two songs Lyle sings poorly are "Let's Jazz All You Young Aliens" and "This Halloween I Go as Me", both by John Southworth. Used without permission, obviously.