#white clapboard church

[eurigmorgan]

Winter in Norwich, Vermont

[seabiscuits-us]

Western AU snippet? Western AU snippet.

The convent lay five miles north of Chinook. Ava went for a first pass in the daytime, to mark the route in her head, and found it interrupting the expanse of plain with nothing before it, nothing after it, and nothing to either side but for a herd of bison grazing in the distance and a few patches of scrub.

An eyesore, in Ava’s opinion. Back in New York, she’d seen the grand catholic churches with stained glass adornments and naves filled with gold and precious stones.

There were no such luxuries on the frontier. Of the two buildings that stood huddled together, one was four-stories with white clapboard where the nuns slept, and the other was smaller with a steepled roof. The church.

[galahadiant]

The Rainy Hyades and Desert Hills

My 2023 @inklings-challenge entry for Team Chesterton!

Frankly I kind of hate this piece; it was planned to be part 1 of 3 but it is not working out at all. I'm glad I participated this year, though, even if intrusive fantasy is far from my preferred genre. Father Rivas is a recurring character of mine; people who've read any of my other horror writing set in modern-ish times might recognize the name.

---

The church is on the edge of town, with only a small parking lot and an old wire fence separating it from the sagebrush flats and the grit-red hills beyond. March came in warm this year, and rainier than usual, the storms carving divots of silver water into the gritty earth. Little pockets of scarlet and orange flowers grow in the shadows of the desert hills, half-hidden by the gray spines of sage. 

Stations of the Cross are over, and the following fish fry is winding down in the dim evening light. Overhead, the steel-blue sky plays reluctant host to a spangling of early stars.

Father Rivas leans back against the clapboard side of the little church, keeping a sharp eye on the little groups of children playing in the lot. The adults are clustered around the grill and picnic table, the murmur of voices crescendoing now and then in laughter. A few beers were briefly brought out and shooed away– it is still Lent, after all. Almost Laetare Sunday. (Laetare, Jerusalem.) 

Rivas is still a young man, but his back gives him trouble. The priest’s lanky frame can usually be found leaning on something, propped up at an angle like an abandoned scarecrow in black. He doesn’t miss much, despite preferring the company of the desert to that of his congregation. It’s been almost six years since he came out here; not far from his hometown, but smaller. A municipality and not a proper town, constantly threatened by the red-gold desert grit and the encroaching tumbleweeds. He likes it out here, even if he has to chase snakes and scorpions out of the sanctuary from time to time. The people are nice, but they don’t mind too much if you spend a lot of time staring out across the sagebrush flats, or if it takes a few tries for you to answer when you’re spoken to. 

“Eden,” he calls warningly, as one particularly tall girl breaks away from the others and heads for the fence, “Be careful out there. Darkness sets in fast out here.” 

Eden turns to look back at him, her amber eyes catching flame off of the single yellow porch light in front of the church. She leads most of the children here, and often leads them into trouble– though in fairness to her, they’re usually long out of the trouble by the time any grown-ups catch on. She’s clever, and unfortunately knows it. 

“Rest assured, I won’t go far,” she says lightly. “But the starlight’s bright enough for me. I have good night vision.” She hops over the fence, and Rivas starts splitting his attention between her and the other children. A few of the younger kids run up to the edge of the fence, grabbing onto the old wooden fenceposts, and he sighs and disengages himself from his comfortable wall to go pick up Jasper, age four, and return him to the circle of porch-light. 

From what he understands, there’s been a schism of sorts in the children over the last few months. Perhaps it started earlier, with the summer baseball team (the Woodpeckers.) Some of the boys from the baseball team have started their own little operation, with a base built somewhere out in the desert. Seems that Eden takes this as an insult; she’s been getting into fights with their unofficial leader, Asher. Both of them were dragged to Confession a few weeks ago after an incident with a baseball bat.

What is she doing going out into the desert at night? 

There’s a bright flash of light overhead, and a shooting star– a low-flying airplane– a white bird burning– arcs across the sky, stunningly blue-white. Rivas barely has time to track it across the firmament before it strikes the horizon, afterimages blurring his vision in its wake.

“What was that? Did you see that?” calls Eden, running back towards the fence. He blinks a few times, the bruise-bright echo of light fading off of his eyelids. He takes a deep breath, the sharp smell of sage and dry earth. 

Eden, her hands full of cicada shells and bone. The light of the porch reflects off of her startled face. “Was that a plane, Father? Should we go look?”

“I don’t think it was a plane,” he says, recovering himself a little. His back aches. “It looked like a meteorite to me.” 

“If it was a plane that crashed, you might have to give people Last Rites,” she pursues. 

“We would have felt the impact if it were a plane, or heard it.”

Eden frowns and looks back across the sagebrush flats, tucking her handfuls of cicada-shells into the pockets of her skirt. Something is building behind her face, clever-eyed, thin grim mouth. But then again, it always looks like there’s something building there. 

The night grows deep, and parents collect their children and start home. The cicadas scream sporadically in the sagebrush flats, underneath their blanket of stars. “Hey, Father,” says a voice at his shoulder. Asher, with a pile of dirty paper plates in his hands. “We thought we’d stay and help clean up.” 

Asher has a round freckled face and wears an outsize leather jacket whenever he can, even over his church clothes. He’s got one of the other boys with him; Cody. Black hair, dark eyes, big smile. 

“Thank you, boys.”

“What’d you think about that falling star? Do you think there’s any of it left?” Asher’s bottle-green eyes are bright. He doesn’t look down at his hands at all as he works. “I bet Eden’s gonna want to give it to the Professor, but we think it should go in our museum.” 

Rivas ties off the trash bag and heaves it into the dumpster. “Your museum?”

“Well, more of a collection. All kinds of cool stuff from nature and the desert, like skeletons and geodes. But it’ll be cooler than the Professor’s stuff, because he never lets anyone touch his things and they’re all hidden away in boxes. Like a museum for real people.”

“...All museums are for real people, Asher. Dr. Kaestner has a personal collection that he sometimes lets you kids look at.” He sighs and rubs his shoulder as a new twinge of pain goes down his shoulder and spine. “It’s good to have a collection of interesting things; I had something like that when I was a boy. It was mostly eggshells.” 

Asher looks around. “Well, it looks pretty clean here,” he says, putting his hands on his hips. “We’re gonna head out. See ya, Father.”

“It’s long past dark,” says Rivas dubiously, looking up at the starry sky. The silver haze of the Milky Way can be seen dimly at the top of the sky, softening the hard, bright edges of the stars. When he looks down again, Asher and Cody have already scrambled over the fence, pushing through the gray-green sagebrush and scaring cicadas into the air. Cody sweeps a flashlight through the air, carving a blinding yellow path in the dark. 

Unlike Eden, most of the Woodpeckers don’t have parents who will miss them out past dark. He paces at the edge of the fence, chewing on the inside of his cheek. When he looks out after the boys, cresting a hill and disappearing into the sharp shadows of the sage, he sees something shining on the horizon.

There is a great light and a soft wind out of the desert, and before he knows it he’s managed to scale the old fence, cattle wire snagging on the edge of his cassock, and headed off after them.

The light is almost blue, very pale, and would be too faint to see if it were not long past dark, but here, in the desert, in grit and darkness, in the balsamroot and sage and tufted desert grasses, he can see it. Almost like a second dawn. The light reflects gently on the narrow spearhead leaves of sage. The wind smells fresh-made tonight, sharp with the smell of distant juniper trees and quite cold for this time in the spring. 

“Boys,” he calls warily, “Slow down. We don’t know exactly what it is.”

The trepidation in his voice makes Cody stop, catching at the sleeve of Asher’s oversized jacket. “We’d better wait,” he says, slowing down. 

Asher sighs, climbing up onto a lichen-covered boulder to survey the landscape. His head is framed by a bright crown of stars, the face itself in a dim blue shadow. “I want to beat Eden there,” he says, scuffing a foot on the rock. “She’ll take all the magic out of it.” His sneakers are taped up with duct tape to hold the soles on; Rivas remembers that he needs to scrape together the money to get new shoes for the kids. Asher, Cody, Cody’s little sister Nina…

“Meteorites don’t glow like that,” says Rivas, squinting at the light. He thinks, now that they’re closer, that it’s coming from a cleft between two hills, some half a mile off. A small worry squirms in his gut. “It could be radioactive, or something.”

“You can feel it, though, can’t you?” asks Asher, sitting down on the boulder and sniffing the air like a dog. “The wind smells like it’s from another world, or something out of a myth. Surely it’d smell different if it were a bomb or something.” 

“It’s not radioactive,” calls Eden. “Sillies.”

Rivas turns to see her picking her way across the sagebrush flats, holding up a plastic box that ticks sporadically. “Is that a Geiger counter?” he demands.

“I borrowed it from the Professor,” she says, with a sniff. “Father, what are you doing out here? This is our business.”

“No, it’s not. You’re thirteen.” 

“I’m fourteen,” says Asher. “C’mon, Cody, let’s go.” He grabs the smaller boy and starts marching off. In places, the sagebrush is over the boys’ heads, and Asher has to use a stick to beat his way through it.

Rivas looks down at Eden. “Did you steal that?”

“...I plan to give it back,” she says, tossing one dark braid over her shoulder. She holds it up and starts walking, keeping a careful eye on the meter. “If it does start clicking more you should shout for the boys; they won’t believe me if I tell them.” 

It’s a long walk, pathless through the sagebrush flats. The ground between the bushes is mostly bare, flecked here and there with flowers and wild, tufted grasses. The ground is gritty and flecked with small flakes of mica here and there that sparkle on the ground like another set of stars. Rivas mostly keeps his eyes turned downwards, focusing on keeping his footing without stepping on any scorpions or snakes that might still be out so late or tripping over the protruding roots. His shoes crunch in the rough sand as he follows Eden down a narrow cow-trail, into the sloping valley between hills.

“Father? Father?” calls Asher, from ahead. There’s a note of panic in his voice; Rivas’ head snaps up, and he starts to run. 

“Asher? Are you boys hur–”

There is a crater at the impact site, dark spines of vitrified sand rising from the edge of the pit. The sagebrush around it has been singed and blackened, the sand and gravel piled in echoes of shockwaves,

and in the center of the crater,

there is a small girl.

She can’t be older than seven or eight, and her hair is ashen blonde and glowing. Her skin is pale, tinged with blue at the lips and on the fingers, and she has no clothes except for the grit and ash that covers her body and the long, shining curtain of her hair. 

Her eyes are mirrors, dragonfly-faceted behind a mask of ash. 

“...She must have come from the sky,” says Eden, scrambling down into the crater, and holds up the Geiger counter. The clicks become slightly more pronounced; a slow heartbeat. The girl turns to look up at her, shuffling away a little as Eden begins to chatter– switching languages every few words, English to Spanish to broken Navajo.

“Get away from her,” Asher snaps. “Look, she doesn’t understand what you’re saying.”

“She must understand something,” says Eden. “Father, you know Latin, right?”

“Why would she know Latin?” demands Asher. He shucks off his jacket and tries to give it to the girl, who switches her mirrored gaze over to him as the jacket falls limply onto her lap. He sighs and picks it up again, trying to wrap it more closely around her shoulders.

“She might be an angel…”

Rivas’ thoughts spin frantically, trying to figure out what to do. She looks like a little girl, surely, and not an angel. He feels like an angel should be older. What if someone comes looking for her? The second, more worrying question– if something comes looking for her? 

“Hello,” he says, and swallows hard. He smiles weakly.

“Are you a Night Warden?” she asks. Her voice is high and slightly accented, the formal speech of a young child who hasn’t quite learned how tone works. “Can you help me find my mama?”  

It’s a slight shock to hear her speak, but the relief more than makes up for it. She can understand him. “I’m a priest,” he says, squatting at the edge of the crater. The wind is cold, but he can feel heat radiating from the sand. Good thing it took them a little while to get out here, or Asher and Eden would have been badly burned. “Where did you last see her?”

“...In the garden.”

He probably should have expected that line of questioning to be less than useful.

“We could take her back to our base,” says Eden. “In the auto junkyard. We have sleeping bags there for when we go stargazing, and none of the adults would find out about her; this doesn’t seem like something the adults should know about. They might call…the government.” Her bright amber eyes flick up towards Rivas, weighing him thoughtfully.

“I don’t think Father Rivas counts,” Cody stage-whispers. “Right?”

Asher gently takes each of the girl’s arms and pushes them into the sleeves of the coat, which comes down past her knees. “She’s about the same size as my sisters,” he observes, fastening a button to hold the coat in place. The girl reaches out and touches his face with a small, silver hand. “Eden, you won’t tell the Professor, will you? Even if we do bring her to your base?” 

She shakes her head grimly. “We’re going to have to carry her back,” she says. “The cheatgrass and sage are going to cut up her legs otherwise. How do shifts sound?”

Rivas’ forehead furrows. “I should carry her,” he says, and is met with three flat stares. 

“Your back, Father,” says Eden.

“She’s not very big, we can do it,” Asher says with a wave of his hand. He looks almost unfamiliar without his jacket on, in a slightly oversized blue t-shirt and nervous goosebumps covering his bare arms. 

“Fine, but I’ll carry her first,” Rivas concludes. “And we’re taking her to the church, not the junkyard. Cody, Eden, do either of you have any little girls’ clothes at home?” Eden nods.

He approaches the girl carefully, becoming aware that the sand in the crater is almost painfully hot. It’s a good thing it took them a while to get out here, otherwise he’d certainly be burning his hands right now. The wind is still cold. “Let’s get you somewhere inside, okay?” he says to the girl, putting on a friendly smile. “What’s your name? Do you want something to eat?” 

She touches her lips hesitantly and nods. “Heliaca.”

It’s a long walk back. The girl Heliaca gazes up at the moonless sky the whole way, her dragonfly eyes tracing the milky way. She seems unbothered by the sharp, thin twigs of the big sagebrush scraping against her bare legs.

They make a line against the sky as they trek along the ridged earth, gravel and sand shifting beneath them. Rivas, and then Eden, tall and lanky, and Asher, smacking his arms to keep warm, and Cody trailing a little behind to pick up pebbles. The girl, shining, outlines their silhouettes in liquid silver. 

Eden breaks away at the edge of town. “I’ll go get her some of my old things; I can get in and out without my dad noticing,” she says, scrambling up and over the fence and taking off down the road. “He shouldn’t be back from his shift yet, anyway.”

Asher jogs after her, his duct-tape sneakers snapping against the asphalt.

“...I guess they’ll be back soon,” says Rivas to Cody.

 The younger boy nods, his dark hair flopping down over his eyes. “Can I have a snack, too?”

“I’ll see what we have.”

They have chocolate-chip granola bars and juice boxes in the church basement, as it turns out. Also, a couple of very crushed fruit rollups, a clementine, and a rather stale loaf of whole wheat bread, which Rivas decides to throw away. These must be leftover snacks from the last time 4-H was in here. 

He sits Heliaca on the floor and puts an unwrapped granola bar into her hand. “Cody, can you help her with the juice box? I’m going to go make some tea, or hot cocoa or something.” He feels the urgent need to make something with his hands, to shoo away the worries that are building in his head. 

What’s going to come after her? Ordinarily he’d laugh at Eden’s whisper about the government finding out; she picked that up from her parents, a parroted turn of phrase. She might not actually be wrong this time, though. There’s bound to be some investigation, even a small one, and their footprints are all over that impact site.

He rubs his aching shoulder absentmindedly and leans against the small kitchen table in the rectory as the teakettle boils. 

And what about that mother? If she does come after the girl, will she be like a human? 

What if she doesn’t come at all?

The whistle of the teakettle makes him jump. He pours the water into five mugs of varying sizes, digs out honey and packets of creamer and tea. When he gets back to the basement, Asher is back with a pile of clothes.

“Eden’s dad got home early, so she had to go to bed,” he explains, sifting through the rumpled pile. Underwear, mismatched socks, a couple of dresses and a rather faded sweater that Rivas remembers Eden wearing constantly when she was ten or eleven. “I brought all the stuff, though. I was worried she might snitch, but it seems like she really wants to keep this quiet. Helps that the Professor is probably asleep.” Heliaca, sucking quietly on a juice box, examines the clothing. 

“Don’t you know how clothes work?” asks Cody. He starts pouring honey into his mug of hot water until Rivas reaches over and wrestles the squeeze bottle away from him. 

“I know,” she says, putting down the juice box and picking up a sock. “I’ve seen Earth people wear all these things. I’m just not normally so small.” She pulls the sock on, upside-down, and then puts a second one on correctly. “You have so few hands,” she adds casually, which is a little worrying in implication.

“Hey, Father, can I have the honey?” asks Asher, leaning over to try to take the bottle out of Rivas��� hand. He, at least, has actual tea steeping in his cup and not just boiling water. 

“Yes, fine.” Rivas is picking up one of the dresses to hand to Heliaca– she can’t keep wearing Asher’s coat forever, after all– when a sharp knock sounds on the door upstairs.

Not likely to be continued. But maybe; if I do continue it I'll put links to the other parts down here.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

[from my files]

* * * *

A Walk to Sope Creek by David Bottoms Sometimes when I've made the mistake of anger, which sometimes breeds the mistake of cruelty, I walk down the rocky slope above the ruined mill on Sope Creek where sweet gum and hickory weave sunlight into gauzy screens. And sometimes when I've made the mistake of cruelty, which always breeds grief, I remember how, years ago, my uncle led me, a boy, into a thicket of pines and taught me to pray beside a white stone, the way a man had taught him, a boy, to pray behind a clapboard church. Sometimes when I'm as mean as a stone, I weave between trees above that crumbling mill and stumble through those threaded screens of light, the way anger must fall through many stages of remorse. Any rock, he allowed, can be an altar. *

[isaiah4031kjv]

“Resurrection” (Ephesians 2:1)

This slideshow requires JavaScript. For a long time the old Cape Cod style church sat in a Detroit neighborhood, empty and abandoned. White paint peeled and dropped from its clapboard siding. The decaying church blended naturally into the whole area. Party stores flourished, but little else. Storefronts were boarded up. An old school building was padlocked. Grim, unswept, forgotten – that’s how…

[bookquotenet]

The story begins as Luke Chandler and his grandfather Eli, also known as Pappy, search for migrant workers to help them with the cotton picking. They initially consider themselves lucky to hire the Spruills, a family of “hill people,” and a few Mexican migrants who annually come to the area looking for work.

Aside from working long hours under the hot sun in the fields, Luke’s life is fairly idyllic. He is obsessed with beautiful 17-year-old Tally Spruill, who on one occasion lets him see her naked, bathing in a creek. But a much more unpleasant experience is seeing Tally’s brother, the overly aggressive and mentally unstable Hank Spruill, attack three boys from the notorious Sisco family, one of whom is beaten so severely that he dies from his wounds. Hank arrogantly identifies Luke as a friendly witness who can support his version of the event, and the fearful boy backs up his story, although the adults in his life, including local sheriff Stick Powers, suspect he’s too frightened to admit the truth.

When Luke sees Cowboy, one of the Mexicans, later murder Hank and toss his body into the river, Cowboy threatens to kill Luke’s mother if Luke tells anyone what he saw. Cowboy and Tally then run off together and are not seen again. Luke also learns that his admired Uncle Ricky, fighting in the Korean War, might have fathered a child with a daughter of the Latchers, their poverty-stricken sharecropping neighbors.

Grisham surrounds these dramatic moments with descriptive passages of life in the rural South and the ordinary events that fill Luke’s weekly routine. His hard work in the fields is preceded by a hearty breakfast of eggs, ham, biscuits, and the one cup of coffee his mother allows him, and at day’s end he’s rewarded with an evening on the front porch, where the family gathers around the radio to listen to Harry Caray announce the St. Louis Cardinals baseball games. A devoted fan, Luke is saving his hard-earned money to buy a team warm-up jacket he saw advertised in the Sears, Roebuck catalog. Saturday afternoons are spent in town, where the adults share idle gossip and serious concerns and the youngsters visit the movie house, while Sunday morning is reserved for church. A visiting carnival, the annual town picnic, and Luke’s introduction to television – to see a live broadcast of a World Series game – are additional bits of local color scattered throughout the tale.

A flood devastates the family’s crop before the harvest is completed, and Luke’s parents decide to travel to the city to find work in a Buick plant, breaking a history of generations working on the land. The novel ends with Luke’s mother smiling on the bus, having finally gotten her wish to leave cotton farming.

The book’s title refers to the Chandler house, which never has been painted, a sign of their lower social status in the community. One day Luke discovers that someone has been secretly painting the weather-beaten clapboards white, and eventually he continues the job with the approval of his parents and the assistance of the Mexicans, contributing some of his own savings for the purchase of paint.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Pretty clapboard church in Nova Scotia built in 1792. 

The doors are lovely. Maybe they were painted gray b/c they couldn’t be preserved.

This is a good conversion b/c they’re living in the nave, which is the best way to preserve it.

It looks like they added 2 rooms along the side. 

Very nice kitchen.  If they gave it a bit of color, it would be beautiful. 

The ceiling is beautiful and there’s a full view of the choir loft.

Isn’t the dining area lovely? That would’ve been where the altar was.

The main bedroom is in the loft and there’s a wonderful view of that ceiling.

This is beautiful. The window is stunning.

The bed and shower on the main floor.

Yow! This so white! It’s the half bath. This place needs some color.

Beautiful setting. ($575k)

https://www.remaxnova.com/residential/upper-granville-real-estate/7401-highway-1-upper-granville-mls-202209728

[natalieironside]

SO#3: The Life Of Euronymous K. Scruggs

[By Tammy Lynn  O'Hanrahan, correspondent, with the help of Francis L'kthant'gla'ftglth  Smith, Esoteric Church of Starry Wisdom Historical Society]

The history of our  sleepy little community is not particularly well-known outside of  Scruggsdale County, Mississippi, and even life-long residents often only  know the bits and pieces we remember from school.  So, as we prepare to  celebrate our town's 221st Founder's Day, the Scruggsdale Organizer  has teamed up with the Esoteric Church of Starry Wisdom Historical  Society to pen a brief account of the life of our town's founder,  Euronymous K. Scruggs.

Euronymous  Kal'thultra'narath'kal Scruggs was born in Clear Island, County Cork,  Ireland in 1769 to his father, Jonathan Scruggs, and mother, Kalnarath  of the Nameless Deep, both Roman Catholics.  The Scruggs family  immigrated to the newly-established United States of America in 1784  when young Euronymous was 15, fleeing unemployment and anti-Catholic  persecution.  After arriving in Boston, the family moved to the  Mississippi Territory and established themselves on a homestead in the  bluff hills bordering the Yazoo Valley, freshly stolen from the  indigenous Choctaw nation.  There, Jonathan grew tobacco and soy beans,  and young Euronymous began a self-education in philosophy and astronomy,  which would become life-long pursuits.

In 1790, a bout of fever  swept through the area and the Scruggs family became very ill.   Jonathan Scruggs passed away, but Euronymous and his mother recovered,  with Euronymous celebrating his good health by famously declaring, "In  my fevered visions I have seen untold wonders, I have beheld forbidden  secrets fit only for the eyes of the gods, and in truth I have seen that  they--the gods--are false, and that truth lies only in the imperishable  Void.  The terrible burden of this unholy wisdom consumes me, and I  know that deeper secrets and more marvelous horrors await me yet, and I  know this beyond a doubt:  That I, having tasted death, can never die."

Later that year,  Euronymous courted and wed a Baptist preacher's daughter, Miss Kelly  Rosewood, and together they founded the area's first permanent religious  institution, the Esoteric Church of Starry Wisdom, of which the  original structure of white poplar clapboard and mysterious luminous  stone still stands today on Euronymous Boulevard, across from the rec  center.

More families came to  the area to steal more land and establish homesteads of their own, and  in the year 1799, when Euronymous was 30, the town of Scruggsdale was  officially incorporated.  

Shortly after the  founding, Euronymous and Kelly retired from public life in order to care  for Euronymous's ailing mother, who complained of "the poison light of  this world's monstrous sun" and "the putrid, disgusting life of this  lighted world where the cold of the Nameless Deep has never spread."   During this time, Euronymous continued his studies of science and  philosophy, writing books such as That Which Dwells Between The Stars, On The Summoning And Correspondence Of The Nameless Ones (volumes 1 and 2), Scruggsdale Wildflowers And Other Flora: A Field Guide, and the very well-received The Sublime Madness Of The All-Consuming Void, all of which are available in hardback, paperback, and ebook form at the Scruggsdale County Public Library.

In 1810, after  Scruggsdale had grown from a loose collection of homesteads soaked in  indigenous blood into a vibrant and thriving agricultural community  soaked in indigenous blood and the blood and sweat of Black slaves,  Euronymous announced that he planned to take a trip back to his native  Ireland, stating that, "The unholy ichor of my mother's blood and the  grim weight of my father's sins are burdens I may never shed, and so I  shall return to the land of my fathers and, there, beg God for a death  which I know will never come."  He and his beloved wife, Kelly Rosewood  Scruggs, boarded a ship departing from Charleston, South Carolina which  foundered and went down with all hands a few miles off the coast of  County Cork some weeks later.  The couple were survived by twelve  children who would all move away from Scruggsdale over the next several  years, each citing "a nameless and all-consuming Hunger, the name of  which cannot be spoken by any tongue of Men."

Our 221st Founder's Day  celebration will be held next Friday in scenic Euronymous K. Scruggs  Memorial Park, with an outdoor barbecue, live music, and a horseshoe  tournament to mark the occasion.

***

Subscribe for early updates and special bonus content!  https://www.patreon.com/natalieironside  Please do, I’m gay and trans and I don’t have any monies

[cowboyified]

ooooh, could i combine two of those prompts? "these clothes are ridiculous" with "where's your sense of adventure?" otherwise, just one of those! :) thanks

The town is still accepting visitors when they arrive, the grassy parking lot full of eight-seater SUVs and minivans with stick figure family bumper stickers. The squeak of the car door turns a dozen longhorn heads from the paddock beside the makeshift lot, chewing grass languidly while they watch Sam and Dean organise themselves.

"Two people have died and they're still open. Talk about priorities." Sam tucks his Taurus into the back of his pants.

Dean's rummaging through the trunk for supplies, salt and holy water and split tipped bullets. There's something possessing the animatronics.

"Can you believe Bobby never took us here as kids?"

"The salvage yard is three hours away, I don't think he would have survived the road trip, let alone the babysitting,"

Knowing Bobby, he would have planted his ass in the saloon and let them off leash, two outlaw brothers strolling into town ready to wreak havoc. Babysitting is probably not the right word for it.

"You're not taking the Colt," Sam asks disbelieving, as he watches Dean tuck the long barrel into his waistband.

"Dude, it's thematically appropriate."

A woman in period-themed skirts greets them at the door, informs them it'll be twenty-four dollars for adults unless they want to stay the night in the hotel and Dean's eyes light up comically, elbows Sam in the side.

Sam forks over cash for the room. It'll be easier to do their job after dark, anyway. Dean is grinning like he can't keep it off his face and Sam's is quietly amused, figuratively patting himself on the back for finding a case so catered.

If he knew one of the conditions of entry was costume hire he might have hesitated.

"These clothes are ridiculous," Sam says, running his hands over a cheaply made bandolier with fake spray painted, foam bullets.

"Where's your sense of adventure?" Dean says, already strapping a holster to his waist, forgoing the shelf of plastic Peacemakers for the real deal.

His brother doesn't go overboard this time, gives the serape rack a wide berth. He picks an embroidered vest, tightened around the back in a way that does something to his waist. Worn over a cotton shirt, buttoned down three or four inches. It's all still terribly gaudy, but that's pretty unavoidable.

Sam lets Dean pick him a hat.

The town is honestly impressive. All original buildings, schoolhouse with desks, undertakers with a coffin lined porch, blacksmiths and horses hitched to posts where children can sit on their backs for a dollar. There's a guy performing lasso tricks in front of the white clapboard church at the end of the street.

The animatronics say their recorded lines, move in jerky mechanical shakes and Sam has to restrain himself from tugging the kids back by the collars of their shirts, installing a rope fence.

They eat in the authentic nineteenth century train carriage slash diner and wait for the sun to set so they can start the real work.

Their room is bed and breakfast style, wrought iron bed frames and crocheted quilts that look scratchy and uncomfortable. Dean unbuttons his vest, unbuckles his holster and drops it on the bed.

Sam's smiling at him from the door and Dean looks back at him confused. They'd drunk rotgut whiskey with their arms pressed together, leant heavy against the bar of the saloon and Sam has always been susceptible to impulsive decisions after being around his brother in a good mood for extended periods of time.

"You alright there, cowboy?" Dean asks him, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt.

Sam covers the distance, bats the hat off his brother's head and kisses him.

[e-b-reads]

Here is my story for the inklings Christmas challenge (@inklings-challenge)! It is almost exactly 9k words of what I think is technically intrusive fantasy; it starts during Advent in a small town with the arrival of some very odd beings. But I think to really understand, you would just have to read it. Mainly it’s a Christmas story.

Ebb of the Tide

There were a surprising number of immigrant families living on the shore. Not as many actually lived in Weston, which was a small town even by the standards of the shore, but Danielle Evans (who lived in Weston) taught in the middle school, which was a long bus ride away over the bridge, and she said some of her students couldn’t even speak English; their bilingual friends had to translate for them.  She’d picked up a smattering of Spanish herself, working there, Danielle said.  She’d probably said it a few times, to various acquaintances or family, but she said it again after the service on the first Sunday of Advent, at the little white clapboard Methodist Church at the high end of Hill Street, and so it was a statement that was under general discussion that Monday, outside West Point Market.  There were a couple tables outside West Point Market where the retired watermen—if there was such a thing—sat and talked every day except Sunday, and except for the days when it got too cold for their hard-used, arthritic hands, when they sat inside instead.

The retired watermen, who could generally be relied on to have a finger on the pulse of the town as a whole, didn’t mind the immigrants exactly.  They’d come to the shore—that broad finger of land between the bay and the ocean—in years before, to work the corn and soybean harvests, and to pick crabs in the packing houses alongside the watermen’s wives.  They didn’t entirely approve of middle schoolers who didn’t speak English, though.  “And they aren’t from around here,” said Buddy Evans, no relation—immediately, anyway—to Danielle.  This seemed to be the long and short of it.

The immigrants didn’t seem that foreign after all, though, when the Others started arriving.

It may actually have been Tyler Caulder who saw the first Others, though his mother didn’t believe him at the time.  Tyler was eight, and fanciful.  “It was a silver man, like a spaceman, and his wife,” he told her when he got home, nose red with cold, from playing outside with Dickie Phillips and Brian Nelson after school.  “They needed a boat.”

“And what did you do then?” said Mrs. Caulder, who was making oyster soup and could hardly see through the steam in the kitchen.  “Take your boots off.”

“We took them to where the old Lady Grace is run up the marsh,” said Tyler.  “They said thank you.”

“That’s too far for you to be going on your own—or with Dickie and Brian,” said Mrs. Caulder, and Tyler said, “Mom, it’s only at the end of Ship Lane,” and they argued about that for a bit, and the silver man and his wife—tall and silver, both of them, Tyler could have told her, with long faces that never quite looked the same when you glanced at them twice—were forgotten.

After that, there were more stories from children—enough to make the most imaginative adults start to look at each other, but not to say anything—and that was it; until the United Methodist Women did their Christmas cards.

Every year during Advent, the UMW baked enough cookies to feed the entire town of Weston for probably most of the new year, and then gathered in the fellowship hall of Weston United Methodist Church with their cookies and the materials to make Christmas cards, and put together boxes for the sick and shut-in parishioners.  In fact, they made more boxes than there were shut-ins, but Pastor Dennis, who was young and fairly new, had learned from his predecessor, Pastor Mark, not to mention this.  Somehow, by Christmas, the boxes were all disposed of, anyway.

This Advent, the UMW gathered, for some reason, on a Thursday afternoon; by the time the cookies were all boxed and the cards addressed, it was evening, and fully dark outside.  “Oh,” said Helen Phillips tenderly—she was the youngest and most sentimental of the UMW—when they had all bundled up and stepped out onto the front porch of the church, into the darkness and the cold, “it’s snowing.”

It was snowing, just a little—nothing that would stick, but sparse flurries that blew around and caught the light from the outside spotlights shining on the church parking lot.  Most of the other women glanced up, too, which is probably why it was Maria Guadelupe Martinez, the only Latina member of the Weston UMC UMW, who was first to spot the small group of people—beings, anyway—at the far end of the parking lot.  “Oh!” she said, too, with a very different inflection.  “There—there—angeles!”

Maria Guadelupe had been Catholic, a fact that she’d never talked about but that was somehow understood anyway.  Helen Phillips wondered if she still considered herself Catholic; Helen didn’t think this would necessarily be a bad thing.  The rest of the women generally considered Maria Guadelupe to be Methodist now, which, if they thought of it at all, they would have thought to be a kindness on their part, though Maria Guadelupe might not have seen it that way.  The rest of the women now exchanged charitable glances with each other, as if to say that they didn’t think the figures in the church parking lot were angels, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have said so in a foreign language; though, since the figures almost seemed to shine with an inward light, it wasn’t as exaggerated a guess or reaction as it had first sounded.

Afterwards, the women couldn’t quite agree on how the things—the beings—had talked, or exactly how they’d looked.  Betsy Evans said they had been almost transparent, like they weren’t quite there, but Rachel Caulder said they were sort of more there than the women themselves were, which was the most poetic language anyone had ever heard her use.  Linda Crenshaw said they had some sort of an accent, but they spoke English well enough.  They way Helen Phillips experienced it, she wasn’t sure if the beings spoke at all; she just knew that for some reason, the women approached them as a group and stood in front of them, and that sometime after getting near them, she suddenly knew, as if they’d put the knowledge straight into her head, that they were looking for a boat.

“So what did you do?” said Danielle Evans, the next day.  She was one of the few women in town who didn’t attend UMW meetings—she claimed to be too busy chaperoning extracurricular activities at the school where she taught—but she’d baked some cookies and given them to Helen to bring.  She’d come to Helen’s small house this Friday afternoon despite any extracurricular busy-ness, ostensibly to get her tupperware back.  Now she was leaning against the counter in Helen’s tiny kitchen, arms crossed over her plastic container, showing no signs of going anywhere.

“We brought them to a boat,” said Helen.  “Rachel Caulder woke up her husband.”  The Caulder brothers oystered together in the winter, leaving at about four thirty or five every morning, so they went to bed early.  Ryan Caulder hadn’t been happy to be woken, at first.  But he’d gone out, once he came downstairs and found them all—the Others, and also most of the UMW, who weren’t going home until they’d seen this thing through.

“Where did he bring them?” Danielle asked, but Helen couldn’t tell her.  Ryan had gone out with the Others, and some time later, he’d come back alone.  It had been enough later that only Helen, Maria Guadelupe, and Linda Crenshaw, who’d outlived her husband and a few of her children and had no one waiting at home for her, were left waiting at the docks at the end of Hill Street; even Rachel had gone home, so that her son wouldn’t be sleeping alone in the house.  But it wasn’t enough later that Ryan could have gone anywhere important; and Ryan hadn’t said anything.  He’d just tied up his deadrise and gone back to bed.  “What did they look like?” asked Danielle now.

“Have you seen The Lord of the Rings?” said Helen.  “They were sort of like the elves from those movies.  And also nothing like that at all.”

After that, the Others were all over the place.  No one discussed them outright or exactly tried to catalogue them (except for Danielle Evans, probably because she taught science and believed in things like evolution, which was regarded skeptically by many older residents of Weston, and even some of the young ones).  Somehow, though, everyone got used enough to talking about them obliquely that everyone understood as much of what was going on as anyone else did.  There seemed to be different types of Others: there was the tall silvery type, who seemed to have a slight majority, but there were also smaller and more, almost, ordinary ones; or rather, though they were otherworldly, it was in a more down-to-earth way.  There was at least one—well, family seemed the right word—of them that looked like trees, enough that Logan Nelson seemed to have a small forest growing out of the deck of his boat when he took them out.  Some seemed more like animals than people; but they were intelligent enough to make themselves clear.

That was the other thing: everyone knew, pretty quickly, what the Others wanted.  They usually showed up at liminal times—dawn and dusk, or occasionally when the weather shifted and got cloudier mid-day—and they were generally looking for a boat.  When they found a boat—the Lady Grace, which had been sitting on mud in the marsh and hadn’t moved in years, seemed to have disappeared, so the boat was generally one belonging to an obliging waterman—they went out in it, and though the boats came back, the Others did not.  It should have been sad, maybe, and there were times when the loss felt bleak; but it didn’t feel, somehow, like an exile, or like a death.  It felt like Weston had found itself in the path of a migration, a natural, regular occurrence that nonetheless no one had experienced before.

Well, probably no one had experienced it before.  Not within living memory.  Some of the older residents of Weston were starting to remember some things, though, things that their parents had said or done.  Nancy Abel annoyed her daughter-in-law, who she lived with, by insisting on putting a saucer of milk out on the back steps at night, though her daughter-in-law had to admit that the saucer was generally empty and almost clean by morning—feral cats, she supposed.  Buddy Evans, somewhat sheepishly, found an old horseshoe in a chest that had belonged to his grandfather and slipped it into the cabin of his son’s workboat one morning before Jerry went out; the Others still accepted rides from Jerry Evans, after that, but it was true that they tended to stay out of his cabin.  Linda Crenshaw, meanwhile, told stories of the Others she’d seen in her childhood to anyone who would listen.

This wasn’t a large number of people.  Linda lived in a small, one-story house near the center of town, even though her grandchildren kept trying to get her to move to a senior living center several miles away.  Her husband had died years ago; of her five children, two had also died by now, and the rest moved away, although to be fair to them, two of them had only moved elsewhere on the shore, which didn’t feel far away to them, but did to Linda, who’d lived her whole life in Weston.  They, and their mostly adult children, visited every few months to try to convince her to move.  Linda’s other visitors consisted of: Missy Evans (she’d grown up in Weston, too, and she and Linda had been feuding as long as anyone could remember, so they needed to get together to snipe at each other); Helen Phillips (who visited for the same reason she attended UMW meetings so regularly, which was that she was tenderhearted and felt truly guilty if she didn’t); and Logan Nelson.

Logan wasn’t related to Linda, as far as he knew, though if you went far enough back, most families in Weston were related.  He wasn’t sure why he visited her; but five or so years ago, he’d noticed that the screen on her porch was coming off, and he’d volunteered to come over in the afternoons, when he got in from crabbing, to fix it; and then somehow, once it was fixed, he’d just kept coming over.  He didn’t go there every day, or anything, but he generally made a point to visit about once a week.  He would call Linda “Miz Crenshaw,” and fix anything around her house that needed fixing, and Linda would give Logan some baked good—these days, it was usually something store bought—and tell him bluntly that he needed to fatten up.

Logan was more wiry than many of the other watermen, who tended to run to bulk, but this wasn’t something he could change with baked goods.  His father and older brother were bigger than him, too; his brother Andy in particular looked like he belonged out on the water in waterproof bibs.  Instead Andy lived on the other side of the bay and wore a suit to go into an office every day, even though wearing suits made him look like he was playing dress up.  Logan’s father, whose father and grandfather before him had been watermen on the shore, had retired and moved to a little fifty-plus community with his wife as soon as they had enough money saved up.  And so Logan was left alone in Weston, hiring the occasional high schooler to help him during crabbing season, and tonging for oysters on his own in the winter on the boat that his father had once owned.  It was hard, physical work; Logan could feel it changing his body, even though he was barely into his thirties.  He couldn’t imagine ever doing anything else.

Sometimes Logan and Helen ran into each other on Linda Crenshaw’s porch, or in her kitchen, and stepped around each other awkwardly, muttering hello and goodbye, as they did their best to part ways quickly.  Logan was uncomfortable around Helen, in a way that he didn’t quite like to label as nervous; she was very round and soft, in that even her nose was sort of round, and her hair tended to escape in tendrils and halo around her round face, but this wasn’t the direct cause of the nervousness; it was more that Logan could see something of the tender guilt that Helen potentially felt at all times about not Doing the Right Thing, and he worried that some of that guilt would rub off on him.  Helen, for her part, could never tell what Logan was thinking—he had black hair, with a tendency to curl under his cap, and a dark, close-cut beard that nonetheless covered his face so that it always looked mostly expressionless.  She thought he was intimidating.  Logan would probably have been gratified to realize as much.

Linda had no compunctions about Helen’s aura of vague guilt or Logan’s aura of closed-off intimidation.  And she wanted people to talk to.  “I don’t think I’d forgotten them, really, but I just never thought about them—why would I?” she told Helen during an afternoon visit, not long after the UMW had done their Christmas cards and then walked out to see the Others standing in the snow.  “But it’s coming back now—I must have been only seven or eight.  Daddy didn’t hardly get any sleep that winter, as many runs as he made in the Ida B to bring them out wherever they wanted to go.”

Helen, alone among the UMW, did not think that Linda was making the returning memories up for clout.  She told Danielle Evans about Linda’s stories one evening, tentatively.  Danielle had come over to see if Helen had any extra plastic bottles she’d been going to recycle; she apparently had some sort of plan to have her students make terrariums, and was going around the town bullying everyone into giving up their plastic bottles.  She’d stayed in the kitchen once Helen had handed over the bottles, though, and leaned against the counter in the same place as she’d stood last time, to chat.  Helen wondered suddenly whether Danielle had any close friends among her fellow teachers at the middle school.  She, Helen, considered the UMW, and Linda Crenshaw specifically, to be friends, and of course her parents lived fairly nearby, but she wasn’t sure if she had any close friends.  It wasn’t that Weston was backwards, certainly, or even very old fashioned; but though there were other young, unmarried women around, by the time they hit thirty—which Helen had, and she was fairly certain Danielle had, too—they tended to either marry or move.  The UMW had been dropping genial hints to Helen lately, about no one in particular.  Danielle wasn’t the sort to stand around and listen to those kinds of hints, which must have limited her opportunities for friendship.

“That’s interesting,” said Danielle, when Helen had told her what Linda Crenshaw had been saying about seeing the Others when she was a girl.  She really did seem interested; unlike Logan, who looked expressionless no matter what, Danielle’s square, pleasant face in its frame of cropped-short hair was blank only when she had no opinion—which wasn’t unheard of—but when she cared what Helen was talking about, she looked like she cared.  “It’s as if they’re like cicadas.  Or monarchs.”

Helen was uncertain about cicadas—she knew about them, she just didn’t like them.  As to monarchs...she had been taking out Christmas decorations when Danielle arrived, so it was probably this, unwrapping her creche from its newspaper and setting it on her dining room table, that made her say, “Kings?  Like the wise men?”

“Like the butterflies,” said Danielle, so Helen felt a little stupid, because she immediately knew what Danielle meant.  Every fall, the small orange and black critters fluttered through, traveling miles and miles to their winter habitation—was it in Mexico?  Like Maria Guadelupe in reverse, only she had stayed to work as a nurse at the hospital two towns over, and didn’t go back and forth the way the butterflies did.  Helen didn’t mind butterflies, but they were still bugs.  “Although I suppose the wise men did travel great distances, too,” added Danielle, charitably, which didn’t make Helen feel any better.

“I got mixed up, looking at the creche,” she explained.

“It really is more like the cicadas,” said Danielle, “if this only happens every—seventy years or so.  I wonder if there would be records, if we looked farther back.”

“Danielle,” said Helen, bravely, thinking of the way those Others in the church parking lot had looked, close-to, and the way Maria Guadelupe had crossed herself surreptitiously when she’d approached them, “I don’t think everything needs to be science.”

“Everything is science,” said Danielle; “some of it we just don’t understand yet.”  She seemed to see how uncomfortable this made Helen, because she smiled in a way that was trying very hard not to look mocking.  “I don’t mean I don’t believe in God,” she said, “although I know that’s what some of the people around here say about me—you see me at church, don’t you?  I don’t say it to my students, but—the more I learn about science, the natural world especially, the more I do believe in God.  Knowing how some of the processes work almost makes them seem more miraculous, not less.”

This was a lot for Helen to try to take in; Danielle must have realized this, because she left shortly after, leaving her to think.  Helen hung some fake greenery around her windows, and set up her creche on her TV cabinet, where it always went.  She looked at the worn baby Jesus, who was glued to his manger and also looked a lot more like a toddler than a newborn, and wondered.  She’d read online—because she certainly hadn’t heard it at church here—that Mary and Jesus wouldn’t really have had white skin, with where and when Christ’s birth had taken place.  She suspected that the blue-painted eyes of her Christ child were inaccurate, too, if that was the case.  She thought a brown-skinned version of the Holy family might not be too bad—it might even be nice looking.  But Helen wasn’t going to trade her parents’ old drug-store purchased nativity set for a new, more accurate one; and she couldn’t make herself think that God would mind.

Logan Nelson didn’t own any personal Christmas decorations.  He rented a room at Betsy Evans’ house—about half the people in Weston were Evanses, without really being related—and helped her hang the Christmas lights out front each winter on the Monday after the first Sunday of Advent, his only stab at festivity.  This winter, on the Wednesday after the second Sunday of Advent, he came downstairs from his rented bedroom, drank his coffee and ate a cold toaster pastry in the dark kitchen, put on his bibs over the three layers of clothing he already had on, put on his coat, put on his winter hat, put on his boots, put on his first layer of gloves—he’d add rubber ones, on the boat—and picked up the lunch he’d packed the night before, before heading out to get in his truck and drive the three blocks to the end of Hill Street where the docks were.

In fact, this was the routine he’d followed every morning that winter—except Sundays, because although Logan was ambivalent about spending every Sunday morning at church, he knew he wouldn’t be able to survive the blow to his reputation that would happen if he didn’t.  Literally, probably, because he stuck most of his crabs and oysters on old Bert Evans’ box truck to be sold at restaurants and packing houses along the shore, and if Bert’s wife decided Logan was godless and immoral and they didn’t want to associate with him, well, he’d lose his only way to make money.  But this Wednesday morning, it was business as usual; until he got to the slip where the Mary Anne was waiting for him, with a light on in the engine box so the diesel wouldn’t get too cold, and saw the not-quite-human figures waiting for him there.

Logan had taken a few groups of the Others out, by now, including that group that had looked kind of like trees.  He hadn’t told anyone what it had been like, but where the other watermen hadn’t told anyone what it had been like because they seemed to regard it as some sort of secret ritual they’d taken place in, Logan just didn’t have anyone he wanted to tell.  It hadn’t been exciting; mostly it had been a little sad.  With each group, he’d taken them out into the bay about as far as he ever went, at which point he would become aware—usually while he was squinting at the water ahead of him—that he was alone on his boat.  Then he would turn around and come back.  It wasn’t like the Others jumped overboard; Logan would have noticed that.  They just seemed to need a lift to a place where they could then go somewhere else.

The group on the dock this morning were some of the smaller, less majestic Others.  It wasn’t actually a group, Logan realized as he got closer—it was just a pair.  It was hard for him to look at them straight-on; out of the corner of his eye, he could tell, somehow, that it was a man and a woman.  Not all of the Others had seemed to fit into gender categories, which, amusingly, the older folks of Weston had taken in stride; but these two did.  He thought the man might have had something like antlers.  “All right,” he said, tossing his lunch onto his boat and then gesturing after it.  “Hop on.”

“That is not what we need,” said the antlered one who, despite his maleness, Logan couldn’t quite think of as a man after all.  Like Helen—though he didn’t know it—Logan’s experience with communication with the Others so far had mostly been beyond words; he had said things, sometimes, but the Others had responded by seeming to put information right into his mind.  This time, the antlered one had definitely spoken English, though his voice was, just as definitely, not human.  It also wasn’t what Logan would have expected.  It made him think of the great blue herons he tended to wake up in the mornings when he motored out of the protected side of the peninsula; their graceful take-offs and flights, and their squawking, harsh voices.

“Well, I need to go out,” said Logan, awkwardly.  “You don’t want a ride?”

“We need,” said the feminine one now, “a place to stay.”  Her voice was like the antlered one’s.  Logan suddenly realized, looking at her sideways, that she was heavily pregnant.

“I can’t give you that,” said Logan, truthfully.  Betsy’s house was full up as it was.  They just looked at him with eyes that looked like owls’.  “I could help you find a place,” he added reluctantly, “but not until I get back this afternoon.  You’ll have to wait until then.”

“We will wait,” said the antlered one.

Neither of the two went anywhere as Logan got on his boat, did his engine checks, and then got her running.  He came out of the pilot house to take off the dock lines, and they didn’t seem to have moved at all.  “Well, I’ll see you,” said Logan.  They didn’t say anything.

It wasn’t until he was eating his ham and cheese sandwich with one hand as he steered between oystering grounds that Logan realized what his conversation that morning had reminded him of; it had been like a perversion of a nativity play.  “We need a place to stay,” indeed.  He shook his head and drank some Gatorade.

An hour after that, well before he usually went in, Logan finished sorting the oysters on his culling board, reached for his tongs, and then froze for a moment.  Helen wouldn’t have thought him expressionless if she could have seen his face at that moment, though she might not have been able to tell what he was thinking.  A minute later, he said, “Damn!” out loud, stripped off his rubber gloves, and went back into the pilot house.  A minute after that, he was speeding back to Weston, cutting through the tops of the mild waves on the bay, throttle full open.

Linda Crenshaw was in her kitchen, bullying Helen Phillips into making shortbread with her.  The girl was far too easy to bully, in Linda’s opinion.  (She also thought of any woman under about fifty as a girl.)  Linda didn’t bake on her own much anymore; she had a nice mixer, these days, that made the stirring and everything easy even with her twisted, arthritic hands, but the washing up afterwards was often too much for them.  But Helen, Linda thought, needed things to fill her time—she worked at the Acme market, but she seemed to have a lot of free hours when she wasn’t doing that—and Linda needed to find someone to give her recipe book to when she died.  She’d had hopes in her youngest granddaughter, who was still in high school, but though she loved the girl, she was starting to see that she would be helpless in the kitchen.

It was while Helen was spreading the second batch of shortbread dough in the baking pan that someone knocked on the back door, which opened directly into the kitchen.  “You keep doing that, I’ll get it,” said Linda, and worked her way around the round table, recipe book open in the center and the first batch of shortbread cooling on a rack, to where she could shoot the deadbolt back.  On her back porch were Logan Nelson, wearing as many layers of clothing as if he were still out on the water, and two—beings.  Linda, unlike Logan, noticed immediately that one of them was going to have a child.  She looked back up at Logan’s face; he shrugged, looking—to Linda’s keen eye—somewhat helpless.  “I didn’t know where else to bring them,” he said.

“You all had better come on in,” said Linda.

Helen surprised herself by not feeling at all panicked or guilty—her two default emotions—when two smallish Others walked into the kitchen, followed closely by Logan Nelson.  She did feel, once the odd-looking figures were standing in the middle of the kitchen floor looking around themselves, that something wasn’t quite right.  They didn’t seem to belong there, despite the fact that, usually, everyone belonged in Linda Crenshaw’s kitchen.  It might have had to do with the smell they’d brought with them into the shortbread-smelling place, a wild but not unpleasant smell of dirt and green and musk, but it also seemed to be something else.

“No,” said Linda thoughtfully, as if reading Helen’s mind, “this isn’t the right place, is it?  Would you be more comfortable in my shed?”

Helen got the idea that the Others understood Linda’s meaning by taking in more than just her words, but the one with antlers responded out loud.  “That would be welcome,” he said.

“It isn’t heated,” Logan pointed out.

“I have a space heater,” said Linda.  “We’ll run an extension cord out.”

“Do you have names?” said Helen, trying to be polite.  She half wanted to crouch to talk to them, like they were small children—it was hard to tell precisely how tall they were, but she thought no taller than her shoulder—but she also thought that crouching would be the exact wrong move.

“Yes,” said one of them, and then they were silent again.

“Hmm,” said Linda, the way she did when she was remembering another story to tell.  “Do you have something that we can call you?”

The one with antlers regarded her steadily.  “I am Odd,” he said eventually, which was so true that Helen almost laughed.  “And this is Ebb.”

Logan—once he’d shed some of the layers that kept him approaching comfortable on the water, and were stiflingly warm anywhere else—found himself clearing out Linda’s shed and running an extension cord across her back yard.  He’d noticed the wrongness, too, when Odd and Ebb had stood in Linda’s kitchen; they were too un-human for such a human space.  In the shed, in a sort of nest made of some old sleeping bags Linda had produced from nowhere Logan could see, they still seemed slightly out of place, but somehow better.  “Why do you think that is?” said Logan to Helen, now drying dishes as she washed them.  Linda had this effect on people, that you did tasks around her; all the tasks of getting the shed ready for the Others had loosened Logan and Helen up around each other, so that although they still weren’t familiar, they were willing to talk.

“Even wild things need shelter,” said Helen, surprising Logan and also herself, again.  It had sounded like something Danielle might say.  “If only for a season,” she added.

“‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,’” said Linda, coming into the kitchen from the back door, but somehow having heard what they were saying.  “Ecclesiastes,” she added.

“Oh, I know,” Helen, while Logan just nodded—he’d recognized it as Biblical, but that was about it.  “What is it—‘a time to be born and a time to die.’”

“‘A time to keep, and a time to cast away,’” said Linda.

“Well now, that just sounds like fishing,” said Logan.

“Not just,” said Linda, her tone so close to severe that Logan felt chastened, no matter that she was as tall as his shoulder and mostly seemed to shuffle everywhere—energetically—rather than walk.  Then she twinkled at him.  “Crabbing and oystering, too.”

Helen told Danielle Evans about the Others in Linda Crenshaw’s shed.  She hadn’t meant to, but she seemed to have gotten in the habit of saying things to Danielle while Danielle stood in her kitchen with her arms crossed—this time, Helen had called her and offered some shortbread, since she and Linda had made an exorbitant amount, and neither Logan nor Odd and Ebb had seemed to want much.  “One of them is pregnant?” said Danielle, hands wrapped around the mug of tea Helen had made in a sort of acceptance that Danielle would stay for a while.  “Do you think,” she went on, sounding almost untypically shy about it, “I could go see them?”

Helen felt a little panicky.  “Please don’t—take notes or measurements or anything of them,” she said.  “They’re just—people.”

“Not just,” said Danielle, unwittingly echoing Linda Crenshaw from a couple days earlier.  “But I understand.  I won’t.”

Logan wasn’t entirely happy about Danielle Evans knowing about Odd and Ebb.  Danielle Evans made him vaguely uncomfortable, in a way that then made him further uncomfortable because he suspected he was being misogynistic.  Logan didn’t have anything against women wearing pants—obviously, this was the twenty-first century, and also he could think of specific examples of women wearing pants that he didn’t mind.  Rachel Caulder wore pants most of the time; they were obviously cut for a woman’s body, and looked both useful and nice enough that she sometimes went to church in them.  And Betsy Drummond, from the next town over, had been running her father’s workboat ever since his stroke; she dressed exactly like the watermen, and was generally accepted as one of them, and Logan didn’t mind that at all, either.  It was just that Danielle Evans strode around in her pants in a way that seemed to scream, I am a woman wearing pants, and I dare you to say something about it!  Logan never dared.

So he was both uncomfortable and, maybe, a little jealous when he came into Linda’s shed on a Sunday afternoon—the third Sunday of Advent—to check whether Odd or Ebb needed anything, and found Danielle Evans already there, sitting quietly on an upturned milk crate and looking unexpectedly peaceful.  Like Helen, he would have expected her to be writing notes or taking measurements or snapping photos with her phone; but her hands were sitting quietly in her lap.

“I, uh—did you need anything?” he said, not sure if he meant to ask the Others or Danielle.

“We are well,” said Odd, who seemed to talk more than Ebb.  Despite the number of times he’d seen them now, Logan still wasn’t quite sure what they looked like.  Ebb seemed now to have blue-gray feathers, but maybe because she gave the impression almost of sitting on a nest.

“Supposed to freeze tonight,” said Logan, glancing up at the roof of the shed where there were gaps at the eaves showing daylight.  It was warmer inside there than it was outside—the space heater doing its job—but not so warm as to be comfortable without a few layers on.  And though the Others didn’t seem to require food or any sort of hygiene assistance from the humans, they did seem to feel the cold.  “I brought some more blankets, just in case.”

Danielle got up and came with him to his truck to get the blankets, which he hadn’t intended.  “I think she’ll have the child soon,” she said, and smiled when Logan looked at her.  “Because of what they’ve said,” she told him, “not because I have any previous knowledge of—of Other gestational periods.  Give it another week, week and a half, maybe.”

“On Christmas?” said Logan.

“Maybe,” said Danielle again, accepting an armful of musty wool—Logan had raided Betsy Evans’ attic.  “Oddly appropriate, if you think about it.”

Somehow, after that, the four people who knew about the Others in Linda’s shed found themselves making alternate plans for Christmas.  Logan called his father, made sure he would be able to get himself and Logan’s mother to Andy’s house across the bridge, and begged off showing up, himself.  He wasn’t particularly sorry; he loved his family, really and also dutifully, but he didn’t like Andy’s house or the city where it was.  He would see them another time.  Helen, in contrast, agonized over what to say to her parents, who turned out to be so happy to hear that she wanted to spend Christmas with some friends that they booked a last-minute hotel in another state so that they wouldn’t have to cook, and so that she couldn’t change her mind and come to them.  They promised to see each other for New Years.

Though folks in Weston generally made it a habit to know each other's business, and though everyone knew that Danielle Evans’s parents lived in the same senior living center that Linda Crenshaw’s family always tried to get her to move to—she was a late and only child, unusually for the shore—no one knew what her Christmas plans would have been.  But she told Linda one evening, while Linda taught her how to make a ginger cake (it was possible that neither Linda nor Danielle quite knew how they’d ended up there together) that she was planning to stay in town for Christmas, too.  Linda told her in return that her own family usually did Christmas at their own houses and visited her, some more guiltily than others, in shifts between Christmas and New Years.  “Which is exactly how I like it,” said Linda, “so that I can go to the evening service and then straight to bed, and not get up on Christmas Day until I feel like it.”

Meanwhile, the flow of Others seemed to be slowing.  Like their arrival, this was not discussed openly so much as disseminated and understood among the residents of Weston, seemingly without anyone actually saying anything about it.  Except Danielle Evans, of course; everyone was a little startled to see her chatting to Logan Nelson on the docks at the end of Hill Street one late afternoon, though possibly no one was more surprised than Logan himself, who’d come in from oystering to find Danielle pulling up a rope that had been untidily allowed to hang in the water off an unused piling for much of the past year, and carefully scraping the critters that wriggled in the muck on it, even in the cold of December, into a jar with a little water.

“We’ve been using microscopes,” said Danielle, by way of greeting and explanation, when Logan walked a little closer to see what she was doing, despite himself.  “Logan, how many trips have you made this week to take Others out?”

“Just one,” said Logan, surprised into honesty.  Not that he would have lied, normally; just grunted wordlessly, probably.

“There’s less of them around now,” said Danielle.  “It’s like—like the changing of the tide.”

Logan considered this; in his experience, if the tide was going to change, it meant that things would start flowing back the other way.  He didn’t know if he liked the idea.  Danielle seemed to catch some of this from the look on his face.  “Maybe not perfectly,” she said.  “I just wonder about—what if any of them get stuck?”

They didn’t talk about Odd and Ebb except in the shed, or in the safe space of Linda Crenshaw’s kitchen.  Logan knew what Danielle meant, though, and gave it the consideration it deserved; Helen Phillips might have dithered on when he stood silent for almost a minute (or maybe she wouldn’t have, these days) but Danielle just waited.  “I think,” he said finally, “they know what they’re doing.”

“Interestingly, I do, too,” said Danielle.  She was standing now, and had secreted the closed jar of critters in one of her coat pockets.  “Even though I can’t think of one piece of evidence that specifically makes me think so,” she added, a little drily.  “I suppose that’s what they mean by faith.”

Maybe it shouldn’t have been surprising when Danielle Evans, Helen Phillips, and Logan Nelson ended up sitting around Linda Crenshaw’s round kitchen table on Christmas Eve.  In fact, none of the people there were surprised, but all were aware that someone like, say, Betsy Evans or Nancy Abel would have been not only surprised but talkative with it to know they were all there, so they’d arrived quietly and at different times.  It was between church services; Helen and Logan had both been to the earlier one, separately from each other, and both Linda and Danielle had expressed plans to go to the eleven o’clock one; “Though if I don’t, I guess no one will miss me,” said Danielle.

“They would me,” said Linda, secure in her own importance in the structure of the town.  “But I could just call Missy Evans and tell her I think have a chill, and she’ll be so happy she’ll tell everyone who’ll listen.”

The reason they were considering excuses for the late service was that they were waiting.  Not even Danielle had bothered to try to put this explicitly into words, but they understood, anyway.  It could have been any night, now, really; but this was Christmas Eve.

“Did your parents ever tell you,” Helen asked generally and only a little shyly, “that animals can talk on Christmas Eve, at midnight?  I used to feed our neighbors’ chickens over the holidays, when they were away, and I always wondered a little if they’d say anything when I went in after the late service.  I mean, it was silly—”

“I think I read it somewhere, instead of my parents telling me,” said Danielle, interrupting genially, “but we would all pretend it was true.  I sort of knew I was pretending, but I used to kind of watch our cat anyway, when it was getting late on Christmas Eve, just in case.”

“I never did hear that,” said Logan, and then paused, remembering.  Andy had sworn up and down, one Christmas, that he’d opened his window the night before and heard the geese talking out on the creek—not the usual goose chatter of the migrating birds who wintered on the shore, but words he’d understood.  Andy had never had much imagination, and he still wasn’t too good at lying.  He’d been insistent, though.

Logan didn’t share this.  For one thing, he wanted to consider it a little longer.  For another, the back door into the kitchen was open—though nobody had exactly noticed it opening—and Odd was there, his strong—but still not unpleasant—warm dirt and animal scent joining him like another presence.  “It is time,” said Odd.

They trooped across the back yard, following him.  Logan had seen animals give birth before, but never a human woman; since Ebb was neither, he found himself stuck in a sort of odd limbo between matter-of-fact interest and heavy embarrassment as soon as they entered the shed, and stuck himself in a corner near the door, back to the wall.  Danielle, practical to a fault, rolled up her sweater sleeves but paused for some reason in the middle of the shed floor, so it was Helen who walked up to Ebb, bent to touch her head—this was the first time any of them had touched one of the two Others—and looked up to say, “Something’s wrong.”

“I know how this works—well, not this specifically—but only in theory,” said Danielle, when Logan and Helen both looked at her.  “I’ll do what I can, but someone with actual experience would be better.”

Both Logan and Helen, though they didn’t realize it about each other, had a sort of catalogue of Weston Residents and Their Interests and Skills in their heads, because that was what you needed to keep up any sort of relationships with the people in the town.  Despite this, both of them went entirely blank.  Danielle seemed to see this.  “Oh, for crying out—can you find Maria Guadelupe Martinez?” she said.  “She works in obstetrics at the hospital.”

Helen realized that of course she’d known that, after all.  “She’ll be at the evening service,” she said.

“I’ll drive,” said Logan.

On the way to Logan’s truck, they passed Linda, who, it turned out, hadn’t come out to the shed with them; she was carrying what seemed to be a pot of boiled water—it was steaming—with strips of sheets in it.  Her twisted hands were closed hard on the handles; Logan tried to take it from her, but she somehow waved him off without actually having the use of her hands to do so.  “I’ve got it,” she said.  “Go get that Maria Guadelupe.”

Logan parked at the back of the church lot.  “I think it’s going to snow,” he said.  Helen glanced at the lights as she bustled up to the church, to see if she could see flakes, which distracted her from what she was about to do until she was standing outside the big church double doors.  They were very creaky doors, and the church was of a size such that the sanctuary was directly inside; no buffer area that Helen could sneak into, unseen.  The only other entrance was to the side room off of the altar area; Helen could get in there unseen, but then to get into the sanctuary from there she would have to walk out in front of the whole congregation, up by the pastor, so that wasn’t an option.  Helen closed her eyes briefly, steeling herself, and thought of Ebb’s face.  She thought she’d seen Ebb’s face clearly for the first time, just then, when they’d walked into the shed where she was laboring.  It hadn’t looked human at all; but it had looked female, and surprisingly young, and maybe a little scared.  “Please, God,” said Helen Phillips.

God works in mysterious ways, including, possibly, via the chancel choir of the Weston United Methodist Church.  They’d just struck up Oh Come, All Ye Faithful when Helen pushed the door open; the people in the back pews turned around, it was true, but they were the only ones who’d heard the creak.  And one of them—“Thank you,” Helen murmured briefly, “and Amen”—was Maria Guadelupe Martinez.

No one at the back who had noticed Helen Phillips’s odd late entrance could tell what she murmured in Maria Guadelupe’s ear.  Neither could Maria Guadelupe’s husband or her young son, but they seemed to accept whatever she murmured to them in turn before edging her way out of the pew and following Helen out of the church.  The congregation reached the last verse as Helen reached the doors; the sopranos reached for the descant.  This time, no one heard the door creak.

Linda Crenshaw had seen a human woman or two give birth, but she knew as soon as she got into the shed that night that she wouldn’t be able to provide much help.  And it had been quite some time since she’d given birth herself.  What she was experienced at, varying levels of estrangement aside, was being a mother, and a grandmother.  After all, no one ever said you had to keep your mothering to your own children.  “Here, now,” she said, and crouched her old bones down next to Ebb, and reached out and took hold of the collection of warm bones, sinews, and, maybe, feathers that seemed to be her hand.  “Don’t worry yourself too much.  This baby’ll be here soon enough; we’re fetching you help.”

Danielle stood next to Odd, nearer to the middle of the shed.  His owl eyes had always been hard to read emotion in; but she’d been spending quite some time just watching him and Ebb, in the past few weeks.  She realized he was worried, too.  “It’ll be all right,” she said.  Danielle loved kids, and was very good with them, but she’d never felt exactly maternal.  She didn’t mind spending extra time with her middle schoolers, but she liked being able to escape at the end of the day.  Now she realized that feeling maternal didn’t necessarily have to do with children; it was more, she thought, like care and protection.  She didn’t think Odd and Ebb were any younger, however they counted it, than she was; but she felt maternally about them all the same.

Then the door to the shed opened again, and Maria Guadelupe was there.

Maybe Helen and Logan had explained everything in the car; they’d certainly tried, they said later, but it had been hard to tell how much sense they would have made even to someone whose first language was English.  It didn’t matter.  Linda stood up from where she’d been crouched; Maria Guadelupe crossed directly to where Ebb was, squatting in the corner of the shed, and bent to her, her dark, smooth head almost touching Ebb’s hard-to-comprehend one.  Everyone could hear that they spoke; but no one knew what they said.  It wasn’t English or Spanish, or any of the ways the other Others had seemed to communicate; what it was, Helen said later, was the language of expectant women in a strange land who are managing to find a welcome there, after all.

The child of Ebb and Odd of the Others was born in the small hours of Christmas morning, into the waiting arms of Maria Guadelupe Martinez, who wrapped him in an old, clean sheet of Linda Crenshaw’s, and laid him in his mother’s arms.  Helen Phillips cried a little over it, and absolutely no one there could blame her.  And Odd, who had hovered nearby during that long, strenuous hour, bent his antlered head over his child, and touched one wing—hand—hoof to his head, and then stood and looked at Logan with his owl eyes, and said, “We must go.  We cannot miss the tide.”

Logan took all of them out on the boat.  It was a bit of a squeeze, but no one wanted to stay behind.  “I think it might snow,” said Danielle, as they drove there; Linda was with Logan in the cab of his truck, and the rest of them were wedged together, for warmth and pure togetherness, in the bed.  A few houses in town still had lights on, as harried parents put the final touches on the scene for the following morning; as they turned the corner, Rachel and Ryan Caulder could be seen through a downstairs window, arranging a bicycle with a bow on it under a still-lit tree, and imagining Tyler’s morning excitement.

There were some heavy-looking clouds, but the snow held off as they headed out in the Mary Anne.  And the wind was shifty and strong enough that the clouds themselves scudded around against the sky, regularly revealing patches of stars.  “Which way?” asked Logan as they came out from the protection of the spit of land into the larger bay; he asked more from habit than anything, because the Others generally had just asked him to go, but Odd came up next to him in the pilot house and pointed.

“There,” he said.  At first Logan thought it was a particularly bright star; then he thought it was probably a planet, though he didn’t know which one, because he didn’t think there was usually a star that bright in that part of the sky.  Then a cloud went over it, without substantially decreasing its brightness, and he wasn’t sure what it was.

“Easy enough,” is what he said out loud.

Everyone else, mostly standing back on the open deck, saw the star—or whatever it was—too.  None of them said anything about it.  It didn’t seem like something that required words.  Ebb and Maria Guadelupe stood close together, still; but when Helen stood next to Maria Guadelupe, on her other side, and put an arm around her waist, it felt like the natural thing to do.  Danielle and Linda linked arms.  The diesel engine rumbled in its box; the combined wind of weather and passage chilled everyone’s noses and put tears in their eyes.

It was Ebb who, eventually, spoke.  “This is enough,” she said.  Her child slept against her chest, still in one of Linda Crenshaw’s sheets, which was doubled over and wrapped around him until he must have been the warmest being on the boat.  Maybe Odd said something, too, or maybe Ebb’s voice just carried; Logan slowed and then shut off the engine, and then he and Odd came out of the pilot house, while the Mary Anne bobbed, rocked by her own wake.

And then, somehow, things shifted, and all of the humans were standing in one part of the boat, sort of huddled together, and the Others, all three of them, were opposite, looking taller than they had yet; maybe as tall as the silvery type, but still distinct, like nothing except themselves.  “Thank you,” said Odd, or Ebb, or both, and, “Thank you,” they said again, but this time it might not have been speaking; it might just have been something understood without words.  And then Odd and Ebb turned and stepped off the boat, carrying their child; and this time, everyone saw them go.  And the star that Logan had been steering towards came towards them, or maybe they walked towards it, until they were rimmed in silver light—a cold silver light, the humans might have thought, except that it was anything but cold.  And even when the shapes of Odd and Ebb themselves were no longer visible, the light shone on for a while.

“‘And the light shines in the darkness,’” said Linda Crenshaw, quietly.  “‘And the darkness has not overcome it.’”

After that, Logan got the boat turned around, and they headed back to Weston, and to bed.  “Odd called it a tide, too,” said Danielle, to Logan.  “How old is your son?” said Helen, to Maria Guadelupe.  “It’s snowing,” said Logan, to no one in particular, as he tied up the Mary Anne, and it was.

“Merry Christmas,” said Linda Crenshaw, to everyone.  And it was that, too.

[overheardontheferry]

Below is taken from a post from our Borough President that he posted tonight. #StatenIslandHistory

A year after slavery was abolished in New York State, Capt. John Jackson made history -- he was the first Black man to purchase property on Staten Island on Feb. 23, 1828, in the area today known as Sandy Ground in Rossville.

Further anchoring Sandy Ground’s place in history: It is the oldest continuously inhabited community established by free slaves in North America.

Capt. Jackson was an operator of a ferry on the Blazing Star line, which traveled from the Arthur Kill to New Jersey. It is believed he ferried escaped slaves from the South to Sandy Ground, making it one of the stops on the Underground Railroad.

Sandy Ground was initially known as Harrisville, named for Moses and Silas Harris who later settled in the area in the hopes of finding land suitable for farming. Instead, they found grounds that were “sandy” -- hence its current name.

The Harris brothers introduced one crop that would grow there: strawberries. This became a profitable venture for the brothers as they delivered the strawberries to market themselves, cutting out the middleman.

Soon after, Sandy Ground became home to freed slaves from Maryland who were fleeing restrictive laws that forbid them from gathering for educational and religious purposes. They were also driven away by a law that prohibited them from harvesting for oysters in the Chesapeake Bay unless they were accompanied by an 18-year-old white male.

At Sandy Ground, they found abundant oyster beds in the Arthur Kill by Prince’s Bay. With that came economic stability, but more importantly, they found freedom from persecution.

Sandy Ground grew to include 108 families with Rossville AME Zion Church as the community anchor.

The founder and first minister of the church was William H. Pitts, a Virginia-born African Methodist Episcopal Zion minister who purchased land in Sandy Ground in May 1849 and began holding prayer services in his home, according to the City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The church was formally recognized in December 1850. Two years later, the congregation purchased land on Crabtree Avenue to build a church, along with an adjoining cemetery. By 1890, the congregation had outgrown the simple clapboard church and built a new church at its present-day site at 584 Bloomingdale Road.

Rossville AME Zion Church was also renowned for its camp meetings, open-air barbecues, clambakes and other social events that drew hundreds of participants both Black and white.

The church was designated a New York City landmark in 2011 -- the cemetery already had landmark status. The Rev. Issac Coleman and Rebecca Gray Coleman House and two “baymen’s cottages” were also granted landmark status in 2011. The two identical cottages, built between 1887 and 1898, housed the oystermen.

Today, Sandy Ground is home to 10 families who are descendants of the original settlers and who still worship at Rossville AME Zion Church. The Sandy Ground Historical Society holds photographs, exhibitions and tours to document its place in history.

In further recognizing Sandy Ground’s legacy of freedom, one of the new Staten Island ferryboats that will be put into service has been christened The Sandy Ground.

(Photo courtesy of the Sandy Ground Historical Society: Oystermen at Sandy Ground, circa 1897).

Next time: In our next installment, we will tell the story of Sydney Howard Gay, a prominent abolitionist and key operator of the Underground Railroad who lived on Staten Island from 1848 to 1888.

[focsle]

21 and 22 for gtw for the worldbuilding asks?

Thank you! I answered 22 here.

21. Tell a bit about the different types of architecture in your story. Is it based on any existing styles, have you created new types of structures, or a mix?

It's all existing styles. A lot of the buildings by the docks are just like...vernacular clapboard houses. But I got to bring in little fun bits like New Bedford having a brief history of building brothels on the hulls of derelict whaleships (tho...having one there in the early 1840s is Historically Inaccurate but I do what I want). The whaleship is based off the Charles W. Morgan because they're from more or less the same time period, and there's still the luxury to visit her in person and get a feel for it. And I'm looking forward to drawing the architecture in the Azores cos it's beautiful and it'll be a nice reprieve from drawing boats boats ropes ocean for 160 pages.

[ID: Modern photo of Horta showing light-colored red-roofed houses and black and white baroque buildings rising above them /end ID]

[ID: Close up of a baroque church built with black and white basalt with black inlaid diamond and curling designs, and a pastel pink building alongside it. /end ID]

[ccohanlon]

notes from the dark heart of the bible belt

On the large, mushroom-like water tower above Elk City, Oklahoma, a rural town of about 11,000 souls just an hour’s drive from the border of Texas, a three-metre-high, hand-painted sign announced that this was the Home of Susan Powell, Miss America, 1981.

It was Sunday evening. My pregnant wife and I had driven all day across the dusty North Texas panhandle, a cold, hard wind blowing sagebrush and grit against the windshield. Now, as we passed fields of freshly tilled, red soil on the outskirts of Elk City, the air was still and humid.

“Tornado weather,” my wife said. A native of Oklahoma, she knew the signs well.

We turned off Interstate 40 to search for a motel, falling in behind a beat-up, black Cadillac Seville as it sharked from the exit to the town’s wide main street. As the old car pulled up in front of a small, steepled, white clapboard church, we noticed a bumper sticker on its rusted rear mudguard: I’m reddened by his blood. Jesus Christ. We slowed to look at some of the churchgoers. Stiff-necked, skeletal old men with the resigned demeanour of undertakers pulled disconsolately on their starched shirt collars as their wives, heavy-set women in ankle-length floral frocks, some with dense beehive hairdos that seemed to melt into the rubbery folds of their necks, gossiped among themselves. They shuffled past a black-suited pastor who stood like a shadowy, slightly sinister figure from an Edward Gorey illustration at the entrance to greet them.

Inside, the tinny wheeze of a harmonium accompanied a few discordant voices singing an unfamiliar hymn. The notes hung in the evening air like a lament.

Elk City was my first glimpse of the so-called Bible Belt, the deep, fervent trench of Protestantism that runs eastwards from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, and above them the Kansas/Colorado border, and straddles the traditional geographical and cultural divide between the old Union north and the Confederate south, to the coasts of Virginia, Georgia and the Carolinas. It threads through some of North America’s worst ghettoes of rural poverty, a poverty indifferent to the racially biased economics of its large cities: according to US census statistics, in the back-country farming communities across the South that are furthest from metropolitan centres, white, black, Hispanic and native American all share the same hard-scrabble grind that gives real meaning to the phrase “dirt poor”.

The land around Elk City lends itself to biblical metaphor. Neither expansive nor picturesque, there is something pared down and almost puritanical about the unkempt hedgerows and stands of gnarled hickory and oak that enclose fertile, arable smallholdings. The surrounding flatlands are stark and unprotected from the moist equinoctial depressions that bring fierce southerly gales, thunderstorms and the threat of destructive tornados and flooding. (As the adage has it: “When the wind blows in Texas, Oklahoma sucks!”) In winter, the temperature can drop a score of degrees below freezing, turning the air to ice and blighting the autumn plantings of winter wheat and sorghum. At the height of summer, a harsh sun heats even the few patches of shade to well above 42ºC, where it simmers for weeks on end until the last drops of moisture evaporate and the earth becomes as brittle as kiln-heated clay.

The locals are the spiritual ancestors of the Joads, the fictional Okie farmers who were the heart of John Steinbeck’s classic novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Memories of the Great Depression are still vivid among them. Back then, Western Oklahoman families were crushed by drought and debt so they abandoned their homesteads to migrate westwards from the worsening dustbowl to work as low-paid fruit- and vegetable-pickers on abundant southern Californian plantations: “Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll on’y be one.” The long drive across half the country on the narrow, two-lane blacktop known as Route 66 – with the few possessions they had managed to keep out of the hands of county sheriffs piled high on the backs of small, rickety trucks – was a hardship, but traversing the last few hundred kilometres across the empty south-western desert was like an Old Testament trial of their faith. Somehow, they endured, despite the press of evidence that if their God did exist, he was all out of mercy and had long since turned his back on them.

Maybe it takes a long haul across the ragged flatlands of the central plains to begin to understand why the roots of American evangelism are planted so deep in this part of the country, and why it appears, much like the land itself, to be at once bountiful and unforgiving. It also takes some time living around it, as I did for three years in Oklahoma, to understand how it can insinuate itself into even an insistently secular life, comforting you with its fellowship, its pervasive sense of community, and presenting the solace of a reductive world view, in which everything is neatly constructed as a choice between good and evil. If you didn’t think about it too much, it’s easy to embrace – and the one thing that can be said of most people in this part of the country is that they are pre-Socratic: they don’t like to think. A few hundred kilometres to the north-east of Elk City, Oklahoma’s second-largest metropolitan area, Tulsa, is the self-proclaimed buckle of the Bible Belt. Home to several thousand Christian congregations and churches, very few of them mainstream, the business of evangelism is as important to Tulsa’s economy as American Airlines, medical care and energy.

It wasn’t always so. The area was first settled in 1836 by the so-called Five Civilised Tribes – the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles. Forced to surrender their homelands east of the Mississippi to the federal government by the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the tribes were escorted by the United States Cavalry on a forced migration westwards along what became known as the Trail of Tears. Christianity arrived with the St Louis and San Francisco Railroad from the West coast in the form of a Presbyterian missionary, the Reverend Robert Loughbridge, who delivered the city’s first sermon from the front porch of a local store. But while the first church was, not surprisingly, also Presbyterian, its founding congregation was made up of converted Creeks. Creek and Cherokee pastors quickly established Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist churches to serve native settlements.

It took more time to convert the rangy cowboys and Indian traders who were the city’s first white settlers. The first white minister, a Presbyterian, the Reverend William Penn Haworth, endured three years of his congregation’s unrepentant sinfulness before he delivered a fiery admonishment from the pulpit about the evils of alcohol. He was beaten bloody and left for dead in the street; when he regained consciousness, he resigned – and fled, like many before and after him, to California.

The city’s first black ministers, who arrived at the turn of the century, were a little more cautious, not least because racial prejudice was, and still is, a raw, ugly cicatrix across this part of Oklahoma. The first black churches were denoted as “Negro” — as in “Negro only” — on a 1911 city map published by Sanborn, and one of them, Brown’s Chapel, at 307 North Frankfort Avenue, went so far as to describe itself as “Colored Methodist Episcopal”. Still, that probably just inflamed Tulsa’s deeply ingrained bigotry. In 1921, when leaders of the prosperous black neighbourhood of Greenwood, in Tulsa, tried to thwart a  mob lynching of a young black man unjustly accused of a sexual assault on a young white woman, it degenerated into an all-out urban war that became known as the Tulsa Race Riot, and black churches were among the first targets. About 300 blacks were killed – their bodies dumped into an unmarked mass grave at a municipal cemetery, where they lay undiscovered for half a century – and several thousand more were driven into the countryside as rampaging armed gangs destroyed their homes and businesses. God-fearing whites had no qualms about smiting down their black brothers, whose Christianity, they might have argued, was less righteous, less devout than their own.

There’s a rich tradition of cynicism and hypocrisy in the predominantly white Christian evangelism of the Bible Belt. The first charismatic preachers learned how to work a crowd at the feet of itinerant snake-oil salesmen and smooth-talking carney spiritualists who bilked small change from the naïve country folk that gathered to watch their shows. Fire-and-brimstone ministers at the turn of the century understood the importance of clever stagecraft – they kept the tents and wagons the snake-oil salesman left behind when patent medicines began to be sold at general stores – and the use of dire hyperbole to ensure a congregation’s rapt attention. But it wasn’t until nearly a century later, in the 1980s — about the time when American capitalism began to embrace the oily Gordon Gekko ethos, “Greed is good” — that Christian evangelism really found its ideal medium: cable TV.

Oddly, it wasn’t the urbane example of Billy Graham, until then the most successful Christian preacher in America and possibly the world, that set the standard for a new, less polished generation of television preachers. It was the ambling, “aw shucks” populism of the then president, Ronald Reagan. His well-rehearsed political choreography enabled him to dance around even the most serious issues that assailed his administration, while still appearing to be elegant and statesman-like to his well-heeled backers, and cosily humane and folksy to white working-class and rural voters for whom, amazingly, he embodied everything that was right and good about the American dream. He was, after all, as he often said, “blessed by God”.

With easy access to capital, and booming prices multiplying the value of their churches’ long-held real estate assets, it took less than a heartbeat for Reagan’s religious ward-heelers — Pat Robertson, who was already a wealthy evangelical media mogul, and the self-appointed leader of the media-conceived Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, as well as the less credible but no less ambitious B team of Jimmy Swaggart, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and Oral Roberts — to 'get' it. Boosting their existing celebrity, built over decades of nickel-and-dime tent shows, travelling ministries and radio sermons, and increasing their quarterly turnovers by tens of millions of dollars, they each overcame their slightly cartoonish personas and country bumpkin drawls to become shrewd, rich media players courted by politicians who needed their endorsements and with them, the votes of their loyal television constituencies.

All it took was a few slick, if sometimes barely credible, crusades that no longer focused on the anachronistic notion of converting sinners but on capturing a bigger share of an audience — an audience that, thanks to cheap cable access, was now in front of a television set (and still listening to a radio) nearly 24 hours a day.

One of the most shameless of television evangelists was Jim Bakker, who misappropriated $US158 million of his TV ministry’s contributions, diverting them through 47 bank accounts in his own name and squandering them on, among other things, dozens of cars, six mansions, each appointed with $60,000-worth of solid gold bathroom fixtures, and hush money ($265,000 to be exact) to his mistress, Jessica Hahn. More shameless, in some ways, was Tulsa’s own, Oral Roberts. He claimed on television that he had had a vision of a 300-metre-tall Jesus, who told him to build (with his congregation’s money) his City of Faith Medical and Research Centre, a soaring tower in faux-gilded steel and reflective golden glass that opened in 1981 and closed eight years later when it proved too costly and impractical to run. In 1986, the then 68-year-old Roberts announced that God had told him he would be “called home” — in other words, die — unless he was able to raise $US8 million in donations over the next 12 months. When the deadline passed, Roberts announced that his life had been spared, but that didn’t stop him from claiming a few months later that he had recently resurrected the dead. As for his own death, the weaselly preacher claimed he would return soon after to rule the earth alongside Jesus Christ

Oral Roberts’s unvarnished (some might say blasphemous) attempts to blur the divide between evangelism and business came along just in time to “rescue” Tulsa.

In 1901, the discovery of oil in Red Fork, a small town just outside of Tulsa, on the southern banks of the Arkansas River, was the first of a series of strikes, including the rich Glen Pool Field, that over the next quarter of a century would turn Oklahoma into the biggest oil producer in the South and Midwest, bigger even than Texas, and Tulsa into 'The Oil Capital of the World'. With more than 2,000 wells in operation in the city, it was the logical headquarters for many of North America’s major oil drillers, refiners and distributors, fuelling a network of subsidiary economies as the demand increased for drilling rigs, derricks, storage facilities, pipelines and pipeline stations, refineries and processing plants, powerhouses (central power), loading racks, petroleum-production camps, tract housing for company employees, corporate buildings and mansions for wealthy oil executives.

By the middle of the century, the wells were running dry and although farming and mining sustained outlying communities, even the arrival of an American Airlines maintenance plant and the continued prosperity of one of the city’s largest employers, the Williams company – which moves 300 million cubic metres of natural gas through 23,500 kilometres of interstate pipelines every day to supply 12 per cent of the natural gas consumed in the US – could not stave off an economic slump. Thousands of unemployed, uneducated roughnecks and their families were sitting ducks for predatory charismatics who came from all over the state to set up makeshift churches and offer spiritual respite from the joyless hustle for below-minimum-wage jobs in a flooded labour pool.

I first went to Tulsa in 1989 when my wife, a Tulsa native descended from local Cherokee and 19th-century French and German settlers, took me there to meet her family. The city was still scuffling – whole blocks of the business district were empty and boarded up, and there were long lines of people queuing outside the soup kitchen at the Salvation Army mission downtown – but there was a sense that better times were just around the corner. American Airlines had turned a small maintenance facility at Tulsa International Airport into a major regional base, and with increased flights to American’s international hub in Dallas, a half-hour flight away, several large corporations, including Dollar and Thrifty Rent-A-Cars and TV Guide, were considering Tulsa for their national headquarters. The city had always remained the main resource of skilled oil workers for fields all over the world, including the Middle East and South America, but with the construction of several, new, well-equipped medical centres, day surgeries and private hospitals, and the expansion of the already large private hospitals servicing the city, Tulsa was becoming, in the words of a local politician, “the specialist care centre of the Mid-South”.

Thanks to Oral Roberts, from whose less-than-shining example the local charismatics learnt how to work their congregations to increase revenues from tithes, donations and even merchandise sales, Tulsa’s churches thrived even during the worst of the slump. Every day new ones appeared, sometimes in the most unlikely forms, in the most unlikely places.

There were still scores of small, unadorned, timber chapels in every neighbourhood, but there were also those set up as storefronts in strip malls, right there between the Starbucks or Denny’s franchise and Gap, Rite Aid or RadioShack, and even one in a nondescript warehouse on an industrial estate where the other tenants were a John Deere tractor-parts supplier, a timber yard, a bulk feed wholesaler and a specialist panel beater.

Then there were the bigger churches. Many had been founded as small, rural churches on tracts of unkempt land on the outskirts of the city. As Tulsa’s sprawling suburban development edged closer, they increased their congregations – and the value of the tithes they received. Some churches built primary schools or day-care centres for pre-schoolers or walk-in medical centres, others conceived even larger complexes that included small stadiums, theatres and broadcast facilities. The most successful bought high-rise corporate offices where they could manage their now multimillion-dollar financial operations, from the funding of overseas missions, mostly in Central and South America, to the negotiation of new cable and satellite slots to distribute church programming in foreign markets.

Every conceivable faith was represented – Anglican, Apostolic, Assembly of God, Baptist, Brethren, Calvary, Catholic, Church of Christ, Church of God, Congregational, Episcopal, Evangelical, Foursquare, Lutheran, Mennonite, Messianic, Methodist, Nazarene, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Reformed, Seventh-day Adventist and Vineyard were just some of the Christian denominations – but it was the charismatic evangelicals that grew their churches into big businesses, with tax-free turnovers that ranged from hundreds of thousands of dollars to tens of millions. That these sums were derived in large part from donations by those in the community who could least afford them – and in many cases had sacrificed basic needs to scrape together the money – did not appear to give anyone, least of all the preachers, pause.

As Pat Robertson declared, 23 years ago, in an infamous taped sermon: “Satan has gone! God has just healed somebody! A hernia has been healed! Several people are being healed of haemorrhoids and varicose veins! People with flat feet! God is doing just great things to you!”

Evangelists work with missionary zeal to target those who will, quite literally, buy the idea that redemption is just a matter of the right-sized donation. “Give generously so that you will be saved,” one Tulsa preacher is famous for telling his working-class flock, which is transfixed by his vivid assertions of an imminent apocalypse, a biblical “end of days”, and his histrionic readings from The Revelation of St John the Divine. Maybe because it inspires such compelling performances, eschatology is not so much an area of theological study among charismatic evangelists as it is a sales tool. "I can feel the power of the Lord in this home,” the plumber said. He was standing in his damp overalls at the edge of our living room, gripping the wooden shaft beneath a bright red, rubber toilet plunger as he admired a wall decorated with Mexican crucifixes and crude devotional paintings of the Virgin Mary. My wife, who was not a religious woman, had collected them over several years as we travelled together around the American South-West. “I can tell these things,” he went on. “I can tell when the Lord has visited his blessings on a place. That’s why I became a preacher – to share my personal understanding of the Lord’s way.” Offering him a thin smile, I gripped his elbow and gently lead him back to the open maw of a cracked and leaking toilet bowl.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I, too, was a preacher. I had impressive documents — one from the World Christianship Ministries, the other from the Progressive Universal Life Church — attesting to it, both framed and hanging on the wall of my study, and my credentials, acquired on the web, had been filed with the court clerk of Bixby county to enable me to perform marriages anywhere in the state. I had even incorporated a church for which I had applied for tax exemption, not because I had any intention of gathering a congregation but because I wanted to see just how far, as a sceptical atheist, I could go in establishing a “legitimate” religious organisation. So far I had invested less than $500 in “donations” to the two churches that provided me with ministerial recognition, and in fees for the paperwork to create the legal entity of my church. All I needed now was a clapboard chapel, a sturdy pulpit and a congregation.

Actually, the clapboard chapel and pulpit were optional.

My wife, our three children and I were then living in a large, six-bedroom house on one of the many gated estates that had been built in the countryside south of Tulsa. Our neighbours were mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants – lawyers, cardiologists, plastic surgeons, computer-software designers and oil executives – who, when they were not working, pursued the predictable elements of the American Dream: they bought expensive foreign cars, which they polished every weekend, played golf at the local country club with colleagues, took their kids to softball and soccer practice and never missed a Sunday service at the local church. They also held prayer breakfasts at local coffee shops and took turns to host Bible discussion groups in their homes. One or two were credentialed ministers — their credentials just as dubious as my own, but taken a deal more seriously — who presided over Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas services in their homes attended by friends, relatives and neighbours.

Home services were common all over Tulsa. A few were the foundation for successful full-time “faith enterprises” that catered to congregations of no more than a hundred. As with other churches, these home operations were tithed, and even the most squirrelly of personal tax plans could not compete with the total tax exemption they claimed on their revenue. All you needed to make a buck was confidence, a little charisma and the correct choice of biblical references.

Well, not quite all. As a musician friend of mine from New Orleans observed, when he heard I had bought a house in Tulsa: “Ah, home to Jesus and crystal meth’!” If anything outnumbered the churches in the city, it was the garage laboratories synthesising “the shitkicker’s cocaine”. Thanks to the wholesale distribution networks of outlaw bikers like the Bandidos, the Mongols and the Rolling 30 Bloods, as well as the predominantly black street gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, and the Latino South Side Locos and Mara Salvatrucha, crystalised methamphetamine had become one of Oklahoma’s highest revenue commodities. "What’s the worst that could happen: that they learn to love their neighbour and learn the difference between right and wrong?”

Martha was a former oil executive who lived across the street from me. Her husband continued to work as a senior vice-president for a Texas drilling company. They were typical of the residents of our estate — rich, Republican and Baptist — except that Martha was black, and perhaps because of that, we became friends. I was the neighbourhood’s only foreigner, tolerated but not entirely understood, my accent as incomprehensible as Aramaic to most of my neighbours.

Martha had asked if my family would like to join her at a church-sponsored picnic in parklands adjoining her church after the Sunday service. I didn’t say anything — just cocked an eyebrow at her and smiled. She knew me too well to be hurt.

On the face of it, she had made a seductively simple point. Any parent wants his young children to grow into upright, socially responsible adults and anything that might contribute to that, including going to church, should not be dismissed too quickly. And yet I had a problem with that “difference between right and wrong”. America’s politicians, civil servants and military commanders might stoop to baby talk — “we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys” — to defend their country’s reasons for being at war, but I was unconvinced that the definition of good or bad was so easily articulated. I also wasn’t sure how I was going to get across the subtle but still essential nuances I saw in it to my children, or even if I should, but I suspected that the preacher at Martha’s church would not have the same hesitation. Resolve is part of what evangelical Christianity is all about. There is no questioning, no hesitation; as I heard one television preacher put it, “With faith, there is always certainty”,  even if there is really none to be had. In the main, evangelicals toe the line of middle American prejudices, having no truck with socialism, pacifism, homosexuality, evolution, gun restrictions (all good Christians should own one) and liberal attempts to take God out of the classroom, court and local and federal government. They were encouraged by America’s split, under George W. Bush, into “faith-based” and “reality-based” constituencies, and are happy to concede irreconcilable differences with that half of the country that is not yet willing to give up reasoned discourse or a confidence in scientific investigation. These days, they also stand ready to go mano-a-mano with Islam. To hear some of the faithful tell it, their born-again Texan President should get on and finish the job that was started by the Crusaders 908 years ago: “Just nuke them troublesome Ay-rabs and Eye-raqis out of existence!” an elderly woman demanded during a phone-in on a popular Tulsa radio show. The trouble is, the rectitude of the Bible Belt, where faith-based politics have been the way of things since the1950s, does not stand up well to scrutiny. Collectively, the Bible Belt states have the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country, about 105 per thousand — overall, the US has the highest rate in the world — and the highest rates of syphilis and gonorrhoea. Oklahoma has the country’s highest infant mortality rate and the highest mortality rate — three times the national average — of abused children. In Tulsa alone, 20 per cent of all children live at or below the poverty line. And along with Texas and Louisiana, Oklahoma has the highest rates of incarceration: worse, of the approximately 22,000 people arrested each year in Oklahoma for drug offences alone, 2,000 are under 18. In the end, we went to church with Martha. My children enjoyed the experience and although I cavilled silently about every line in the earnest, young preacher’s down-to-earth homily, I was taken with the sincerity of the shared faith, and afterwards, the friendliness. I wondered, just for a minute, how we non-believers are able to live with the spiritual void within us. How do we find meaning in the everyday of our lives? It’s easy enough to find reasons to live but meaning, and the restless longing for it, is more complex, more elusive and insistent. A religious faith sublimates it and for many people, especially those millions all along the Bible Belt for whom every day is a struggle, that is probably enough.

For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. [Romans 8]. First published in Griffith Review, Australia, 2005.

[vvatchword]

Weird Dreams Are Made of This

why am I like this

The last two days have been terrible. Capital-T terrible. It’s like the blood-donation panic attack woke up every anxiety-induced nightmare I’ve had over the last six months. Let’s just say that I spent most of the last 48 hours sleeping.

I had an intense dream that I was in a church—very traditional, complete with white clapboard and steeple—that had fallen through a break in time and space. Unfortunately, most of it—sans steeple—fell into the Faerie Realm. For some reason, I believed—along with a lot of other people—that we had to take care of the Faerie threat before they used the church as a staging point. The Faerie actually had no idea this place existed, so our excursion would both reveal it and wake up a bunch of bad blood.

I had this sense that the Faerie were very old and well-acquainted with humanity, but looked down upon it and loathed it. Obviously, my feelings about them fell along the same lines: for the reason that they looked down upon me, I despised them.

We get to this Faerie realm by noclipping through a wall, and I’m not sure whether we were transformed by it or were just an eclectic mix to begin with—we weren’t human. I was more machine than person myself, and it was like I had put my body together using random shit in a dumpster. There were three parts to our army; I headed the second one. I want to stress that I wasn’t exactly high up on the totem pole. I was just a commander, and there was a proper general in charge.

We start to attack random Faerie bases. Everything in this world was neutral colors, beiges and blacks, ugly and geometric. Our bodies were terrible, too, all blacks and grays, and we were monstrous machines past description. The Faerie themselves were stereotypically beautiful, tall and slender with narrow heads and slanted eyes. It makes me wonder if the ugliness of Faerie were really because it was ugly, or because I could only see it as ugly because I was ugly myself.

We knocked a few wins out of the park, but soon our element of surprise was gone, and we were mired in a war of attrition, and we could do nothing but lose—we were buried in enemy territory with no reinforcements. We had no need for food there, at least, but soon the general made a decision: returning through the church was not an option, because our avenues of escape were all cut off. But the Faerie offered a truce: come to them, promise not to fight anymore, and they’d transport us back.

I was like lol no, and kept my secondary force back, but the first and third commanders went with their troops, and to no one’s surprise, the Faerie started transporting everyone into Instant Death. For a little while, they didn’t realize that the second force—my force—had been kept back. So I had some element of surprise.

“Fuck u guys,” I said, apparently, and went to battle right away.

I had lost one of my legs by this point and used a makeshift shield as a crutch to limp everywhere. I was some huge, genderless, vaguely-humanoid Frankenstein, towering perhaps ten feet, and every blow I threw murdered ten Faerie scum at a time. I could walk through fire like Darth-fucking-Vader. In some ways, this dream was a weird power fantasy. I didn’t like myself—my self was weird, bestial, in constant agony, and spoke mostly through inhuman bellowing—but I commanded a third of an army of monsters, which both loved and feared me, and we were smart, and we were kicking ass. There was something marvelous about us in all of our hellishness.

At some point, my avatar went down in a hail of sparks and brimstone, and the next commander had to rise by necessity. Like me, they weren’t that high up the totem pole, but enough commanders had died that they were shunted up into the leader’s position. In true nonsensical fashion, it was Porky Pig. PORKY PIG. Why???? Why are my dreams so awesome on one hand and then do shit like this

Anyway, Porky lost all cutesy cartoonishness immediately, except by name alone—reasoning being that he had taken such damage in battle that he now appeared completely alien. In fact, he had been close to death, and was saved by some kind of weird battlefield surgery, and now appeared NOTHING like Porky Pig. I don’t remember Porky Pig appearing in the dream until this moment so it’s probable he just appeared out of the ether. Anyway, he strode out of the surgery like some kind of monstrous one-eyed approximation of an angel, slender and human-shaped, the color of a birch tree, complete with scratchy brown lenticels. He wielded a golden staff shaped like an asparagus and wore a lopsided halo over a single horn, which grew from over his right eye.

I don’t ask my dreams why they’re like this. I should. They’d answer by making Elmer Fudd a biblically-correct angel, probably.

The real question here is whether or not we referred to this monster general as “Porky Pig.” The answer is, “Yes.” So this horrible monster went by Porky Pig and everyone just accepted it. (My “self” had reverted to a kind of universal eye that could see everything going on in the dream, but not affect it.)

Porky was incredibly cautious. My disembodied self was grumpy about it, actually. Everything he did was a power play. He was playing the field of diplomacy as well as fuckin shit up guerrilla-style.

Naturally, I woke up before I could see what fruits this methodology bore. There were some losses, but it seemed like Porky was gearing up for some big twist, and… I’ll just never know. The End.

I’ve had dreams like this for days. Full story-lines, cohesive plots and characters, fleshed-out settings full of color and architecture, and I’m tired of them, honestly. They are always so goddamn serious and there’s always a war or plot going on, and I’m not always in full control of it, even if my character is powerful.

I’ve started talking to myself before I go to sleep: “If you ever find yourself in a dream, don’t forget you’re in complete control. You don’t have to let bad guys win and you don’t have to find anything and you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. If Indy gets out, he’ll be okay, and you aren’t in school anymore.”

In response, my dreams make me go to war over and over. Thanks?

[sunshinebunnie]

Prairie Doll (Sneak Peek)

The sun was already past the noon zenith by the time the tall prairie grasses began to give way to tramped down dirt streets and a hodgepodge of clapboard buildings as Lexi finally reached the town of Springfield. Unlike the almost frenetic bustling energy of Omaha, fueled by the ongoing operations of the Union Pacific, or the more settled routines of Philadelphia, Lexi was not sure she would’ve recognized she’d entered a town when she finally arrived in Springfield if not for the presence of the saloon and the small white church bordering either end of the main “street.” As her eyes scanned around, she noticed a small livery and blacksmith next to the saloon as well as a small, squat building on the other side of the road that looked like the words “Dry Goods” might’ve been painted on the side at some point in time. On the far side of the apparent general store, there appeared to be an undertaker and on the other side of that, there looked to be a small jail. There were horses tied up here and there to hitching posts along the main street as well as a couple of buckboards at the far ends of town. A steady trickle of men seemed to flow in and out of the saloon, while a vaguely familiar-looking girl around her age perched on a balcony above the saloon’s entrance, plumes of smoke periodically drifting from her lips. 

Turning her attention back to the general store, Lexi began crossing the street only to narrowly avoid getting trampled by an imposing man on horseback with salt and pepper hair. As his horse quickly started galloping pell-mell down the street, Lexi noticed the door to the saloon’s balcony opening out of the corner of her eye before a slim blonde slipped through and draped herself around the smoking brunette like a robe. Both of the women on the balcony watched as the horse and its rider charged out of town. 

As the dust cloud following the man began getting smaller, Lexi finally looked back down at her dress. Her ire started rising as she took in the coat of dust covering her from head to toe.  Even though she’d hardly been spring fresh after walking for hours through the tall prairie grasses, at least she hadn’t felt like someone had covered her in an inch of ground up buffalo chips: the last thing she wanted was to walk into the general store smelling like the wrong end of a horse. 

She was still standing in the road trying to figure out what she could do when a disembodied voice called to her.

“Hey! You got a death wish or something?”

[aloysiavirgata]

Petrichor

Title: Petrichor

Rating: Explicit

Summary: He could tell her that her prefrontal cortex was the revelation to the thief on the cross.

Spoilers: Early S7

Author’s Notes:This is a casefile inspired by many things. The Season 7 timeline is a mess, I don’t know what else to say about that.

Early November in the temperate mountain valleys of southern Appalachia. The ground is carpet-soft with plush moss, and the hidden pools are still riotous with life. Ree needed only a pullover that morning, her doll Cordelia peering out of an old tote-bag stuffed with scraps of bread and feed corn. Her mother sent a lunch for her too, tucked in with her books and binoculars and a thermos of hot chocolate.

Ree in faded jeans and a lavender sweater picking her way over rocks and pine needles and fallen leaves, watching for the birds she can name and trying to mimic their calls. She points them out to Cordelia, who stares solemnly with blue-glass eyes. There are foxes, but they hide still. Ree dreams of befriending them. She can lure some of the deer within twenty feet now, and wishes she were Fern Arable, from Charlotte’s Web.

She takes a right instead of her customary left, wanting to test her new binoculars from a different vantage point. She skips over tree roots and rocks like a mountain goat, scarcely needing to look at the ground to keep her footing. The path curves sharply for a hundred feet before Ree finds herself at the edge of a wide pond, dense with duckweed. It is bordered with stands of ancient pine, with mossy boulders and half-sunken logs furred with algae. The silence is deep, but not frightening. It feels holy, like church. Godlight filters through the evergreens, the color of new peas. Somewhere, not far, falling water.

“Ohhhh,” Ree whispers to Cordelia. The beauty makes her chest hurt a little. She fumbles in the bag for her binoculars, laying Cordelia on a rock. Bread crusts and pencil ends spill from a loose seam. A rattle of deer corn on the stone.

Binoculars in place, Ree spots a heron across the pond, squirrels peeping from between the gold and red leaves of elm and sugarberry. She recognizes a deer she’s seen many times before, with a wide white blaze down her nose. Sudden movement catches her eye - a slim figure with long hair moving among the trees. Ree adjusts her lenses but cannot focus properly; the figure is blurred, always moving among the evergreen boughs.

The heron again. Squirrels. The deer now much closer. Then a pale ankle, a woman’s laugh.

“Helloooooooo,” Ree calls, braver than she feels. “I’m just lookin’ at birds and stuff! I’ll go if you want.”

Silence. 

She chews her lip, uncertain. The woods don’t belong to anybody on paper, but there are chancy folk out here with their own laws. “Cordelia?” she whispers. “What do we do?”

Cordelia offers no opinion. Ree grabs a handful of corn and climbs onto a flat boulder. Just beside it is a little patch of grass, and she hopes the doe will come into it. 

The laugh again and this time it’s much closer, just to her left. Were those fingers at her neck? Ree turns to look but tunnel vision sets in, the binoculars slapping hard against her chest when she drops them. The strap twists at her throat and she gasps, her hands springing open in surprise. She slips on the fallen corn and goes down hard on her spine against the rock. 

The deer steps into the glade, her unusual face cautious but curious. She knows Ree will not make sudden movements like the others do.

Ree, dazed, watched the deer nibble the corn with her velvet lips. She tries to sit up, but it’s like her brain will not connect to her body. Her feet seem very far away. 

Something pulls her hair and she manages a thin cry of pain. She’s freezing suddenly, the world glassy and distorted. Ree opens her mouth to call for help but she can’t; the greenness of the glade is in her throat now, and behind her eyes and inside her blood. The laugh again, so pretty, and then long arms are wrapped around her and Ree thanks Baby Jesus for saving her but oh!

Such teeth.

***

A quick glance in the rearview confirms once more that his hair’s pretty well grown back from the surprise birthday neurosurgery, and at thirty-eight such victories cannot be taken for granted. He tries to peer around the tight curve along the mountain road, but can make out only shadows. The bag of sunflower seeds ran dry twenty minutes ago, but he’s got a couple more in the trunk.

Beside him comes a rustle of paper. Scully’s printed out directions from MapQuest, checking off turns like a shopping list. “Still another three miles before the access road,” she says, not looking up from her trim navy-blue lap. She takes a sip of coffee.

Mulder coughs, says nothing. Things aren’t strained exactly, it’s not that. It’s more a liminal space. Everything’s fine, he tells himself. Everything’s fine.

He  checks his hair again.

***

The town is shabby but proud; the roads are clean and there are no cars propped up on the trimmed lawns. On this block a hardware store, a stone church, a fire station, and a bakery. Despite the Fannie Flagg charm, Mulder expects the local homeowners are dying for a Wal-Mart and a McDonald’s. There’s a billboard advertising a newly opened Cracker Barrel, which must count as progress to some.

The Ross home is a small, weatherbeaten clapboard in a stretch of small, weatherbeaten clapboards. Many of the houses have elaborate neo-classical porticoes taller than the actual roof. At the Rosses’, the mailbox is shaped like a dog, with a moveable tail instead of a flag. There are purple balloons hanging limply from its neck. Mulder noses the Crown Vic up the cracked asphalt of the driveway, engaging the parking brake before turning the engine off. 

Scully gathers their files, straightens the picture of Rhiannon Ross paperclipped to the manila envelope. Her little face is joyful in the school photograph. She wears a sweater with purple hearts and has sun-bronzed skin. Her big hazel eyes are laughing, framed by golden braids. 

“You ready?” he asks Scully.

She sighs. “Are we ever, with kids?” 

“Nope.” Mulder straightens his tie. So strange to do these little rituals again, to convey authority and professionalism through a strip of ornamental fabric. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Scully asks him again, fussing with a Post-It. “You know I still don’t think you should have been cleared for this, Mulder. You’re scarcely three weeks past severe trauma, and you haven’t even been back to the office.” She looks up, concern furrowing her brow.

He could tell her that when the gyre widened and spun out, it was she who held the center for him. He could tell her that the cool silver stream of her unvoiced voice stemmed the hellish tide of thoughts and premonition that threatened to drown his sentient mind. He could tell her that her prefrontal cortex was the revelation to the thief on the cross. 

Instead he crunches on a peppermint LifeSaver, washing it down with the rest of his cold coffee. “I get in the most trouble when I’m left to my own devices. You should be glad for a federally mandated excuse to keep an eye on me.”

She smiles at that. “Fair enough.”

They leave the stale air of the car for the fresh autumn breezes of northeast Alabama, the air so crisp it tastes like spring water. Mulder, a devout New Englander, is wary of the South, but cannot deny this to be a beautiful patch of it.

He puts his jacket on as Scully clips several paces ahead of him, bandbox fresh as always. He joins her on the little porch, and the front door opens before they have a chance to knock. Before them is a lanky blonde woman in worn jeans and a striped blouse. The shadows around her eyes look like bruises, lips papery and dry. For 26 years, these mothers have always been his mother, their homes his house in Chilmark.

“Y’all the FBI people?” she asks. Despite her stretchy vowels, brittle tension suffuses her voice. 

“Yes ma’am,” Scully says. They display their badges for her perusal.

The woman nods, then ushers them in. She gestures to a floral couch, taking the chintz armchair across from it. Mulder settles at one end of the couch while Scully, less leggy,  perches at the edge of the other. She is a slim smudge in the pastel room.

“I’m Iona Ross,” their host begins, rubbing a chewed thumbnail across raw knuckles. “I’m Ree’s mama.” 

Behind her, on the wall, are family photographs. Ree has three older brothers. The largest photograph shows the four children arranged on a park bench, smiling in white shirts and blue jeans. Ree is missing her two front teeth.

A man enters the room, rawboned, with the same wheat colored hair as his wife. He’s got on a gray sweater beneath Carhartt overalls and carries a coffee tray. He has big hands with ropy tendons standing out, and it's clear he’s not used to playing host. His face is haggard.

“This is my husband Wyatt,” Iona says, as he puts the tray on the small table between her and the couch.

Mulder looks at the pristine coffee cups and saucers. He guesses this is their wedding china, only brought out for “best.” That it will be carefully placed back into a breakfront after hand-washing.

Wyatt sits in a blue La-Z-Boy, relieved to be finished with his task. “They told us y’all were the best ones to find Ree,” he says in a choppy voice. He reaches out to grip his wife’s hand. 

Mulder, as he always does, longs for this to be true. “I can promise you there is no one at the FBI who will work harder for you,” he says.

Scully smiles sadly in his peripheral vision. “We have the police report, Mr. and Mrs. Ross. But it’s always better if you can walk us through the events yourself.”

“Iona and Wyatt, please,” Wyatt says. “Anyhow, it was Sunday morning and Ree had just got new binoculars for her birthday on Saturday. She, uh, she’s nine now. Real smart little thing, likes nature and all, really likes birds.” His voice breaks. He scrubs at his face with his hands.

Iona takes over, voice raw but steady. “Well, she packed up her little bag with some bird food you know, and her binoculars and some nature books and all. Her doll Cordelia of course, and I made a lunch. She’ll go out for hours in the woods. And whatever, uh, happened it was before she ate ‘cause all the food was there.”

Mulder glances at his notes, just to look at something other than Iona’s desperate face. “The police report says her doll and her bag were found by a pond with the lunch still inside, but her binoculars were missing. The items were found Monday morning by a search party. That’s correct?”

“Yes sir,” Iona replies. “And there was algae all over Cordelia and the bag and the food, even though it was still wrapped up. It was even in the hot chocolate in the thermos.” She looks eagerly from Mulder to Scully. “Y’all think that means something, the algae being on closed-up food? I never heard of it. Maybe it’s like a, whaddya call it, an MO.”

“Unusual details are always good details,” Scully says in her gentle way. “Unusual facts can certainly help narrow things down, Mis- Iona.” She leans forward now, palms splayed over her sharp knees. “I know this next question is painful, but I do need to ask. It says that the pond was searched and that neither Ree nor any of her clothing have been found. But, from the photographs, it seems like there’s a bit of debris in the pond. Logs and large rocks, mostly, and lots of algae and duckweed. Is there any chance that Ree would have gone into it on her own?”

Wyatt gets to his feet. “She ain’t stupid,” he snaps, pacing. “She didn’t do nothing wrong, and despite what you may think, we’re not backwoods morons too ignorant to raise children.” His pain seeps a dark aura into the air, ink through clear water. “Our other three are still fine, you notice. Police report say that?”

“We don’t doubt you at all, sir,” Mulder says. “No one is trying to blame Ree or your family for her disappearance. Agent Scully and I just have to review all lines of questioning to make sure the police have done everything they can thus far. We want to make sure we’re starting from a helpful place as we take over the investigation.”

Wyatt leans against the wall, looking hollow. “Jenny Greenteeth,” he mutters.

Iona, with shaking hands, pours four cups of coffee. “Wyatt,” she hisses. “Not now.”

“Jenny Greenteeth?” Scully repeats, writing it down. “Is that som-”

“It’s an old story,” Mulder says, surprised. “A nursery bogey.”

He is met by three blank stares.

“A nursery bogey is a story created by adults with the specific goal of making children avoid certain behaviors, or to encourage generally good behavior,” Mulder says. He is intrigued by Wyatt invoking the name. “The Namahage of Japan, the Scottish bodach, Russia’s Baba Yaga - all of these legends are about mythical beings who will in some way harm misbehaving children. Sometimes they get specific. Jenny Greenteeth, like the kappa and bunyip, is said to snatch children who venture to close to dangerous water.”

Wyatt is staring at him. “How’d you know all that?”

Mulder spreads his hands in a vague gesture. “These kinds of stories have always interested me.” He feels it best not to elaborate.

“He’s an internationally recognized expert,” Scully chimes in, rather generously. “Can you tell us why you mentioned this particular legend?”

“Don’t mind him,” Iona says, passing around the coffee. “We’re just both about to fall to pieces.”

Wyatt scowls. “I’m telling you,” he says stubbornly. “It’s her.”

Mulder adds cream to his coffee and takes a sip. It’s worlds better than the gas station dregs he just finished. “I know the story of Jenny Greenteeth comes from the north of England and from Scotland. This area has a big Scots-Irish influence, doesn’t it?”

“Yessir. There’s a big Scottish festival hereabouts, and both our families are Scottish from way back. Ree’s named after my Granny Rhiannon. You think that means something?” Iona’s voice is strained, hungry for any morsel.

Mulder shakes his head. “No, not necessarily. Probably not, and I apologize for getting off topic. Wyatt, tell me more about this, uh, theory you’ve got.” He finishes the coffee in a long gulp.

Wyatt rubs his face. “Well, listen. I know how it sounds to me, and I reckon it sounds even crazier to y’all. But growing up around here, every kid knows about the little pools in these hollers. Real deep ponds will spring up practically overnight, I guess ‘cause the ground is weak from all the mining. In the spring you get these real fast streams from the snow runoff. So kids run wild through the woods but they know to be careful. All the meemaws tell ‘em if they aren’t careful, Jenny Greenteeth’ll grab ‘em at the water. She’s got, you know, long black hair and real long arms and green teeth.” He shrugs, a bit sheepish.

“And you think this, uh, this creature took Rhiannon?” Scully asks, managing to sound both compassionate and deadpan at the same time.

Iona and Wyatt exchange a glance.

“Well, there’s a bit more than that,” Iona says, turning her mug in her hands. “Over the summer a woman moved in out in the woods. She, uh, took over some old hunter’s shack not real far from where Ree went missing. Her name’s Tallulah Church. She’s real tall and skinny, probably at least six feet, and I’ll be damned but she’s got green teeth.”

“Green teeth,” Mulder repeats, intrigued. He glances at Scully, who’s scribbling.

“Pale green like jade,” Wyatt says, warming up to his subject. “The kids are all scared of her, call her Jenny Greenteeth ‘cause they know the story. They say the dogs won’t go around there even.”

“A few hunting dogs have gone missing up that way,” Iona adds, her reluctance clearly fading. “Tallulah comes into town every month or so in her station wagon, gets some supplies, then rattles back up into the mountains. She seems okay I guess, just never really talks to nobody.”

“She gives every kid around here the evil eye,” Wyatt asserts, returning to his recliner. “She’s bad news. There’s things going on with her.”

Iona shoots him a hard look. “I’m sure the FBI isn’t interested in a bunch of mountain superstition.”

Scully pipes up. “When you say there are things going on with her, is there anything specific you can point to? Anything stand out in your memory?” 

A glance between Wyatt and Iona. “Just gives me a bad feeling,” Wyatt says. “You ever meet people like that?”

Mulder is curious as to what they won’t tell him, but decides not to create conflict just yet. These things always out themselves, but for now it’s clear he’s learned all he can. 

He exchanges a quick nod with Scully, who has already closed her notebook. “Wyatt, Iona, we’re going to do our best to find out what happened to Ree. It sounds like talking to Tallulah Church may be a good start. If she lives nearby she may have seen something or someone involved in the disappearance.” 

Wyatt snorts. “The police already talked to her. Doesn’t know a thing, they say. Search parties are still out though, and we’re heading out again when we’re done here.”

Scully gets to her feet, and Mulder follows. “Thank you for talking to us,” Scully says. “We’ll review all of this information and be in touch as we can. We’ll let you get back to the search.”

The Rosses rise, hands are shaken. Iona runs her fingers through her hair before crossing her arms tightly back across her chest. “Please bring her home,” she says. “Even - even if…” She trails off, weeping.

Wyatt draws her close, and Mulder and Scully slip past them, barely noticed.

***

It’s just past six by the time they get to their motel, but the sky is black. The parking lot gravel smatters against the fenders as Mulder parks in front of the little office. He gets out to contemplate a luggage cart when Scully emerges. She promptly turns her ankle on the uneven ground, but Mulder manages to grab her by the upper arm before she falls.

“You okay?”

She stares up at him, her breath quick. 

Scully glances at his hand and he remembers to let go. She looks away, tests her footing on the gravel. “I’m good,” she says. “I’m fine.”

“Scully fine, or regular fine?”

She smooths her jacket. “How’s your cranium?”

Mulder goes to the office at that, and retrieves their room keys from the drowsy clerk. A part of him hopes the reservation got messed up, that there’s only one room. But both are available, a queen en suite for each. They’re on the first floor around back, next door neighbors, the clerk says. Mulder swipes the bureau plastic and heads back out to Scully, who has found safer footing on the sidewalk.

He passes her the key. “You want to get some dinner? I saw a Cracker Barrel back yonder.” He drawls for her amusement.

“Sure. I want to take a shower first though. Give you a call when I’m done?”

“Okay.” 

“Okay.”

He wants to kiss her but won’t. He wants to suggest a joint shower to conserve water, but won’t. Her eyes do a quick scan of his face, perhaps reading these thoughts. It would only be fair if she could, really.

Scully grabs her bag and heads to her room. He waits until her door clicks shut before heading to his own.

***

Mulder thought of Jenny Greenteeth in the shower, of skeletal arms grasping at him through the drain. It made the tops of his feet tingle, and he hurried out to towel off. 

From what he’s read, Rhiannon Ross seems like a steady, responsible child, unlikely to go haring off through dangerous parts of the woods, or testing the limits of a slippery embankment. And the algae troubles him, the presence of it on her belongings. 

Mulder dresses in jeans and a t-shirt, pulling a parka on for warmth. He forgot his hair gel, and his head looks a bit like a startled sea creature. Scully doubtless has something in her portable salon.

She meets him in front of the car, Scully-casual in grey slacks and a black sweater. Her hiking boots put her shoulders about level with his ribs, and he is reminded that the love of his life is built on a songbird’s frame. Mulder recalls the fine velveteen skin at her inner thigh, like the breast of a chickadee.

“Nice hair,” she says. 

“Thanks, I’m trying to channel Lyle Lovett.” He strums an invisible guitar.

She slouches against the rough brick of the building, backlit by neon. At her feet are bunches of plastic flowers jammed into the white quartz around the ragged boxwood hedge. “So. Cracker Barrel, huh?” 

“Sure, I figured we could sit in the rockers and talk about the old days. Those kids with their jazz and soda pop, am I right? Spit some chaw, vote Republican. Besides, it seems to be either that or a dubious establishment called A-1 Panda Kitchen. The diner closes at 7.”

Scully wrinkles her nose. “Cracker Barrel it is.”

***

There’s a MISSING! flier of Ree on the table, dog-eared and slipped into a plastic page protector. It’s sporting the same school photo from their dossiers. Mulder pushes it gently aside, feeling like he should apologize.

Scully frowns at the menu, taps at it with an immaculate fingernail. “I don’t see how anyone eats here regularly and lives long enough to reminisce about the old days in a rocker. Even the salad has fried chicken in it.”

He remembers when she would cheerfully put away a plate of ribs, but now she cares about fiber and antioxidants along with her tailoring. And her stupid bee pollen crap. “Aw, Scully, you’re citified. Surely you’ve got some kin in these parts. Hardy mountain folk descended from fleeing Irish potato farmers. You can hand le these vittles, little lady. It ain’t possum.” He considers the chicken-fried steak with interest. It comes with gravy.

“Stop talking like you’re on Hee-Haw.” She looks thoughtful. “I suppose there probably are distant cousins out this way, but none that I know of.”

He blows a straw wrapper past her shapely nose, which she ignores with practiced dignity.

“Pork tenderloin, that seems all right.” Scully closes her menu with an air of resignation. She does not like being fussy with her ordering.

The waitress comes by and he commits to the fried steak over Scully’s clear distaste. 

“Re-myelinating,” he assures her, handing over the menu.

“That’s not-”

“Shhh.”

They amuse themselves with several rounds of a little peg game, and Mulder decides to purchase one before they leave. 

“Mom was pretty calm there, don’t you think?” Mulder drums his fingers on the table. He doesn’t really suspect the parents, but the sad fact is that they’re most often the perpetrators. It at least bears discussing.

Scully shrugs. “Police don’t seem too concerned. Growing up in a house with four kids, I remember my mom keeping her cool in completely insane situations. Charlie had a compound fracture once, when my dad was away. His femur was poking out the front of his thigh, he was in shock, and mom just handled it like a skinned knee until the ambulance came.” She shakes her head, remembering.

“Must be a dominant trait.”

She squeezes lemon into her water, then picks out an errant seed. “Hardy mountain folk. So there’s no body in the pond, she probably wouldn’t have wandered off without her food and doll, and there’s no ransom demand or strange footprints at the site. So where the hell did she go, Mulder? Where’s Ree?”

“I think she was in the water at some point.”

Scully narrows her eyes, suspicious. She twirls a peg between her fingers. “At some point? Not terminally?”

“You know I hate to speculate, Scully,” he says, in tones of wounded innocence.

She snorts. “At last we come to Jenny Greenteeth.”

“It was Wyatt’s idea,” he reminds her, chewing his straw. He is excited by a new monster to mash with Scully.

“Sure, blame the other kid,” she says, with a kind of weary amusement.

“I’m withholding judgement until we talk to this Tallulah Church tomorrow. I’m interested in those teeth.” 

“It’s always teeth with you,” she says. She captures two pegs, then looks up at him. She is well pleased with herself, smirky and bright-eyed.

He doesn’t want to say anything. He wants to find Ree, dead or alive, and go home. But he feels pretty sure he can’t do that until unburdened. Holman Hart’s repressed emotions may have controlled the weather, but Mulder knows his own can control the fate of this case. He brushes his fingers against her palm. “Scully.”

Her expression tightens, but she doesn’t respond.

“We have to talk this out.” He is concerned with where it may lead, but this particular truth is in her. He no longer doubts her feelings at this juncture, only her willingness to do anything more with them.

Scully sighs. She toys with a sugar packet. It amuses and aggravates him that she can pore over dead infants and handcuff mutants to her bathtub with little discomfiture, but talk about emotions and she squirms like a kid in church. 

“I don’t think there’s much to talk out, really,” she says, terse.

She wouldn’t, of course she wouldn’t, and there are times he could wring her swan-like throat. 

“Well, humor me then,” he says, with exaggerated patience. “Because you woke up in my bed two weeks ago wearing nothing but smudged makeup, and we’ve been avoiding any real mention of that. And now that I’m properly back to work, I’d kind of like to know what the hell we’re doing.”

She looks around, like anyone’s listening to two weary Feds on a Wednesday night. “I really don’t see any reason to have this conversation right now, Mulder.” 

The waitress delivers their food and, sensing tension, scurries away.

In the past few weeks he’s thought back to that hellish summer when a bee had saved Scully from addressing the fact that she’d clearly been willing to jump his bones before skipping town. Well, anaphylaxis wasn’t going to rescue her this time. “Why are you being like this?” he asks, as though she’s ever different.

She leans forward, piqued. “Like what? Not wanting to talk about my… my… personal life in the middle of an Alabama Cracker Barrel while looking for a missing child?” 

Her personal life, Jesus fucking Christ. “You’ve been avoiding me other than some medical check-ins since you left that morning, so I’m trying to figure out what happens now. Come on, Scully. It’s not like I left those underwear on the desk for you before we headed out here.”

She blushes, bless her, and talks to make him shut up. “I can tell you that I don’t regret what happened.” Scully applies herself to the tenderloin with an intensity usually reserved for the mysteriously deceased. 

Mulder knows it’s the best he’s likely to get from her at the moment, that he’s pushing her to give him something he can’t even define. But he remembers with longing the intricate ocean of her thoughts, the fractal beauty of them as they wove into his own. He was still bathing in the quantum entanglement of her when she’d checked his pupils that evening, when he’d kissed her in the certainty that she’d drop both her little flashlight and her guard.

Scully had kissed him back like a mermaid with a half-drowned sailor.

He looks at her again, knows that he sees only the surface of her now. “Scully, I’m not asking you to go steady.”

She laughs a little at that, looks up at him with wary interest. “So what do you want, then?”

It’s a damned good question. He has general ideas of lying in bed with her while she declaims on the marvels of the quadrupole ion trap. He would like to map her freckles, like a star chart.

“For now I’m just glad to know you don’t regret it,” he hedges.

She searches the ceiling for inspiration before returning her cool gaze to him. “It was absurd of me to act like nothing happened, to treat you like any other patient since you weren’t back at work. It was easy to ignore what we… what happened. I’m sorry, Mulder.” 

She still can’t say it, he notices. But it’s something. “Your other patients are dead, Scully. So I’m a special case no matter how you look at it.”

There is warmth in her eyes. “You really are,” she says.

***

Scully’s got their peg game in a Cracker Barrel bag on her lap. Mulder had wanted to stockpile cheese blocks and sausages against future car trips, but she had put her foot firmly down. “Do you think we’ll find her, Mulder? Her remains, probably, but still. It would be something for the family.”

He shrugs. It’s hard to separate hopes from expectations sometimes, especially in their line. “I really don’t know. We need to get a better look at the area she went missing, and I’m pretty curious about this Tallulah woman.”

“Children can have green teeth if their mothers took tetracycline during late pregnancy,” she tells him. “It crosses the placenta and binds to the calcium in the fetus’s developing teeth.”

He grins at her. “Only one alternate explanation? You’re slowing down in your old age, Scully.”

Scully bares her little fangs. “Neonatal hyperbilirubinemia.”

“Attagirl.”

***

He parks around back this time, right in front of their dreary rooms. “I figure we’ll head out around 9 or so tomorrow,” he says. “Let the air warm up a bit before we hit the woods.”

Scully nods, yawning. “Pond first, or Tallulah?”

He considers this. “I think it’s best if we have the lay of the land when we talk to her.”

“Okay.”

Mulder turns the car off, but they stay in their seats with the inertia of food and time difference and mental exhaustion. Even the lost children they manage to bring home are haunted afterwards. It’s hard to imagine a good outcome here. 

Scully unbuckles her seatbelt, turns to him with sleepy eyes. She yawns again, then reaches out to muss his hair. “Come by in the morning,” she says. “I’ll help you out.”

She goes to her room then, the bag dangling from her fingertips. She doesn’t look back at him before she shuts the door.

***

He stretches out on the bedspread, mulling over her words at dinner, and annoyed at himself for the distraction from Ree Ross. What could he have expected from this, though? Scully’s not Diana. Scully wouldn’t flaunt their shared bed to other agents, wouldn’t drape herself over his desk while reading grimoires and classified documents. Christ, he could marry her and she’d probably think a wedding band was unprofessional at work, his uptight darling.

It’s strange for Diana to be dead. He’d stopped trusting her in the final hours of her life, but he didn’t want her dead. She was a rare and capable creature, however dangerous. She was solitary and sleek and fast.

He recalls the choices he’d made what she glided back into his life, her ruthless intellect and legs as long as a midwinter night. He recalls Scully’s face when he swore Diana was playing a long game, all for a nobler cause.

He recalls the dusky labyrinth of her mind and what he saw at the center of it; a beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

***

Diana slips through his dreams again, but not in bridal white, not with the round belly of Taweret. She is dead, but not the dead of his other visions. She is weeks dead, greying and skeletal. He can see patches of bone through her ragged dress but her eyes, her eyes are vivid and whole and the color of cabochon emeralds. They are luminescent in the nightmare forest of his dream, beckoning him. It is a leafless forest, bleak, with bony-armed trees looming over him. 

He finds her in a blackwater creek, standing in the middle of it as the water surges past her calves. She smiles at him with too many teeth. “Hello, Fox,” she says. She bats her lashes. “I apologize for my appearance, but they didn’t embalm.”

“Do you need help?” he asks her, casting about for a long branch.

She shakes her head, hair still lush and glossy. The water rises up her legs.

“Is this real? I mean, are you a ghost or is this all in my head?”

The water whips around her thighs. “What’s real?” she asks. “Perception is reality. If you believe it to be true, it’s true enough for government work.” Diana laughs at her own joke.

A white deer walks up to him, with softly furred antlers like fresh snow. It looks at him with black-irised eyes, wet and bottomless voids. There may be constellations in them. Mulder reaches out to stroke its muzzle as Diana looks on. The deer opens its mouth and dried corn comes pouring out.

The water swallows Diana then, before receding fully. She lies on the bank as he remembers her, whole and striking. Her dead eyes are their usual smoky blue, her dress no longer decomposed. 

He wakes up when the ground swallows her.

***

Morning, bright and chilly in the mountains with light of a purity that never touches DC. He remembers a dream with Diana, with water and deer and a general sense of Jungian dystopia. It’s nice to see his subconscious branching out from its usual reruns of family fare.

Wary of fungal spores embedded in the matted carpet, he steps into his untied dress shoes and clomps to the bathroom wearing nothing else but his boxers. He brushes his teeth in the tiny sink, then wets his unruly hair. 

There’s a knock at the door and he groans. “Just a minute!” he yells around the toothbrush. He hopes it’s someone with the extra towels he asked for.

Mulder clomps back towards the door and, lacking a peephole, he pops it open a fraction to accept his linens. Instead of the housekeeper he’d been expecting, he finds Scully kitted out for a hike, brandishing a canister of mousse.

Cold air sweeps in with her laugh.

“Good morning to you too,” he grouses, ushering her in. He secures the chain when he closes the door.

“Nice outfit,” she says brightly. “What’s with the shoes? Is this a formal hike? I wasn’t sure because you’re not wearing pants, but…”

He scowls, sitting on the bed. “You’re mighty chipper. I’m trying to avoid athlete’s foot, if you must know, and I couldn’t find my socks.”

Scully rummages through his bag for a pair of thick socks, which she tosses to him. She gestures at the bed. “May I?”

“Not if you’re going to be mean.” He kicks the shoes off and tugs the socks on.

Scully sits beside him, shaking the can of mousse. “Thought I could do your hair before we prank call some boys. French braid?”

Mulder stands to pull his jeans up, and the weight shift makes her bounce a little on the mattress. “Let me have that mousse.”

She gestures for his hand, then sprays a lilac-scented pouf into his cupped palm. 

“Thanks,” he says, and scrunches it into his hair. He styles himself before the dresser mirror while she watches, amused.

“You left before my beauty regimen last time,” he remarks.

In the mirror, Scully shakes her head but doesn’t seem bothered. “I made some calls this morning about Tallulah Church. There’s no phone or plumbing up there, but the sheriff’s office said she’s usually right around her home. And the motel clerk drew me a map of how to get to the pond from the access road, then how to get to Tallulah’s.” She waves several crumpled papers.

He pulls a t-shirt over his head, then a fleece. “Aren’t you a busy little bee? Looks like someone’s getting her cartography badge this week.” Mulder returns to the bed to put his boots on.

“I’ve got evidence vials too,” she says, producing them from her pockets. “We’re going to find out what happened to Ree.” Her eyes are big and solemn.

Scully masquerades her tenderheartedness as honor, but Mulder didn’t need a God Module to know why she took that terrible dog in years ago. The depth of cold Dr. Scully’s compassion would shock their colleagues, and he likes this secret knowledge about her. Even Skinner, who reveres her only just below the Constitution, underestimates the fierceness of her empathy. 

“What?” Scully asks.

Mulder cups her splendid jaw, thumb at her sphenoid bone. He kisses the space between her eyebrows, and she makes a small noise.

“We have to go,” she breathes, and is outside before he can stand.

***

Not a word about it in the car, just miles of silence broken only by Scully giving directions. The drive ends in a flat patch of dirt by the forest’s edge, a scrubby path poking out from the ferns and overhang.

“Our little forays into the forest never end well,” she observes. “But at least tick season is winding down. After you, Mulder.”

He pushes into the woods, holding branches back so Scully doesn’t get smacked in the head. “Been a while, though. We’re tougher now. We’re hardened woodspersons.”

“And I have a lighter,” she adds.

He grins. “Show off. Hey, how far is it?”

Scully consults her map. “Well, we’re coming at it from a different angle than Ree would have probably taken, but this is the most direct. Looks like maybe a hundred yards up ahead before it opens into a clearing.”

The path unfolds as she said, and suddenly a storybook pond is before him. Squirrels frisk in the branches and birds call to each other across the glen. The surface of the water is velvety with duckweed, like a perfectly clipped baseball field. Shafts of sunlight illuminate red and white mushrooms at the bases of oaks, the feathers of golden-green ferns. He sniffs the air, lush and tannic.

“Oh, wow,” Scully says, coming up behind him. “Mulder, this is unreal. It’s like a Waterhouse painting.”

They pick their way down to the edge of the pond, startling several fat bullfrogs and a garter snake. “Imagine being a kid here, Scully.”

She shakes her head, admiring. “It’s a Wonderland. I’d be out here all the time too.” Scully crosses her arms, staring upwards with a rapturous expression. “From what her dad said, Ree’s a lot like I was as a kid. I didn’t have my own binoculars though. Had to steal Bill’s.”

“Fuck Bill,” he says cheerfully. “You deserved them.”

They circle the perimeter, looking for...what? He never quite knows. The pond makes gentle rippling sounds as the local fauna heads for deeper water under his scrutiny.

Scully pauses at a section of churned-up dirt. She squats for a better view, pokes delicately at the earth. “They made a mess of this, Jesus. At least they had enough sense to band their shoes.” In the dirt, distinct tracks marked with horizontal rubber band lines around the soles distinguish the CSI team’s prints.

Mulder crouches bedside her, spots something golden half-buried in the soft ground. “Tweezers, Scully?”

She passes them over and from the ground he plucks a kernel of deer corn, half coated in dried algae. “Mulder, look. There are more of them, maybe twenty, all pushed in or smashed on this rock. And most of them have algae on them.” She frowns. “The footprints on the ground over it, they’re not marked and they’re too small for an adult.”

Sure enough, there’s a mess of kid-sized sneaker tracks all over where the greenish corn is, muddy smears on the rocks adjacent. They’re algae-covered as well, and too far from the water for such a coating. He stares, thinking.

Scully, meanwhile, is labeling tiny evidence jars in pencil, filling them with samples of algae and earth and corn. She finds the cap of a glittery marker. “Who processed this crime scene? Ray Charles?” She seals it up, tags it. 

“No kidding. Hey, look. There’s a gap between those two big boulders over there. If you wanted to watch someone and hide, it would be a good spot. You think they searched it?”

She snorts with derision. 

“Me too. I’m gonna go take a look. You stay here. Sit on that rock there, it’ll put you at about Ree’s height.”

Scully passes him a few vials and a pencil, settles on the rock. “I think this is where she left Cordelia, based on the photos, though they were mostly closeup. I don’t remember any good overviews.” Some algae remains on the rock, and Scully looks sad.

Mulder jogs around the pond as best he can, but the bracken is heavy and he has to climb over a few logs. Is it really so crazy to think Ree tripped and fell out here, slipped quietly into the pond and snagged on a submerged rock or branch? Lots of little nibbling things in the water; it happens.

His mind returns to the algae. But if Ree went in, how did it come out? Who stepped all over that deer corn?

He’s between the boulders now, with a clear view of Scully across the way. He walks a little grid by the boulder, looking for bits of trace evidence. Snagged hair, footprints, forgotten belongings, anxiously chewed nails. But there is nothing. Either he misjudged the hiding spot, or the perpetrator has been very mindful of Locard’s Exchange Principle

.

“SCULLY!” he calls, setting off flurries of birds.

“MULDER?” She scans the area where he’s hidden.

“CAN YOU SEE ME?”

“NO!”

He climbs up one of the rocks, waves to her. She waves back from her perch. From atop the boulder, he scans the ground below. There aren’t any footprints but, squinting, he can see trails of dried algae along the edge of the ferns, where the rocky area begins.

He calls Scully over, and she moves through the forest as lightly as the squirrels. He points at his finding when she arrives. “That’s weird, right?”

She scoops some up in a vial, the holds it to the light. “Maybe she was playing at the edge, got her hands dirty, went to wipe them, and slipped.”

Mulder shakes his head. “That doesn’t explain the algae on the unopened food, Scully.”

“It could have been simple contamination. Her parents say she’s out here all the time. If she uses the same thermos and bag, brings the same books and toys, it’s not exactly far fetched to think some of it remained from last time and grew in the sun. Busy mom with four kids, how thoroughly is she going to scrub everything down for a kid who’s always outside? Algae are extremely tenacious, and it was out here in the sun for about 26 hours.”

He gazes at the duckweed, lets his vision swim until everything is a green blur. “Maybe,” he says. “But I want to talk to Tallulah.”

“Greenteeth was my delight,” Scully sings, appallingly off-key. “Greenteeth was my heart of gold.”

“You’re a riot,” he says dryly. Delightedly.

“Exposure to copper or nickel,” Scully says, clambering over a log. “Septic cholestasis.”

He might marry her after all.

***

Tallulah’s little shack looks old as the mountains, with log walls and a shake roof. There’s a tiny porch tacked on the front, and a wall of firewood being gnawed by two spotted goats. They stare at Mulder with their rectangular-pupiled eyes.

He reaches out to pet them and startles when they bleat loudly at his overture. They scamper off behind the house.

Scully pokes the toe of her boot into a plastic bucket, rights it. “Her car seems to be here,” she observes, indicating a battered old Volvo wagon. 

“A European car, no wonder everyone here hates her.”

Scully smirks.

They walk up to the house, Mulder withdrawing his identification. It generally gets a snappier reaction the further West and South it travels, but Mulder is also wary of a demented libertarian streak that runs through the country at odd intervals. Seams of it appear throughout Appalachia, and federal agents of various stripes have been fired on by feistier residents.

Scully, thankfully, is a quick draw and a dead shot.

They don’t get the chance to knock before a woman who must be Tallulah Church stands before them on the other side of the screen door. She’s close to Mulder’s height, thin to the point of emaciation, and pale enough to make Scully look freshly tanned. She has beautiful black hair to her waist, and eyes the color of ferns. They seem too bright in her gaunt, colorless face. She’s dressed in a Huck Finn ensemble of castoff men’s work clothing. On her hands are faded canvas gardening gloves.

Mulder shows her his badge and introduces them. Scully wordlessly displays her own identification.

Tallulah grins widely, her teeth perfect and straight and pearly green. “Well come on in,” she says, turning back into the house. Her feet clomp loudly in their heavy boots.

Mulder glances at Scully, who still seems taken aback by this gawky apparition. He holds the door open and they follow Tallulah into the house. 

The little shack creaks with every step, and smells of woodsmoke and earth and herbs. The interior walls are the same weathered gray as the outside. The whole thing is just one room, with a bed in one corner and a kitchen consisting of a fireplace, a dry sink, and a table with several mismatched chairs. Tallulah is occupying a black metal one, and her impossibly long, thin limbs make Mulder think of Jack Skellington. He can’t tell if she’s twenty or fifty.

“Sit down, please,” she says. “The table’s not much but I reckon it would be weird to offer you the bed.” She smiles again. Her voice is as drawling as everyone else in town, but there’s something different about it, something strangely polished and almost British. 

They take their seats. “Miss Church,” Scully begins.

“Tallulah, please.”

“Tallulah. Agent Mulder and I are investigating the disappearance of Rhiannon Ross. She went missing on Sunday morning. Given that you live not far from the area where her belongings were found, we wanted to ask you some questions.” Scully opens her file folder, pen poised like a hovering dragonfly.

Tallulah levels her remarkable eyes with Scully’s. “No ma’am. I know who Ree is, it’s a small town and she’s out here a lot, but I didn’t see her that day. Real nice little girl though. She feeds the deer sometimes.”

Mulder perks up. “Yeah? We saw some deer corn out where she went missing. Did you see her feeding them that morning?”

Tallulah sighs. “No, I’m sorry. As I’ve told the police, I didn’t see a bit of her on Sunday. Which is sort of odd itself, because she’d always be out on a day like that. Too shy to come up to the house, but she liked to watch the goats. They’re not even mine, but I leave them food and water, so we’re friends now.”

Behind her, on the dry sink, Mulder notices green smears of moss or mildew. Or algae. 

“I know you’ve spoken to Sherriff McLeod already,” Scully continues. “So we appreciate your patience.”

“It’s a terrible thing for a child to go missing,” Tallulah says, shaking her head. “I wish I did have something to tell, but I just don’t. I’ve seen the search parties around - I guess they searched the pond.”

“You say you knew who Ree was because it’s a small town, but I got the sense you didn’t mingle much with the good townsfolk,” Mulder observes.

Tallulah chuckles at this. “No sir, not much, which suits them and me just fine.” She lifts her hands to eye level and wiggles her bony gloved fingers. “They think I’m spooky.”

Mulder smiles in spite of himself. “I know a little bit about that. So tell me, Tallulah, you from around here?”

She shakes her head. “Not from anywhere, really, but I was raised outside Savannah in a rich ladies’ orphanage. That’s why I sound like Dixie Carter.”

“An orphanage?” Scully repeats.

“Yes ma’am. I was left at the Baptist Ladies’ Home when I was a day or so old. Nothing with me but a plastic laundry basket and a gingham tablecloth. They said I was a frightful looking little thing.” She smiles ruefully, showing them her green teeth again.

Scully, true to form, tackles that bull head on. “Tallulah, I’m also a doctor, and I’m compelled to ask about your teeth. Do you know why they’re green?”

An expansive shrug. “Oh, the doctors that saw us there had all kinds of ideas of what was wrong with me, but I never got anything official. Marfan Syndrome, that was one.” She snorts. “‘Course, the other kids heard Martian and with the green teeth they decided I was an alien.”

“There’s a genetic test for it now,” Scully says. “You could find out for sure.”

Tallulah chuckles again. “Thanks, Doc, but it doesn’t matter much. I feel just fine. Always have, and I don’t plan to have any kids. I’m twenty-six and haven’t had anything worse than a cold.”

Mulder watches the Doc jot this down and he returns to the subject at hand. “So you moved here over the summer. Where’d you live before this?”

“Oh, gosh, just lots of tiny towns like this one. I find these empty little cabins, you know, and stay for a while. Then I move on when I get restless.”

“The Rosses said you come into town every so often to get supplies and gas. May I ask where you get the money for that?” Scully looks up to ask this.

Tallulah looks sly. “I don’t know that I want to discuss that with the FBI,” she says.

Mulder exchanges a glance with his fellow narc, who nods imperceptibly to any eye but his own. “We’re just here to find Rhiannon,” he reassures Tallulah. “Not do the DEA’s job for them. Neither Agent Scully nor I wish to fill out extra paperwork.”

Tallulah considers this, glancing between them. “Well,” she says at last. “I reckon you could say I’m real good with plants; I can coax anything to grow. And in boring little towns there’s, uh, a lot of people who like plants.”

Scully looks unimpressed by this attempt at euphemism. “Plants,” she repeats.

Tallulah shrugs. “I’ve said as much as I’m going to on that subject without a lawyer. But anyhow, what’s that got to do with Ree?”

“Just trying to get to know a bit about you,” Mulder says. “Sometimes we find witnesses have seen things they don’t even realize they’ve seen, and talking generally can help.”

“I know everything I’ve seen,” Tallulah asserts. “You live out here like this, you don’t miss much. It’s not like I have a lot to distract me.”

“What were you doing last Sunday morning, then?” Mulder asks.

She shrugs. “Woke up, ate, got dressed. Went over to the pump for some water.” She gestures at some distant point through the back wall. “Then I went looking for some mushrooms and things to eat. Eggs. Lots of greens out there.”

Scully narrows her eyes. “Ree was in the woods that morning too. You’re certain you didn’t see or hear anything?”

Tallulah scoffs. “The woods are pretty big. Might as well say we were both in Alabama.”

“Wyatt and Iona are under the impression that you don’t like children,” Scully says. “Have there been any particular incidents that would make them feel that way? Any encounters with Ree? It must have been irritating to have her running all over the edge of your property.”

“No, she’s all right and besides, it’s hardly my property. Scared of me like the rest of them, but all right. I like the way she is with animals, real gentle and all. Got a kind heart, that girl, and I wish more were like her. But here’s the plain facts. My mama didn’t want me, none of the parents who came to the Home wanted me, the other kids thought I was an alien, and I learned to just keep mostly to myself because I can take a hint. I go walking outside a lot, do some fishing in the little ponds and all, and that’s how I know who Ree is. You know the kids call me Jenny Greenteeth.”

“We’d heard that, yes,” Mulder says, feeling uncomfortably sorry for Tallulah. He knows empathizing with suspects is his weakness, and that it drives Scully up the wall.

“It’s not the first time, won't be the last. But I know Ree’s daddy thinks I hurt Ree. He’s pretty disapproving of my...plant business and I think he half believes that stupid old fairy tale.” She rolls her eyes.

“I saw you had a whole lot of firewood,” Mulder says, shifting gears. “You staying here all winter?” 

“I never know, but I’d like to. Doubt I will though, with this, uh, situation.” She picks at her gloves. “People can start to get unkind.”

Mulder gestures to the dry sink. “Seems kind of damp. Looks like you have some mold or something growing over there.”

The three of them follow his finger with their eyes, where bright green streaks the wall and sink. Mulder sees that there is far more than he originally noticed, spread over much of the wall all the way to the bed.

“Oh, yeah, these places always are,” Tallulah says. “You can always find these old cabins if you look a little, but it’s hard to keep them snug. Part of why I move so much. They just sort of collapse around you.”

Mulder glances at Scully, and they agree in a blink. 

“Well, I wouldn’t move any time soon, Tallulah,” Scully says in her Bad Cop way. “And I’d take a break from business until the situation - as you called it - is sorted out.”

Tallulah looks uncomfortable, but nods. “Yes ma’am.”

“Thanks for your time,” Mulder says. “We’ll see ourselves out.”

They rise from their rickety chairs and head out the front door. On his way past the bed, Mulder opens an evidence vial and scrapes it along the wall to gather a film of algae. If Tallulah notices, she doesn’t remark.

The sun feels over-bright after the dim cabin and, squinting, they pick their way carefully back to where they parked. One of the goats is on the hood of their rental.

Mulder is delighted by this, if only because he can write “GOAT ATTACK” on the return form. He hopes it will find its way across Kersh’s desk and make him chug Mylanta straight from the bottle.

Scully, far more vexed, begins throwing fallen pine cones at it. 

“Nice arm,” Mulder says. “Try bringing your knee up next time.”

She glares at him, exasperated. “Where’s a chupacabra when you need one?”

***

They’re back at the Cracker Barrel, playing Pegs, with Ree’s flier propped up against the napkin dispenser. Scully is picking at an anemic salmon fillet, and eyeing Mulder’s chicken fried steak with disdain.

“You know you want a bite,” he says around a mouthful of mashed potatoes and gravy. 

She looks irked. “I didn’t have time for a run this afternoon because I was on the phone with the eponymous Baptist Ladies.”

“I wasn’t going for leisure,” he says with an air of wounded dignity. “Talked to a lot of people while I was out and about. The crotchety old ladies on their porches love me, I’ll have you know. I’m charming, for a Yankee.”

Scully rolls her eyes. “They just thought you looked good in your running shorts.” She pauses, then looks mortified.

“Oh yeah? How about you; you think I look good in them?” She’s so easy to torment sometimes and besides, he’d kind of like to know.

“Your vanity needs no help from me,” she says primly. “So what did you hear?”

“Nothing official, of course, but there are rumors that the oldest Ross siblings, the twin boys, were getting weed from Tallulah, so Wyatt has it in for her.”

“Plants,” Scully corrects. “Geraniums, probably.”

“Doubtless. Some people think Ree stumbled onto Tallulah’s crop and Tallulah killed her, but given the fact that the geranium sales are an open secret, it’s pretty unlikely.”

“Plus I doubt Ree would know it if she saw it,” Scully adds. 

“She might if her brothers are dope hounds with the reefer madness, Scully. Mary Jane. Grass. Wacky tobaccy. It’s ruining good Christian families.” He shakes his head somberly. “Ganja.”

“Devil’s lettuce,” Scully adds and, for whatever reason, this undoes them both and they dissolve into laughter.

This earns them startled glances from nearby patrons who seem to generally disapprove of their dark clothing and clandestine ways.

It feels incredible to laugh. Less than a month ago his head had been cracked open like an oyster while Scully and Diana played Spy vs. Spy. And here he was now in this awful little town, safely away from all major conspiracies, having had carnal knowledge of the enigmatic Dr. Scully, and he had just won at Pegs.

And Scully thinks he looked sexy in his shorts.

She is glaring at the peg board when he asks about her phone calls. “So what’d you learn, other than a tuna casserole recipe and how to tease your hair?”

“Weird stuff, your favorite.”

“Lay it on me, mama.”

Scully settles back in the booth. Delivering information is her comfort zone. “Well, Tallulah’s basic facts were right enough. She was left on the front steps of the Home in a white laundry basket. By the look of the umbilical stump, she wasn’t a hospital delivery. No one was ever able to identify her parents. But about a week before she appeared, a baby girl went missing from the Home. There were no signs of a break-in, and the baby never turned up. Everyone just assumed her parents had taken her back and the whole thing was swept under the rug.”

Some quick math, and Mulder realizes this wasn’t long before Samantha went missing. He frowns, and Scully’s expression makes it clear that she’s done the same calculation.

“It was April,” she offers gently. “In the South.”

“Go on.” 

“The woman I spoke to said Tallulah did have lots of problems with other kids, but not just for her appearance. She did get teased for the teeth, but apparently she was an aggressive kid. Biting, pulling long hair. They went to the Y once a week for swimming lessons, and Tallulah would drag kids under the water under the guise of playing. She was banned from the pool eventually.”

“Jesus,” Mulder says. “Someone needed more time with Mr. Rogers.”

“Oh, is that how they addressed abandonment issues at Oxford, Dr. Mulder?” Scully asks, archly.

He grins. “Hey, the NHS budget isn’t unlimited. So how’d she end up here?”

“Well, apparently when a kid turns 18 they give them some money and set them up with a job in the community, which isn’t a bad situation. But Tallulah took off at 15, said she was sick of handouts. The Baptist Ladies put the word out, but Tallulah was good at hiding and was 19 before anyone found her. And only then by sheer accident - a former employee bumped into her in Macon, Georgia.”

“Were they able to tell you about her movements at all in the intervening decade? Places she’s lived?”

Scully shakes her head. “No, and there’s no records on her at all. No arrests for anything as minor as vagrancy or trespassing, much less dealing. Her fingerprints aren’t in the system. She’s like a ghost. I was going to call the sheriff’s office to ask about the weed, but I thought better of it. I don’t want to walk into anything unprepared.”

He sighs. “I’d like to look at missing child cases in the past ten years, ones where the kid went missing around freshwater. We’ll narrow it to prepubescent girls.”

She nods. “I’ll see what Danny can scrounge on ViCAP. The Baptist Home is supposed to be faxing Tallulah’s medical records, thin as they are, and I want to see what I can pull out. Oh, and here’s another thing. Marjorie - that’s the woman I spoke with - Marjorie said Tallulah was always going out at night to wander in the woods. Her bed and storage cabinet were always covered with green stains and - get this - what appeared to be gold dust. Her hair was wet and had algae in it, like she’d been swimming in a pond or lake. No matter what they did, she’d manage to get out. Eventually they gave up because she kept returning and it seemed to keep her violence down.” 

Mulder considers this. He’s had an idea since yesterday that he’s been hesitant to voice, but what the hell? “I was thinking about her gloves when we visited this morning.”

Scully raises a non-committal eyebrow.

“Hear me out. All of Ree’s stuff was covered with algae, right? And there was algae where it shouldn’t be at the crime scene and all over Tallulah’s wall. She said she’s good with plants too, right? What if algae grows when she touches things? What if that’s why she was wearing gloves when we came by?”

Scully puts her fork down. “She’s an algae witch?”

He sighs. “I’m saying it’s maybe a...like a manifestation of something else. It’s something she can’t control.”

“Let me guess. You think the missing baby was taken by Tallulah’s unearthly mother and that Tallulah is actually a changeling left in her place. She’s from a race of some kind of evil water fairies, and has stolen Rhiannon Ross as her mother stole the other child twenty-six years ago.”

A slow smile spreads across Mulder’s face. “Scully, are you trying to get me back in bed?”

She reddens, rolls her eyes. “Textbooks could be written about your deviance.”

“Oh, no doubt. But details aside, you have to admit there are some weird details there.”

“All our cases have weird details. But the algae is notable. I’d like to take some samples from Tallulah’s cabin and compare it to the algae on Ree’s belongings. I’ll have to see what equipment the sheriff's office has. We’ll need to send some out for DNA testing to be sure, but I could at least do some microscopic analysis. It could place her at the scene.”

Mulder passes her the little vial he’d collected that morning. It’s fuller than he remembered.

“Sneak,” Scully says, approvingly, sipping at her Diet Coke.

“I know you like bad boys. Apropos of which, why do you think the sheriff has left Tallulah alone about this weed thing? I mean, this doesn’t seem like a hip and swinging town, does it?”

“I was wondering that too. And Wyatt never mentioned it either. I’m also wondering why, if we go with your hypothesis, Tallulah would steal a grade schooler rather than a baby. And Mulder, that cabin was one room. There’s nowhere she could have stashed a child. What’s more, shouldn’t some changeling child should have shown up by now? I mean, by your logic.”

Mulder wipes his plate with a roll. “I admit there are complex facets involved here,” he allows. He has ideas percolating, but they need more time to steep. “But whatever the reasons she may have had, there’s no one else who even seems remotely likely. No dubious strangers in town, no evidence of any kind at the crime scene. No one I talked to today indicated there were any grudges with the Rosses.”

Scully curls back into the corner of their booth, looking modish with her dark clothes and sleek hair. “I hate this,” she says. “Autopsies are so clear. Manner and mechanism. You just read the body and it tells a story. Sometimes it’s a challenge, but it’s always there. Missing persons are nightmarish, especially children.”

Mulder, as he is prone to do, thinks of Addie Sparks. “Missing still has hope, I guess.”

She looks chagrined. “I didn’t think, Mulder. I’m sorry.”

He hates that his missing sister has consumed her life too. Hell, Melissa was murdered and Scully’s moved on in a relatively healthy fashion. “No, don’t be. I just mean that there’s cruelty there, in that hope. Schroedinger’s crime, you know. That last heart of Roche’s is the end of someone’s hope, only they’ll never know.”

She reaches across the table to take his hand in hers. “The sense that an answer exists but isn’t knowable is a miserable feeling,” she says. “Especially if it’s an answer that could redefine one’s status quo if only it were revealed.”

He’s pretty sure she’s not talking about the case now, and traces her fingers with his thumb. “So you wanna kill this thing, then? Perform a post-mortem, write it up, and move on?” He doesn’t want this, but at least he’d know.

Scully draws infinite circles on his wrist with her nail, and gooseflesh rises over his body. “Hope doesn’t have to be painful,” she murmurs to the table. She looks up at him with her summer sky eyes in the fading autumn light.

Mulder’s heart squeezes hard, then expands. “It’s kept me going for a long time, even when it is,” he tells her. 

She nods, lets go of him. “The motto of my first  profession is hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae. But I tend to forget the maxim that should drive the second one.”

He has a flashback to scanning the plasma-vivid mind behind that perfect face. “Yeah? What’s that?”

“Dum spiro spero,” she says.

“While I breathe, I hope.” He smiles.

They get the check and go to the car.

***

The drive holds the easy silence of a pizza hangover, the kind when they’re wiped out on Scully’s couch with half-eaten slices and paperwork on the coffee table and floor.

Scully has her feet propped up on the dash and her seat reclined. She has a manila folder on her face, her eyes closed.

He thinks, as he sometimes does of late, about what a shit he was to her after Philadelphia. He’s never asked if she knew then that she was dying, but he’s always suspected she must have. 

All he’d known at the time was that she’d blown him off for a good-looking psychopath, let the man brand her like cattle, then poured her herself into his bed. He’d hated Jerse for the bruises on her face and body and psyche, but the man was under guard and therefore beyond his rage. He siphoned some of it onto Scully instead, for daring to need more than him and for seeking it. He wanted it to be about the desk because he could have given her the fucking desk. He could have easily fixed that without having to fix anything else between them. He could have kept going in a straight line instead of trying to make a map.

He thought of her in Jerse’s arms, in Jerse’s bed. Beaten by Jerse’s fists. He imagined the needle biting into the flawless canvas of her back and leaving that turning serpent there. He noticed that it went in a circle and at the time, he’d let that be about him too.

Later, when he understood that she was even more ephemeral than he feared, fits of self-pity left him wondering why she went for Jerse instead of him. Surely she knew he was available for emotionally destructive sex if that’s what she craved before dying. 

But it turned out that sleeping with her had been like losing his virginity all over again. In twenty years or so, if they were still alive, he might find the balls to tell her that.

***

Scully yawns when he parks the car, batting the folder off her face. “I was awake,” she insists.

“Very convincing,” he assures her. 

She swats his arm, straightens her seat. “I’m wondering if she was dealing elsewhere, maybe giving a kickback to LLE. Someone gets wind, she gets kicked out of town and moves along to another friendly hamlet. You know how these networks run.”

“Local law enforcement,” Mulder sighs. “The eternal bane of my existence. It would certainly explain a few things.”

“And if the Ross twins really are buying, you can see why Wyatt wouldn’t mention it to us. He can throw her under the bus without dragging his kids in too.”

Mulder rubs his eyes. “But how does it all come together? I mean let’s say Tallulah slides into these little towns, she deals to make ends meet. Pays some kickbacks. But why risk it on a serious crime like kidnaping or murder? This is the South, Scully. They do not fuck around, and kidnaping’s federal.”

She shakes her head, still frustrated. “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait for Danny, I guess. I’ll leave him a message when I get back to my room. The internet connection out here is a nightmare, so maybe he can dig it up while I’m at the lab.”

Scully unbuckles her seatbelt, but makes no move to leave the car. She plays with the edge of the folder. “I know you said you weren’t looking to go steady, but now that I’ve put out I was hoping I could get your varsity jacket.” 

He feels some of the tightness leave his neck at her willingness to play. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a pretty sweet jacket. That’s more than a one-nighter. Maybe if you swing by in a cheerleader outfit I’d think about it.”

She looks up, smiling one of her rare smiles that show her teeth. “I think my mom still has my high school uniform in mothballs somewhere.”

He tosses his phone onto her lap. “Call. Now.”

Scully laughs her throaty, chuckly laugh. “Good night, Mulder,” she says, opening her door. “See you tomorrow.” She passes his phone back and slips into the dark.

He grins all the way to his room.

***

Diana comes to him again that night. He finds her at the edge of a meadow on a large rock, a vivid rainbow overhead. She wears a floor length evening gown of shimmering gold fabric, and her flesh is whole. She pats the rock, inviting him to sit.

“Hello, Fox.” 

He scowls, sitting. “As a manifestation of my subconscious, you could have the decency not to call me Fox.”

She laughs. “As an alleged manifestation of your subconscious, maybe you just want to be acknowledged as a fox by a desirable woman. How is Agent Scully this evening?”

“Spare me. Nice dress, Diana.”

She stands up and twirls. The gown flares out from her graceful waist into a narrow bell. Her feet are bare. “It is, isn’t it? It’s cloth of gold. Very Eleanor of Aquitaine, I think.”

“Is it heavy?”

Diana sits back down. “Oh, yes. Terribly heavy. And costly.”

He rubs it between his fingers. The fabric is stiff and itchy, like tweed. “Well, nothing’s too expensive when you’re dead, I guess.”

“Not expensive. Costly,” she corrects.

He furrows his brow. “Okay. What’s the difference?”

She shrugs. “It’s just that the cheapest way to pay is usually money. Some things cost much more than money. Surely you know that by now. But there’s no need to be dour, Fox. It’s beautiful out, and look at the rainbow.” 

He does. “Someday we’ll find it, the rainbow connection, the lovers, the dreamers, and me,” he sings softly. Even in his dreams his voice is terrible.

Diana gets to her feet again, spinning in the grass. She starts to twirl faster, her hair whipping out around her. Her skin greys again, her face turning cadaverous, and little crawling things flying from her into the grass.

Mulder scuttles back from her on the rock, repulsed but captivated as she becomes a formless blur. 

Then she stops, stares at him from her cavernous eye sockets. Her bony chest is panting.

“Diana?” he breathes. 

She steps towards him and flickers back to her earlier smooth-skinned appearance.

Step.

Flicker.

Step.

Flicker.

He is transfixed.

“Is it real, or is it Memorex?” she muses.

Step.

Flicker.

He wakes up gasping before she can touch him.

***

He’d hoped this kind of shit would end with his neurosurgery, but apparently his subconscious is tenacious. Unless it’s not his subconscious, in which case he needs to get some tips from Scully, who sees an awful lot of ghosts for someone who doesn’t believe in them.

Yawning, he gets the in-room pot gurgling and clunking with whatever factory sweepings pass for coffee in the sticks. The room fills with an aroma reminiscent of burning tires.

A knock at the door distracts him and he opens it to find Scully holding two styrofoam cups steaming from their plastic lids. “Went for a quick run,” she says, stepping under his arm into the room.

He shuts the door.

“Mulder, prop that door open. It smells like wet asphalt in here.” She sets the cups down and turns the coffee pot off with a look of contempt.

“Ah, Scully,” he says, sipping from the cup marked M.

“You can take the car today,” she says. “Someone from the sheriff’s office is giving me a lift to the lab in Huntsville. It’s about an hour each way, so I doubt I’ll be back before dark. What are your plans?”

“I want to talk to Tallulah again,” he says. 

“Watch out for those goats,” she warns darkly. “I think the little one cost us the deposit.”

“I’ll bring pine cones.”

Scully frowns, steps closer to him. “Mulder, you don’t look so good. Are you feeling alright? Maybe you should have them bring her into the station for questioning instead.”

He waves her off. “Bed’s not great,” he says. “I’m just tossing and turning some, but the coffee should perk me up.” He takes a large gulp. “Mmmm, perky.”

She narrows her eyes. “You’re a liar, but if I try to actually examine you you’re just going to be cranky or perverted. At least make sure your phone’s charged so you can call me if you keel over or something.”

He pouts, preemptively deprived of the opportunity for a predictable playing doctor joke. Damn her. “You suck the fun out of everything,” he informs her, sitting on the bed.

She walks over to him, standing between his knees. She puts her empty coffee cup on the night stand, then grips his t-shirt with both hands.

He swallows.

“As your physician, I ask that you try not to die in a stupid and avoidable fashion,” Scully says. Her mouth is inches away. She shakes his shirt for good measure before leaving.

He goes to the shower and stays there for some time.

***

Mulder stops off at the farm store where Scully obtained the coffee. He selects a raspberry danish, then adds a loaf of fresh bread and some local milk in a quaint glass bottle. 

“Five dollar deposit on the bottle,” the clerk informs him. Fahv dahlah dipawsit.

“What’s it made of, crystal?” he grouses, swiping his card.

“You that FBI guy?” the clerk asks suspiciously. “It’s pasteurized, it’s perfectly legal milk.You can test it.” 

“It seems fine,” Mulder assures her. He’d had no idea that there was a black market in milk. He takes his bag and makes for the door.

“It’s not homogenized though,” she calls after him. 

Mulder takes his unhomogenized, perfectly legal milk up into the mountains.

***

Tallulah’s chopping wood when he pulls up. She has on the same Carhartt overalls Wyatt did, and thick leather gloves this time. There are splinters and sawdust in her long braid. She’s not a bit beautiful, but has an appealing serenity.

“Hey,” Mulder says to the goats, who have come to sniff him. He scratches the big one behind the ears. The little one makes for the car.

Tallulah straightens up, wipes her wrist across her brow. “Mornin’, Agent Mulder. Where’s your partner?”

“She’s the science half of this outfit,” Mulder says. “She’s peering at things through microscopes and running them through unpronounceable equipment.”

“Like that algae you scraped off my wall?” Tallulah sounds amused.

“That would be one of the things, yes.”

She frowns thoughtfully. “You sure that doesn’t violate the Fourth Amendment?”

“California v. Greenwood says I can search your trash,” Mulder informs her. “Besides, you invited us in.”

“Like vampires,” Tallulah observes, and adds the split wood to her growing pile.

Mulder holds out the bag containing the bread and milk. He ate the danish on the way up. “Here,” he says.

She takes his offering and peers in. “What’s this?”

“Call it a belated housewarming gift,” he says. 

Tallulah looks at him for a long moment. “You know, some of the old mountain women believe it’s wise to leave a little offering of such homey treats to the Good Folk. Oh, they go to church of a Sunday and preach the gospel just fine, but come Saturday night, there’s little biscuits and butter at the forest’s edge, wrapped all in leaves.”

“I heard something about that,” Mulder says. “I guess it’s like wearing suspenders and a belt.”

She wipes down her hatchet with a faded bandanna, then puts it in a little storage bin next to the house. “Funny what people believe, isn’t it?”

“Funny.” He doesn’t take his eyes off her, even when the little goat jumps on the hood of his car.

Tallulah opens the milk and takes a deep gulp of it from the bottle. “That’s very good,” she says. “Now your partner would roll her lovely eyes at such a thing as you’ve brought, but she’ll kneel for wafers and wine.”

Mulder doesn’t ask how Tallulah knows this. “There’s a five dollar deposit on the bottle,” he says. “All yours, since you’re out of business at the moment.”

She smiles greenly at him. “Come in, Agent Mulder.”

He follows her up the steps and into the cabin, looking at her round-bellied stove, the faded patchwork quilt on the narrow brass bed. Mulder sees the appeal of this simplicity, a pared down life to strip away all foolish distraction. He recognizes his own romanticization of it, a rich boy with summer homes and an Oxford education wanting to play at Saint Jerome. He also considers that the Unabomber went to Harvard and lived this way too. Minimalism may not be inherently enlightening. 

Tallulah is sprawled in a chair, her steel-toed boots kicked off. Mulder sits at the table across from her, bread and milk between them. A ham and a cleaver are out as well.

“You hungry?” Tallulah asks. “That ham is from Sam Oakley out by the grain elevator. Just delicious.”

Mulder shakes his head. “Can she come back?” he asks, without preamble.

“Agent Scully? Any time she likes, though I’d ask for more of that milk if she does. I’ll pay you the deposit.”

Mulder senses a shift in her demeanor. She’s not the friendly, country orphan any longer. There’s mischief rising in her, something tart and maybe wicked. Her posture is languid rather than awkward now.

“You know what I mean, Tallulah.”

She works on loosening her braid. It’s hard in the thick gloves. “You mean Ree. You still think I know something about that.”

Mulder realizes that she is enjoying herself, remembers that the fay are supposed to love riddles and wordplay. “Well, we can talk about something else. I heard the Ross twins are customers of yours.”

She laughs. “The thing I absolutely love best about people is that they make rules to stop themselves doing everything they long for, then do it anyway while pointing their lying fingers at the next fellow for the same. I don’t really need the money, but I do think it’s funny to watch these fine upstanding people condemn me with one hand and pay me with the other. It’s pleasurable money to spend, and it passes the time.”

Mulder’s anarchic soul cannot deny the schadenfreude. “I notice you used third person instead of first.”

“I don’t make those kinds of rules. I just sell the devil’s lettuce to all comers without judgement. I do like to watch them chase themselves in circles, but I’m not a hypocrite.”

Devil’s lettuce. His neck prickles. “No? What are you then?”

She smiles, and her mouth has too many teeth in it. They seem very thin now. “I’m the apple in the Garden,” she says. “This realm has made nothing but trouble for my folk, and I like to pay back mischief as I can.” 

Tallulah slowly takes her gloves off and balls her hands into fists. She opens them and pieces of gold ore are in them. Closes her fists, opens her fists. She pours the gold onto the table and the pieces are streaked with algae.

He stares, awed. Shaken.

Tallulah holds his gaze. “Do you want some of it, Agent Mulder? Everyone else does, and it only costs a little. Can you offer me a most beloved child? The ring finger of each hand? All the memories of your sister?”

“Where’s Ree?” he chokes out.

Tallulah continues as if he hasn’t spoken. “Maybe there’s something else you want? A love spell?” She winks a green eye. “But you don’t really need it. She wants this as much as you, Mulder. When you kissed her she felt only relief and lust in equal measure. My god, she rode you like it was the Kentucky Derby, skirt around her waist and her breasts tight to your chest.”

Tallulah reaches up to stroke his cheek and he jerks his head away, appalled.

“How do you know all of these things?” His voice is scarcely a whisper and his stomach is lurching.

“A little ghostie tells me,” she says, and mimes an hourglass woman in the air. “Don’t think she realizes she does it though.”

Fingers trembling, Mulder retrieves three iron nails from his pocket. He’d pried them out of the floor at the motel, and now he brandishes them, hoping. Dum spiro spero.

Tallulah looks at them and hisses. “Cold iron!” she shrieks. “It binds my magic!” 

Then she snatches them from his hand and eats them, laughing.

He is too shocked to be frightened.

“Don’t feel bad,” Tallulah says, consolingly. “You’re not the first. Listen, you’ve looked through lots of one-way mirrors, right? Interrogating?”

He nods, not yet trusting himself to speak.

“Okay, well, imagine stacks of it. If you were standing on a tower of it, shiny side down, you could see to the bottom.”

Nods again.

“Attaboy. Now, if you were under that tower, looking up, you couldn’t see through up to the top. Hell, you wouldn’t even know there was a tower. One layer or a hundred would look the same. All you’d see was your own reality reflected back.”

Something is starting to coalesce in his brain. “You… your people are looking, uh, through to us, but we can’t perceive you.”

“Oh, looking down is much more accurate,” Tallulah assures him. “Like how you know ants exist and find them interesting, but they have no understanding that you exist because they’re tiny and stupid.” She looks smug and takes another drink of milk.

“Why are you telling me this?” He hates her, but he still wants her to talk.

She reaches across the table, caresses his hands with gentle fingers before he pulls them back. “Because no one will ever believe you and so it amuses me for you to know,” she says sweetly. “You can see up through the worlds  piecemeal, I think. Bits of the whole, like the Louvre through a keyhole. Your partner will say this was a hallucination brought on by recent brain trauma. Your superiors will laugh at you - at least aliens are masculine and slightly scientifically respectable. But fairies? Oh, dear.”

For a fraction of a fraction of a second, she wears Diana’s skeletal face.

Mulder feels hot bile rise in his throat, but forces it down. “Where’s Ree?” 

“The sheriffs in these silly towns never even remember our bargains, of course. They harass for my little game with the ganja, but then no one can recall why I’ve been picked up, and they apologize and I go. Some like babies, to start fresh, but not me. I like to know what I’m getting. I only take one a year, and they’re good ones. Sweet girls who love the woods and water. I was nineteen before I could make the gold come, so that’s only seven. You’ve seen worse then seven. Remember Roche, Mulder?” She changes her face to remind him.

The bile does come then, and he vomits on her floor.

“Rude,” she says mildly, and water pours from her fingers to wash it away and out the front door.

He fights nausea and dizziness. “Give them back. Give me Ree, Tallulah. Just let me take Ree home.” His hair is soaked with sweat and he’s terrified it will be Goldstein all over again. He pulls his gun anyway. Can she turn it on him like Pusher? Scully will be very angry with him if so.

Tallulah is unconcerned. “I don’t hurt them, you goose. I take them up through the looking-glass, so to speak. It’s beautiful there. It’s safe for them. They deserve better than to live with the people who look the other way for thirty pieces of gold. A bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. Or is it a Catch-22? I’m not much of a reader.”

“Ree,” he grinds out between clenched teeth. He puts his finger on the trigger.

Tallulah grabs the cleaver and chops her hand off. There’s no blood. “Shoot me,” she giggles, and he passes out.

***

It’s still light out when he awakens in his car, just past two-thirty by the dashboard clock. There’s a glass of sweet tea and a slab of pound cake on the console. Feel better, reads a note in a fine copperplate. Sorry for the shock. Had to run an errand, but you should eat and drink before you drive or you might crash. Don’t worry - there’s nothing wrong with it. But no need to die in a stupid and avoidable fashion. Thanks again for the gift. I might return the favor.

Mulder eats and drinks. He figures if her food is poisoned or enchanted, he’ll be spared explaining to the Rosses that their daughter was kidnapped through an interdimensional portal as a sacrifice to the greed of public officials and the amusement of a wicked fairy.

The cheapest way to pay is money.

The snack is revitalizing and he sits until he feels his blood sugar level out. He wonders if Tallulah would have killed him if he’d met her empty-handed. He wonders if Ree is really alive somewhere, or if it’s just a game.

A headache has begun pulsing deep in his temple, like the throbbing brain of IT on Camazotz. Mulder fumbles his sunglasses out of the glove box.

He puts them on, filtering out the worst of the light. He breathes through his nose, massages his temples like Scully used to do when her tumor became rowdy. He begins to relax, the nausea and pain subsiding. His eyes slide closed as he digests the morning’s events.

“I’m sorry,” Diana says, her hand on his thigh.

He sits bolt upright and she’s next to him, her long legs cramped in the Scully-configured seat. 

“I’m not asleep,” he insists to both of them, looking wildly around. Tallulah’s house, the mountain, the forest - none of it has the surreality of a dream.

Diana strokes his cheek gently with her cool grey fingers. “I’m going now,” she says. “I thought I was helping, making it up to you after a last betrayal. But it turns out…” she shakes her head.

“Diana, wait. Are we here or am I sleeping? Do you know where Ree is?” He hears his own panic and fights it. “Diana, just help me find her. Don’t leave yet.”

She presses her lips to his temple, murmuring. 

“Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;”

Agent Diana Fowley fades away then, into the quiet peace of nothingness.

Mulder never feels himself waken, never feels a shift in consciousness. She’s simply vanished and he’s alone to finish the rhyme.

“Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?”

***

His drive back has a frenzied, febrile quality with saturated colors and echoing sounds. He is sweat-soaked and shivering when he gets back to the motel.

Mulder kicks his boots off and crawls into the bed. He draws the covers up under under his chin and falls away into the dark.

***

He wakes to her light fingers smoothing hair from his forehead. The sky outside is dark and starry, but it’s not even seven.

Mulder blinks, confused. “Scully?”

She’s sitting at the edge of the bed, in her dark trousers and a grey top. Her face is serious. “Mulder, I’ve been trying to wake you for an hour. You were burning up, but the fever seems to have broken. Did something happen?”

Everything. “No. I think you were right. I just came back to work too soon.” He gives her what he hopes is an appealing look.

Scully smells a rat but doesn’t push. She presses her fingers to his wrist. “I want you on antibiotics. I’ll call the pharmacy in the morning. They closed at five.”

He nods. “What did you find on the algae?”

She strokes his hair again and he feels like purring. “Nothing much. There were a few different strains at the pond but only one in her house. And a common one at that. It’s no good for linkage, I’m afraid, though I had them run a couple other tests. Nothing in the medical records they sent either - she’s as healthy as she says.”

“Well, did you get anything from Danny on disappearances?” 

She stops petting him to get up and retrieve a piece of folded paper from her jacket pocket. “I found a dozen that look possible, and six that match the details of this case pretty closely.”

He pats the blanket. “Come back and show me some more of that famous bedside manner.”

She snorts, but returns to her perch. “Here, look. I highlighted the six that look best. Called them too, and gave Tallulah’s name and description to LLE. None of them recognized the name or description.”

Of course, Mulder thinks. Of fucking course. “Betcha we’d get a different answer if we asked people who live there.”

Scully frowns. “What does that mean? You really think police departments from 6 towns are all embroiled in an elaborate web to protect a very low level weed dealer? Mulder, come on. I know you love a nice sexy conspiracy, but I think the best answer is that there’s some kind of drifter active in the area. I say we turn the whole thing over to NCMEC and go home. You look awful and there’s nothing else we can do here.”

He presses his hands to his face. Fuck, fuck. He looks back at Scully.  “I mean this lovingly, but please do not say anything condescending until I finish my undoubtedly insane rambling, okay?”

She narrows her eyes. “I should have let you sleep.”

Mulder props himself up against the pillows. He’s still chilly. “Okay, so there’s this concept of something called the Teind. It’s um…shit.” He stares at the bathroom door for a moment.

“Mulder, when you’re hesitant to share a theory, it gives me grave concern.” She scoots higher on the bed, crosses her legs. “But go on. The Teind.”

“So the idea is that there are other worlds - other simultaneous realms - that are layered over this one. Like a multiverse, okay? Like Schrödinger. You love Schrödinger, right? And Brian Greene?”

She purses her lips.

Mulder barrels ahead. “Okay, so. So one of these realms is what is sometimes called Faerie, or Elfhame. And our world, the so-called Christian realm, is constantly encroaching on theirs. Every seven years the Lords of Elfhame must pay a tribute to the Lords of Hell. This tribute ensures that the Christian realm with not destroy Elfhame and that the Lords of Hell will keep the Christian realm in check. I think that’s what these seven girls are - I think they’re tributes, or possible tributes. Maybe there’s a big pool created, I don’t know.”

Scully says nothing and it makes him nervous.

“Scully?”

She flops back beside him on the bed, gazing at the ceiling. “It’s a prettier story than drowning or murder or sex trafficking,” she says. “I mean sure, it’s essentially a complex pagan mafia real estate kidnaping scam, but it’s still better.”

He pulls the blankets up to his chin.

Scully turns, props herself up on her side to look at him. “What in the hell did Tallulah say to you, Mulder? Because I have to say, this is pretty far down the garden path even for you.”

He wonders if it’s even worth it. “She was able to conjure objects, Scully. Gold in her bare hands.” He has enough sense not to mention the cleaver.

Scully scoffs. “My dad could pull a quarter out of my ear.”

“She said that LLE knew she was taking these girls and she gave them gold for looking away. That the weed thing was just for her amusement, stirring the pot. So to speak.” He grins at his own unintentional joke. 

Scully scoots closer. “Mulder, what am I going to do with you? Don’t you think it’s much more likely that this woman is part of a larger drug and prostitution ring, tasked with procuring children for those up the chain? I believe there could be payoffs - small town cops are overworked and underpaid. But payments to the Lords of Hell? Realms? If she did show you gold, she was probably trying buy your silence as well but didn’t realize you’re too incorruptible to even notice, you stupid noble idiot.”

He feels oddly pleased by this assessment. “Well, can we at least agree that she probably is involved?”

Scully runs her finger down the bridge of his nose. “Yes.”

“And that whatever the source of funds, there are payoffs happening?”

She traces his eyes, his brows, his lashes. “Yes.”

“And that 1977’s Elvis in Concert is grievously underrated in terms of both quality and significance?”

She strokes the corner of his mouth. “Absolutely.”

If he does have a brain infection, he couldn’t care less if it means dying in bed like this. “Get under the covers,” he demands. 

She sits up. “I’m afraid not.”

“No, Scully, we were doing great while you kept saying yes to everything I said. Let’s try again and get back in the groove - can we agree that Kate Capshaw in Temple of Doom was a tremendous step down from Karen Allen in Raiders?”

She smiles. “Not even negotiable. But really, I’ve got a fax coming in up at the office and you need to rest. If we get stuck here because you end up with some exotic encephalitis, so help me god.”

He takes her hand as she gets up. “So you’re really ready to hand this off?”

Scully sighs, squeezing his fingers. “Look, the fax I’m waiting on is from Danny. I asked for a ViCAP cross reference on any unsolved sexual assaults or attempted abductions that dovetail with those missing girls. If nothing else, I think there’s a real case there that needs to be put together. It was a good call, Mulder.”

“If I go to sleep like a good boy, will you let me have one more chance with Tallulah?” He bats his lashes at her.

“One More Chance With Tallulah sounds like a Barry Manilow song. I’ll tell you what - I’ll check on you later and if you still haven’t got a fever I’ll allow it.”

He crosses his heart and lets her go.

***

He dreams a memory. 

Two weeks past, and he’s sprawled on his couch while Scully afflicts him with acts of medical science. She’s administering neurological tests, bruising him halfway to gangrene with a pressure cuff, and siphoning off enough blood to keep her bucktoothed sheriff happy.

“Scully,” he laments. “Your healing will be the death of me.” 

“Don’t be such a baby,” she says, with her usual bedside warmth. “You’re a week past a very serious brain trauma, and you refused to stay in the hospital because you’re an idiot. So you’ll put up with me and you’ll like it.”

He does like it. Looping into her mind with that fungus had been nothing like this. Her heart is an open wound that she constantly stitches back together to make it through another day. The amount of fight in her is enormous, and she channels into a broken and thankless world. 

She loves him, and what surprises him is that it isn’t the inevitable pair-bonding of proximity and isolation. Scully thinks about that sticky June day in the hallway too. Finishes the thought, sometimes, pinned to the wall like a butterfly with his fingers in her hair.

Pretty hot, Scully.

She’s bent over him with her tiny flashlight to check his pupils and his tracking, a corner of her lower lip tucked behind her front teeth. She leans forward, her brow furrowed at some minute anomaly. He stares at the arabesque of her collarbones, the two lines that circle her white throat. 

“Mulder, keep your eyes up,” she says in doctorly annoyance.

He does, and he doubts it takes psychic ability to read what’s onhis face

She runs her tongue over her top lip, and it’s like a circuit closes.

His hands are at the back of her neck, her waist, pulling her towards him as he sits up. He kisses her like should have ages ago, reckless and open-mouthed and decisive.

Scully drops the flashlight and kneels next to him on the sofa. She sips at his mouth with her cool little tongue, slides her fingers through his hair. She stops short  at the bandage and pulls away. “Mulder,” she says, ashamed, and moves to get up.

He grabs her upper arm, far harder than he means to. She gasps, and not at all unhappily. He had not seen this in her directly, but he had suspected.

“Let me go,” she whispers. “I don’t know what I was thinking. You’re not well.”

She’s close enough for him to see her hard nipples through the silk, her dilated pupils. He keeps his eyes on hers while uncurling his fingers from her bicep. 

She swallows.

He reaches out to undo the minuscule pearl buttons on her blouse. He’s always loved the high drama of women’s clothing, like a puzzle box.

Scully says his name again.

“Go,” he tells her, as her shirt falls open. He slips his hands under the fabric to plane her back and waist. He’d touched her here in Antarctica, but not like this. He tongues the tight stretch of her navel, breathes in the hot scent of the skin beneath her bra. It’s astringent with her tea-tree soap, sharp with her sweat.

She’s on her knees still, her fingers back at his stubbled jaw, his earlobes. She’s dipping her head to kiss his hair while she makes little animal noises.

“Go,” he repeats, and she doesn’t.

He unhooks her bra, a simple white satin affair, and she lets go of him long enough to pull it off with her shirt. 

It is with difficulty that Mulder sits back to look at her. Her belly is flat and taut, her breasts full above them. They are lightly veined with the blue of her eyes, her nipples the color of late raspberries. Around them is the fine, crepey skin of her areolae, puckered tight. Her head is tipped forward, glorious flame of hair falling around her fine Roman face, full lips parted.

He’s hard to the point of pain.

Scully watches him watch her, reaches behind her back to unfasten her skirt. She laughs.

“What?” 

“It’s stuck, Mulder. The zipper’s stuck.” She tugs more forcefully, her breasts shifting as she moves.

He half assumes this is the ghost of Ahab at work, denying the FBI the last vestige of his daughter. Mulder pulls at the zipper too, but it doesn’t budge.

Scully reaches under the hem of her skirt and works her stockings and underwear down. She tosses them away like snakeskin. 

His cocks twitches in his jeans with seven years of potential energy. No pretending he hasn’t wanted her since she stripped down to her good-girl cotton panties in a panic, but it’s so much more now.

Pulls his shirt off, then tugs her onto his lap. She’s infertile and knows his medical records better than he does, but he asks anyway. “Condom?”

She shakes her head, runs her light hands over his chest. He could come from this alone, the weight of her bare ass on his lap and the sensory overload of breasts and hands and scent.

He groans when she sucks at the tender skin below his ear. “Scully, I’m pushing forty and I think it’s only fair to warn you that-“

She’s opened the fly of his jeans. Mulder raises his hips, Scully still on his lap, to work them down with his boxers. The cool air on his cock is torment.

Time slows, drips like honey, then stalls entirely. Scully’s eyes are wide, focused, as she moves herself over and around him. Her head rolls to the side, then forward. She sighs something blasphemous from flushed lips.

Mulder bites his tongue until it bleeds to ensure he’ll last longer than the average teenager. Perhaps her next thesis can be on the frictionless surface of her own body, the impossibly slick heat of it. He wants to taste her too, but that would require not being inside her and god help him, he hasn’t got the willpower for that right now.

Scully’s head is against his neck, panting humid nonsense into his ear while her breasts are flattened to his chest. He holds her at the hips, letting the sinuous flexion of her spine have its way with them both.

He’s embarrassingly close to ending this, and clenches his nails into his palm. Scully bites at his neck, his earlobe, and there’s no resolve left. He groans something mindless as he clutches her body, shudders and twitches as she squirms around him. Mulder holds her tight to his hips, grinding up into her with the kind of surging napalm pleasure he’d forgotten was possible. Her little bare feet squeeze his thighs, and the universe condenses to her hundred and ten pounds of exquisite physiology. His head falls to her chest and he slips out of her with a groan.

He could sleep for days, but instead reaches between them under her skirt to find her clitoris. She so wet his finger slips at first. Scully squeaks, a little chirp, and finds a rhythm with him that pleases her. 

She arches her back away from him, her hips forward, and he is awed anew. Her hair tumbles between her shoulder blades, her breasts bouncing softly as he strokes her. 

He says her name, sotto voce, and slips two fingers inside her. He shifts his thumb to her clitoris, presses his fingers to the ridged tissue of her g-spot. He writes his name there a dozen times.

She whimpers, and he leans forward to draw the hot little bud of her nipple into his mouth. He sucks at it, grazes it with his teeth. Scully comes with a gasp and falls against him, shuddering. She licks his neck, mouth on his ear and his lips. 

He envelops her with his arms and draws the Navajo blanket around her narrow shoulders. He holds her, listening to her heart and lungs as they slow to normal. He smooths her tumbled hair.

She runs her fingers along his bandage again. “Are you okay?” 

He has literally never felt better in his life. He feels like a lord of creation, like Adam striding through the Garden of Eden to survey his dominion. “I’m fine,” he says, in her snippy voice.

She laughs, burrowing closer. “You have a bed, don’t you?”

Mulder slips an arm under her legs and another behind her neck. He lifts her as he gets to his feet, carrying her like a bride. She’s such a central force in his life, the mass around which he orbits, that it is odd for her to be so light. 

He kicks his bedroom door open and lays her out face-down on the comforter. “Let’s work on that skirt,” he says.

Somehow he’d forgotten about the tattoo. The burning red mouth that marked the beginning of their darkest times together, that portal to her lonely trip north. He pushes aside the memory of what he’d said, the photographic evidence that came home with her. There be dragons, the old maps say.

He kisses it and she flinches. He prays it isn’t shame. Or fear.

With careful maneuvering, he breaches the zipper and tugs the skirt away. She rolls to her back again, her body spilled across his dark blankets like a shaft of  errant starlight. He is pleased to note she has eschewed the recent fashion for shaving oneself utterly bare. 

He gets to his knees, pulls her to the edge of the mattress by her hard little ankles. She starts to speak, but he cannot hear once her thighs are tight against his ears. 

In the morning, she will disappear with the dew.

***

Her cool palm on his cheek wakes him and it takes an unhappy second for the dream to snap away. He’s uncomfortably hard and rolls onto his side for some relief. It’s eight by the bedside clock.

“Hey,” she says, sitting down. “You okay?” 

He clenches his left thigh until there’s pain, and it helps. She looks tired, he notices. Drawn and weary from too much bad coffee and too little proper sleep and feeding. He ought to make her take a vacation where she gets wrapped in seaweed and fed organic mangoes by beautiful castrati.  

But for now, they’ll have to manage on motel moisturizer and takeout. “Do I smell pizza?” 

“Indeed. Just wanted to see if the fever was gone first.” She squints at him. “You look a hell of a lot better. Did you take something? I might be able to hold off on the antibiotics; I know what they do to your stomach.”

He stretches. “Well, just in case, thanks for checking my forehead instead of going rectal,” he says. “Sometimes you have a slight sadistic side.”

“When was your last prostate exam?” she asks sweetly.

Mulder sits up. “I didn’t know that was your scene, but I’m open-minded. Let’s go.” He peels the covers back, feeling like he needs a long run to revive himself from the day. He hates being idle for so long, and his clothes feel stale.

Scully realizes she’s overplayed her hand and wrinkles her nose. “Let’s preserve the magic on that for now. You okay to get up, or should I bring the pizza here?”  

He’s not freezing anymore, and his head isn’t throbbing. “I’ll get up,” he says. “I’m starting to 

feel like one of those consumptive Victorian heroines.”

“Mmmm,” she says. “Maybe I should leech you and give you some cocaine for that.” Scully goes to the little table where the pizza box is sitting. She opens the lid, and hot greasy air wafts out.

Mulder gets up and walks over, scuffing his socks along the drab oatmeal carpet. He zaps her with his finger and she scowls.

“Ugh, go back to bed.”

He can’t help himself when she’s his favorite toy and part of his brain will always be an arrested 12 year old idiot. He flips the chair around to straddle it, resting his elbows across the back. “What’s that, mushroom and pepper?”

“And pepperoni on half for you.” Scully disdains the greasier meats herself, but will treat him on occasion.

Mulder realizes he’s starving and rolls a piece up like a burrito, demolishing it in four bites before Scully’s done blotting the grease off of her own.

“I’m not performing the Heimlich maneuver if you choke on that,” she says, delicately peeling off two slices of pepperoni that have contaminated her mushrooms. She holds them out to him.

Mulder snaps them out of her fingers like a trained seal. He rolls another slice up, gesturing with it. “So I’m cleared to go nose about more tomorrow, right?”

She tweaks his nose with her oily fingertips. “You’re certainly equipped for it.”

“Right for the gut. We can’t all look like we were carved from marble, I’m afraid. You’ll have to deal with my hideous deformity as nature presents it, Roxanne.” He eats half his pizza, then wipes his face.

Scully finishes her slice. “Did she really show you gold this morning, Mulder?”

He nods, swallows. “Yep. And you said that woman you talked to told she’d show up after nights out streaked with algae and gold dust. Maybe she was, I don’t know, developing her powers. You said she was missing for a few years.” 

She considers this. “I think indicates that she herself was being abused or exploited in some way from a young age, Mulder. I mean, if you can access it, unmarked gold is a nearly untraceable currency and good in any market. They start giving her little cuts, get her dealing in her teens to build trust and rapport with kids. It’s a trafficker’s dream.”  

He hates that she’s not wrong, and it’s got nothing to with defending his theory. He’s got a reputation as a bleeding heart in many corners, but would happily support supplying child predators as involuntary organ donors. Punching Roche had been a career highlight. 

“You have to concede that the linkage between fairies and gold goes way back.” Diana’s rainbow suddenly makes sense to him, and he feels stupid. “I mean, leprechauns, of course. And Rumplestiltskin - who wanted a baby in exchange for gold, I might point out. The original story of Cinderella features bewitched golden shoes instead of glass. Jack climbs the beanstalk for a golden harp and a golden harp and golden coins; there are dozens.”

She rolls her eyes. “Mulder, for heaven’s sake. These stories are all about wish fulfillment. And gold was the ultimate wish, it’s a universal currency. Of course if people are going to create stories about strange, powerful beings with the ability to fulfil desires, those desires will be about financial freedom. I’d say those tales represent far more about human longing than fairy powers.”

“I saw her do it,” he says, but doesn’t press the issue. “You hear from Danny?”

“Yeah, nothing. It’s like whomever took the girls vanished along with them. No reported drifters, no unfamiliar cars, no uptick in petty thefts or break-ins.”

Mulder jabs at the table with a finger. “It’s not a drifter, Scully. We agreed on that.”

“Right, but if it’s Tallulah, then these girls have to go somewhere. She has to be meeting someone, she can’t just - I don’t know - keep them in her little cabins like a stray dog indefinitely, then drive out of town in her Volvo.”

“Well, on that point I cannot argue. I’m going to talk to her tomorrow, see if there’s anything else she wants to unburden. We need to touch base with the Rosses too, I guess.” He eats her discarded crust.

“I can stop by while you’re charming precious metals out of Elfhame.” She’s looking up at him through her sooty end-of-day lashes, the tip of a pizza slice between her teeth.

His stomach flips. Leave it to Scully to arouse him at the weirdest possible times. “Scully, why’d you leave?” he asks, because he wants to know and because she let him put a chip in her neck, and because she smells like tea tree oil and jasmine, and because he made her drink sardine juice to save her life, and because she shot him once, and because she saved him after having his skull drilled into twice, and because she tastes like saltwater taffy and the sea.

She frowns. “Well, you had a fever, and I wanted to-”

“That morning,” he clarifies. “Why’d you go?”

She sighs. “I suppose I knew this was coming,” she says. “Of course you couldn’t possibly be a gentleman and mind your business about it.”

He’s stung until he sees the smile in her eyes. “I’m only a gentleman in the parlor,” he says. “This is most definitely a bedroom.”

Scully leans back in her chair, crossing her legs. “It’s what I did after Dallas, don’t you remember? It’s what I did to Jack Willis, it’s what I tried to do in Philadelphia that time. My journal to you, when I had cancer, it was just a long Dear John letter, Mulder. When I was in med school, there was this man…” she trails off, staring at the cheap tile ceiling.

Mulder tries to process this. “I think you’re being a little hard on yourself, Scully. You weren’t running after Dallas - they transferred you.”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “That’s not what you said at the time. You said I was quitting. You said you would too, if I left.”

He winces inwardly at the memory of what he’d said. “Well yeah, but I was trying to guilt you into staying, so you have to cut me some slack.” 

She laughs, throws a wadded-up napkin at him. “Is that all you were trying to do, Mulder? I remember something else, in the moment.”

He doesn’t tell her that he knows exactly how well she remembers. “You’re incredibly good looking,” he says, with an air of confession. “Sue me.”

She smiles, looking down at her hands. “Mulder, I left the way I did the other morning because I didn’t know how else to leave. I didn’t know what it meant, and I still don’t. Was I… were we supposed to eat breakfast in bed and clean our guns together?”

There’s something bitter in her voice that he sets aside for later. He reaches across the table to take her hands. “Scully, why does it have to be anything? We could have had some coffee, tracked down your underwear together. They’re still in my sock drawer, incidentally.”

She blushes and punches his arm for that.

He laughs. “But seriously. What good does it do to worry in advance about how things will go wrong? I mean, look at me. I’m a total fucking disaster by many metrics, but I get by. I wing it most of the time, sure, but I manage.”

Scully laughs, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Truly a ringing endorsement. But I don’t know what you expect me to say, Mulder. I was a physicist before I was a doctor, you know. So I guess I just leave before entropy can fully take over.”

“I know,” he says. “But you can’t fail at this. There’s no checklist. There’s no test to pass or form to fill out.”

She makes a noise of frustration. “Mulder, do you not understand that that’s exactly the part that’s impossible for me to handle? That I can’t ever know, empirically, if I’m doing all the things that...that...I’m supposed to?”

He stares at her in confusion. “That you’re supposed to? I don’t even know what that means. There’s no supposed to. You just do.” He says this with the confidence of a man whose six-month marriage hadn’t fallen apart, of a man who hadn’t had a one-night stand with a blood fetishist, or an extended disaster with a British sociopath. 

Scully shakes her head. “I make lists and five year plans.”

He refrains from asking her how well that’s panned  out. “Take your shirt off,” he says.

She freezes, startled. “Mulder, we’re on a case, I don’t-”

“Trust me,” he says, knowing she considers it the most dangerous phrase in his lexicon. “You’re stressed. You’re exhausted. I was going to rub your back.”

She smirks. “I think my mom fell for that and got pregnant with Charlie.”

“Indian Guide’s honor,” he says. “I’ll get the lotion from the bathroom.”

Scully eyes him suspiciously, but goes to the bed and smooths the blankets out.

He retrieves the little bottle of lotion and reads it. Scully will have to settle for “Alabaster Gardenia,” this evening. It occurs to him that Padgett would have referred to her as an alabaster gardenia and he rolls his eyes. 

When he emerges, Scully is facedown on the bed, head on the pillow. Her smooth back is bare to the waist of her trousers, where the serpent lives, and her sock feet small and dark. Her shirt and bra are folded neatly on the night table, as though he is an actual masseuse.

Mulder straddles her hips, kneeling, and pours the lotion into his hands to warm it. Close up, he sees red marks from her bra straps on her shoulders and decides to start there.

“Wouldn’t this have been a nice morning?” he asks, working the lotion into her skin. “I could have done this for you. And with better lotion - you know I’m knowledgeable on the subject.”

“Shut up,” she mumbles into the pillow. 

He feels deep, hard knots in her back and attacks them with his thumbs, following the muscles down the sides of her spine. He’s not sure it’s effective, but then Scully groans happily into the bedding.

He’s pleased, working back up to the delicate muscles of her neck and base of her ears. “Is this good?”

“Don’t stop.”

He refrains from innuendo, wanting to prove to her that this is about so much more than sex. He kneads the folded wings of her shoulder blades, her handspan waist. There is lotion on her trousers and in her hair, but he doesn’t think she’ll mind.

She’s dozy and pliant now, breathing slowly. He’ll pet her to sleep like this every night if it suits her, like a little feral cat.

“Mulder?”

“Hmmm?” He traces the tattoo again, trying to bond with it and love it because it’s part of her. The work is admittedly beautiful.

“I’m sorry if I hurt you when I left. I don’t know how to be easy with things like you are.” She turns on her side, an arm draped across her breasts.

“Well, one of us has to have a plan,” he says airily. “Poor Walter’s always been afraid of me corrupting you. I never felt like he was angry, you know? Just disappointed. My god, this would kill him.” He thinks Poor Walter might be more than a touch in love with her too, but keeps this to himself.

She turns fully onto her back now and, to his dismay, works herself under the sheets. “Well, Kersh just thinks you’re mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

“Put it on my tombstone.”

“Of course you’d take that as a compliment. Lord Byron was really awful, but at least we got Ada Lovelace out of him. Mulder, why are you pulling clothes out?”

He hunts for his favorite t-shirt amid the wreckage of his suitcase. “I’m going for a run. I’ll be up all night otherwise.”

Scully frowns disapprovingly. “You really shouldn’t after today, Mulder. Can you make it a casual jog, at least?”

“Brisk trot. Leisurely gallop.”

“It’s AMA,” she warns him, but doesn’t argue further.

Mulder changes quickly while she drowses, limbering himself against the night table where her clothing sits. He opens the door, and the night air is invigorating.

“Hey Mulder?”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t promise you anything, but I want to try to...you know. This.”

“Okay,” he says, and hopes she’s too sleepy to hear the thickness in his voice.

***

She’s out cold when he gets back, occasional little Scully-snores in the silence. He rinses in the shower, making excessive noise to alert her to his presence.

Mulder dries off and wraps himself in the undersized motel towel, putting his shoes back on against the dubious carpet. He walks over to Scully and strokes her hair.

“Mmmfff,” she says, bleary-eyed. “Am I still here?”

He holds out her shirt. “You’ll want this before you head next door,” he says.

She blinks. “Okay.” Then she promptly falls back asleep.

Mulder is not one to beg. He pulls his boxers on, toes the shoes off, and climbs in next to her. He is delighted to find that she has kicked her socks and trousers off, now clad only in her little grey bikinis.

He strokes the violin curves of her, from her shoulder down the sweep of her waist to her thighs. She sighs in her sleep.

He knows Scully would explain that he’s evolutionarily primed to be attracted to her full breasts and rounded hips. She’d tell him about how pelvic girdle width is an advantageous adaptation for such a melon-headed species.

He’d counter with the Golden Ratio. Sometimes beauty is its own justification.

Mulder snuggles in next to her. If he dreams that night he doesn’t remember. And if she wakes, she doesn’t leave.

***

His alarm goes off at six. Scully is an immovable lump next to him under the bedding, her exposed hair the only sign that she isn’t a heap of pillows or an extra blanket. He strokes the fine vellum of her belly until she stirs. “Time to get up,” he murmurs.

She pokes her head above the comforter and looks at him, confused. “What time is it? Did I spend the night?”

He smoothes her hair back from her brow. “I won’t tell anyone.”

Scully sits up, holding the sheet to her chest with one hand. “Where are my clothes?” She feels around under the blankets with evident agitation. 

Mulder points at the night table. “I put your shirt and bra there, but I don’t know about the pants and socks. You lost those while I was running, but I can give you a hand.”

She puts a hand to her forehead and looks tense. “This is what I was afraid of, Mulder. This… this chaos.”

He rubs her thigh and doesn’t laugh at her idea of chaos. Scully may sometimes think of him as a giant untrained Weimaraner who is either destroying her life or nosing her crotch, but he’s also got a DPhil from Oxford and occasionally he picks up on social cues. He moves the blankets around, keeping her covered, and eventually finds her belongings wadded up between the pillows.

“Here,” he says gently, and hands them to her. 

She nods, biting her lip. “I need to go.”

“Okay,” he says, and doesn’t touch her. “I’m going to get in the shower. Come back over when you’re ready?”

Here smile is lukewarm, but present. “I’ll bring some coffee.”

Mulder tosses her the keys. “Get me one of those raspberry danishes too, if you don’t mind.”

He turns his back to give her privacy, then heads into the bathroom. He must have missed it yesterday, but sees that Scully’s left her little can of mousse on the sink for him. When they get home, he’s going to buy some of those velvet hangers she likes, to keep in his closet. He thinks of Ree, holding out dried corn for her deer. 

They’ve spent so long in the dark together it’s daunting to walk into the light.

***

Mulder takes a scalding shower, burning sweat and dead skin directly from the pores. He scours himself like a penitent until the heat becomes nauseating. When he steps out onto the little rug, the air feels nearly Arctic, and it perks him up. He feels purified of something nameless.

Scully’s lilac mousse in his hair, and he’s back in a suit for seeing Tallulah today. He thinks it’s best to remind her that he has a badge and a gun. He tries not to think about her hand, for once hoping he had experienced a hallucination.

He sits on the bed to tie his shoes when Scully comes back in, carrying a paper bag. She’s got on last night’s clothes still, her hair tucked behind her ears.

“They were out of raspberry, but I got you blueberry. Me too, actually. They looked good.” She holds out the bag, fragrant with coffee.

“Keep the change,” he says, taking the bag from her with happy anticipation.

“You should be doing stand-up, really.” She joins him on the bed.

Mulder passes her food to her, wishing he could make a breakfast-in-bed quip without sounding desperate. “So what’s your game plan today, then?” he asks around a mouthful of pastry.

She licks blueberry filling off her thumb. “Back to the lab, then I’ll see after that. We grew some of the algae samples at different temperatures to see if that could explain it being in Ree’s thermos in particular.” She blinks. “Oh! That reminds me! The lady at the store said to tell you not to forget about your bottle deposit.” 

“Thanks,” he says, hoping it doesn’t incite further questioning.

But no such luck with his inquisitive inamorata. “What bottle deposit?” she asks, puzzled.

He shifts, rolls his steaming cup between his palms. “Brought some groceries up with me to Tallulah’s yesterday. I figured it might grease the wheels a little.”

“Hmmm,” Scully says, and sips her coffee. “Well, it does sound like she had a lot to tell you. Anyway, I’ll be in Huntsville for the morning at least if you need me. Then I figured I’d - we’d, depending on your schedule - touch base with the Rosses, see if the search teams have found anything that hasn’t made its way to us.”

“Sounds good.” He brushes crumbs off his lap onto the floor, and supposes the mice will find them sumptuous.

Scully finishes her danish, clearly pondering something.

“Penny for your thoughts,” he offers.

Scully scoffs. “I’ll add it to my tip. I was just thinking; I did a little research while you were asleep yesterday. Apparently the term name Jenny Greenteeth applies not only to the creature in the legend, but has been generalized in some areas as a name for duckweed. In can make a pond surface look like inviting moss to walk on, like we saw down at the pond where Ree disappeared. Why not just...I don’t know. Why not just warn your kids about drowning instead of making up a - what did you call them?”

“Nursery bogey,” he replies. “The prevalent theory is that most kids will overestimate their abilities against natural dangers. They believe they can swim across a pond, or navigate through a forest, or climb a very tall tree. But if the supernatural is introduced, children are less likely to believe they can overcome the danger. So the deterrent is more effective.”

She shudders. “What a grim way to parent. Though I suppose it’s all just a variant on ‘don’t do that or you’ll die.’ And not so different from the Tooth Fairy or Santa, I guess.” Scully drinks her coffee, musing.

He considers this. He always found Santa creepy in a Panopticon way. “But Santa doesn’t provide a specific deterrent from naughtiness, only a reward for good.”

She sets her cup on the night table, presses her hands between her knees. “Well, there’s Krampus.”

Mulder loves the deranged chaotic energy of Krampus. “Krampus is good.”

“When I was taking German we were, you know, learning all the cultural bits of Germany. And Krampus is a companion of Saint Nicholas, which I thought was just terrible. Saint Nick gets all the credit for presents and just has Krampus do his dirty work.” She shakes her head at the treachery of Bavarian Santa.

He grins. “Santa’s that shitty friend who makes him carry out all the bullying so he can keep his hands clean and be teacher’s pet.”

“Ugh, I always hated that kid,” Scully says. She drinks her coffee, looking dark.

Mulder is joyful. Talking with her like this is the brightest spot in any day and he doesn’t want it to end. But there’s still a lost girl to find. “Well,” he says, slapping his thighs, “we’d best be off.”

She nods, serious again. “Depending on how the lab results look, we might be able to bring Tallulah in for questioning.”

He doubts it will do a particle of good, but they all need something to cling to. “Keep me posted.”

Scully reaches over to pat his hair. Heat radiates from her, and the warm cotton smell of her skin. Her coffee-and-danish breath is sweet in his mouth. “You can keep that mousse,” she says.

Mulder clears his throat. “I’m going to,” he assures her. “So much hold, but not sticky or stiff.”

She kisses him, close-mouthed, and flicks his ear before leaving.

***

The car shimmies up the unpaved road, rattling spent sunflower seeds in the empty Quik Mart cup. He grips the wheel against the uneven drive, against his anxiety over facing Tallulah again. Scully had come undone with Pfaster, her hard varnish becoming brittle and crumbling in the cold. Mulder fears Tallulah may leave him similarly disarmed.

He pulls up the last stretch of road to the meadow below the cabin, and stares in confusion. Instead of the weathered shack is a tangle of kudzu, ivy, strangler fig, and splintered planks. Mulder parks and slowly gets out of the car. He pushes his sunglasses up onto his forehead, picking his way up the path in gripless leather-bottomed dress shoes.

He crouches in the waist high grass, looking for...he’s not sure what. The floor of the cabin is utterly destroyed, existing only as a series of foot-long splinters. Large sections of the walls are collapsed inwards, algae-covered and snarled in woody vines. Tallulah’s few possessions, including her bed and kitchen furniture are gone. The big goat wanders over to chew on a section of the door. 

Mulder stands again, circles the wreckage with his hands on his hips. “Son of a bitch,” he says, kicking at it. He puts his sunglasses back on and stares into the woods.

Typical, absolutely fucking typical. He wants somewhere to put his anger, somewhere righteous and useful, but there is nothing. He longs for the congested grittiness if DC, where he can yell at corrupt officials or aggressive drivers or at least a noisome pigeon. But here there is nothing except unspoiled beauty as far as the eye can see. 

Looking back at the wreckage, he sees something glinting in the bright morning sun. He tugs at a swath of thorny vines hanging over the remains of the porch, and the milk bottle rolls out from beneath the greenery.

Mulder picks it up and sees a slip of paper inside. It slides out when he inverts the bottle. I guess we’re even, it reads, in a familiar hand.

He looks at the paper for a long time then, carefully, sets the bottle back on the ground. He begins running towards the tree line.

“Ree!” he calls. “RHIANNON!”

 Birdsong and silence.

He shouts her name again and again, receiving no reply. Mulder stops to take in his surroundings, never once doubting his interpretation of the note. “REE!”  he yells once more, and has only his echo for a reply.

He paces at the edge of the wood, looking, but there is nothing. Then, a hundred yards or so off, he sees a rock, like the one beneath Diana’s rainbow. He races towards it, loosening his tie. 

She’s still when he gets to her, a small bundle wrapped in a quilt that Mulder recognizes instantly from Tallulah’s bed. He crouches beside the girl. Twigs and leaves are snarled in her cornsilk hair, and her face is hollow and dirty.

Mulder reaches out to touch her cheek. “Hey,” he whispers. “Rhiannon?”

She stirs slightly, then opens her eyes. They’re far greener than they looked in her school picture. He tells himself it’s the light

“Mama,” Rhiannon says. She reaches out a thin, filthy hand.

Mulder gathers her up in his arms, head tucked against his neck. She weighs next to nothing, and he wants to run but is afraid of internal injuries or losing his footing. He moves as quickly as he dares back to the car.

Ree whimpers softly the whole time, her dry little fingers clutching at his collar. She calls for her mother and father.

He comes to the ruined shack and wants to show it to the child, to ask her a hundred questions, but he passes it in silence and arrives at the car. Still holding Ree’s little body close, he opens the back door. She begins to cry and clutch at him when he tries to lay her down.

“Please,” she begs, he can feel his heart break anew  when he pries her away, sobbing, onto the seat. Ree curls into the fetal position under the tattered quilt, mumbling to herself. 

He’d have laid rubber if there were any road to lay it on when he peels off towards town. Steering with his knee, he fumbles for his phone to call Scully, but there’s no service. He swears, flooring the gas.

A thin, awful, wail from Ree and he thinks of Emily dying by inches, dragging Scully down with her to the grave again. Emily’s burning body in his arms, staring mutely at him with her mother’s eyes.

He squeals onto the main road, eliciting a chorus of angry horns, when he realizes he has no idea where a hospital is. Scully’s off in Huntsville and he isn’t qualified for anything beyond CPR.

Mulder remembers the fire station from when they first arrived, and runs several red lights to get to it. Someone throws a rock at the car, but it bounces away.

Ree wails again, sitting up to scrabble at the window. Mulder glances at her in the rear view as he swerves onto MacNeill Street. She is thinner than he realized, and very pale. He didn’t think to check her gums and wonders if she’s in shock.

He calls back a flurry of reassuring nonsense to her, but she seems not to hear him. “I’m with the FBI,” he repeats. “You’re safe, Ree.”

She claws at the glass, whimpering.

Mulder finally sees the fire station up ahead on the left. He swerves across oncoming traffic and pulls halfway into the engine bay, narrowly missing four guys cooking hotdogs on a flimsy portable grill. They rise, yelling and waving their arms.

He’s waving his badge when he gets out, shouting Ree’s name over their indignant bellowing. 

“What the fuck do y-“

He opens the back door, catches Ree before she hits the ground. That’s all the conversation they need. The EMTs are yelling to one another, getting Ree in the ambulance, telling Mulder he’s a goddamn hero but he’d better get his fucking car out of the fucking way.

He backs out along the curb as the sirens scream. The ambulance howls past him, lights flashing, and disappears from view.

Mulder sits in his car for a moment, feeling strangely deflated. Then he gets his phone to call the sheriff with the good news.

***

Scully calls him from the hospital. She met the ambulance and the family there, figuring it was the easiest way to get the details for their report. Mulder is sprawled across the sagging expanse of his motel bed, propped up on one elbow. He is playing solitaire on his laptop as Scully fills him in.

“So anyway, she’d dehydrated and malnourished and had some bad bruises and scrapes, but nothing serious, which is impressive. They’re keeping her overnight at least for observation, but she seems fine, Mulder.”

He drags a queen of hearts across the screen. “Mmm. So is she talking yet?”

“Not much,” Scully says. “She’s still pretty freaked out. From the few things she has said, it sounds like she followed a deer into the woods and got lost. That’s why she didn’t have any of her things.” 

In the background are the beeps and echoes of hospital noises. Mulder finds them strangely soothing. “Okay, so where’d her clothes go? Where’d she get that quilt?”

A frustrated noise from Scully. “Mulder, they’re doing their best to get her story, but she’s very traumatized right now; you should know that. Maybe she found the cabin all collapsed and dragged the blanket out. Maybe it’s a different blanket entirely - this one was pretty beaten up. There’s no sign of sexual or other physical trauma, that’s the main thing.”

He knows it’s the main thing, but still. Still. “Scully, you listed a bunch of conditions that would make your teeth green. Anything that does it to the eyes?”

“Mulder,” she says warningly. “Why?”

 He rolls onto his back, abandoning the  game. “When I found her, I noticed that -”

“No,” Scully says. “Absolutely not.” Her voice is hard.

Mulder closes his eyes. “Is it real, or is it Memorex?” he asks.

“Don’t you dare,” Scully says, her voice a hiss. “Mulder, go for a run or take a shower or make use of the lotion or whatever it is you need to get this out of your system, but I know what you’re thinking and I absolutely forbid you to say a solitary word on the subject.”

He can envision her pacing furiously, black and white and red against the soft hospital neutrals. He imagines holy rage on her Botticelli face. “I won’t say anything,” he promises her.

“Good,” she replies, mollified. “The family wants to thank you in person, if you’re game to head over. I’m hanging out for about another half hour to look at some test results.”

He really, really isn’t game to head over, because he’s afraid he will fail to keep his mouth shut. “Tell them I was recently diagnosed with cranial rectal inversion, and I’m afraid of exposing them to a flare-up,” he says.

“Hilarious. I’ll tell them you turned your ankle during your daring rescue and you’ve got it up on ice.”

Mulder knows the fib is for the family’s sake rather than his, but he’s still grateful. “How many Hail Marys is that lie gonna cost, Dana Katherine?”

“I got a special dispensation from the Holy See for matters involving you,” she says. “It’s like EZ Pass. I go into the confessional, show my badge, and the priest just tells me not to worry about it.”

He’s grinning. “Yeah? You think the Pope’ll write a note to Kersh for me?”

“Even the Holy Father has no oversight over Alvin Kersh. Mulder, I’ve got to run, but I’ll be back at the motel within two hours. Call around for a flight, would you? I really don’t want to spend another night at the motel. Everything feels sticky.”

He turns to his side and pulls his laptop over. “I’m on it,” he tells her. 

She hangs up

“True enough for government work,” he says to no one.

***

Mulder goes for the run she suggested. His feet pound mindlessly against the pavement, past tidy lawns and mom-and-pop stores. He remembers the Samantha clones, the hive of identical girls who were in the world but not of it, and how he wanted to save just one of them. Scully would tell him that good works alone are not enough for salvation, that grace is required first. She might make a Catholic of him after all - he could use a little grace.

He glances through the window of the farm store and resists the urge to stop in. Past the church (CHRISTMAS BAZAAR BOOTHS STILL OPEN!) and two giggly teen girls. He’s coming up on the fire station when a hand claps him on the shoulder. He whirls around, reaches for the gun he didn’t bring.

“Whoa, hey, sorry,” says the guy who told him to move his fucking car earlier that day. “Just wanted to say thanks again.” The man’s about his age, more heavily muscled, and sporting a scruffy beard. His shirt reads VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER across the front.

Mulder holds his hands up in apology. “All good. I’m glad she’s home.”

“Owen Cylburn,” the man says, holding out a hand. 

Mulder shakes it. “Mulder,” he says. “Agent Scully’s still at the hospital.”

Owen hooks his thumbs through his belt loops. “Yeah, I heard she was a doctor. Real nice of her to look in on our girl.”

“You family?”

“Naw, but I live a few houses down and she plays with my son Simon sometimes. It’s a small town, you know? Anyway, I heard she’s doing fine.” Owen looks like there’s more he wants to say.

“Anything else on your mind, Mr. Cylburn?” Mulder asks.

He looks sheepish. “Oh, uh. Well, I guess I heard some talk, you know, about whatsername up in that old shack? You don’t really think she was involved, do you? I mean, I checked in on her a couple times and all, made sure the stove was safe. She seems nice. Just sort of strange.”

Mulder considers this for a moment. “Even if she were, clearing her house of fire hazards doesn’t mean you were aiding and abetting, you know. You do anything else while you were up there?”

Owen’s face darkens. “I don’t know what you’re implying, but I’m a happily marr-”

“Not what I meant. Sorry.”

“Oh,” Owen says, looking confused. “No, just the stove.”

Mulder tries again. “What I’m asking is, well, I heard some rumors too. That Tallulah was selling a little weed to supplement her income. Now listen, I’m not looking to hassle anybody. I’m a legalize it man myself, just trying to see if people were heading up there with any frequency to, uh, go shopping. And if they might have seen anything while they were there.”

“Ohhhh,” is the reply. “No, not my thing but I think I’m in the minority. I reckon she could blackmail half the upstanding members of the town if she wanted to, one way or another. Them or their spouses or their kids.” He shrugs. “It’s a dry town, so…”

Mulder nods. “I get it. Like I said, just trying to see if anyone might have been around, might have seen anything. But not trying to make a federal case of it.”

“Mighty decent of you. But anyhow, all’s well that ends well, I guess. My sister’s a nurse up at the hospital, she says Ree looks pretty good, all things considered.”

“Yeah, that’s what my partner said too. She’s a real pretty little girl, isn’t she? Golden hair, and those big green eyes.”

Owen frowns. “All the Rosses have that hair, but I don’t think she has green eyes.”

“My mistake,” Mulder says. “Anyhow, you have a good one.” 

He jogs off, thinking.

***

Scully’s getting out of a patrol car when he returns. There’s a German Shepherd in the back seat, muzzle against the grating.

“This is K9 Officer Jangles,” Scully says, introducing Mulder to the dog. “She’s new.”

Officer Jangles sticks her head out of the open rear window. Her tail is wagging and her ridiculous ears are tilted against one another.

“Brought Jangles up to see Ree,” says the cop. “She’s my niece. Ree, I mean. My brother’s girl.” He has the blonde hair of his clan.

“How is she?”

“Pretty good,” Officer Ross says. “Starting to talk a little more.”

Mulder is genuinely glad to hear this and says so. “It’ll be nice to have your green-eyed lassie home, I’m sure.”

Scully kicks him hard in the shin with her deadly shoes. “Officer Ross, thanks for the lift. Agent Mulder and I have a lot of paperwork to take care of, so I hope you’ll excuse us.”

The officer nods. “I can’t thank you enough, none of us ever could. Can we call your boss for like, uh, a commendation or something?”

Scully smiles. “That’s very kind, sir, but we’re really just doing our job.”

“Alvin Kersh,” Mulder calls, as Scully hauls him into her room. “Extension 44-”

The door slams shut.

***

She punches him in the arm. “What is wrong with you?” she demands. 

Mulder sits on her bed, which is identical to his. Her room smells nicer though, distinctly Scully-ish. “I’m sorry,” he says. He genuinely wishes he were different.

Scully sighs, rubbing her temples. She sits next to him. “I am covered in dog hair, I have listened to hours of conservative talk radio, and now you are in direct violation of the one thing I asked you not to do.” She leans over to sniff him. “And you smell like a stable.”

“I’m trying to keep my ass shapely,” he says. “I want to look sexy in my running shorts for you.”

She punches him again. “Go...go take a shower. I’ll call around for flights. Maybe we can get out of here tonight.”

“Done,” he says. “There aren’t any until tomorrow evening.”

Scully groans. “Please don’t tell me that. I need to get out of here. The water smells like pencil shavings, did you notice? Go shower though.”

Mulder turns and takes her hands. “I know that I am sweaty and disgusting but I think you’re going to want to hear me out before I go shower.”

“It better be good, Mulder, because you’re competing with Jangles right now.”

“So there’s a hotel near the airport with a day spa. It’s not exactly the Four Seasons, but the website looked pretty good. I thought we’d let Alvin spring for another night here, and we’ll luxuriate in Dead Sea mud.”

She laughs, crossing her arms. “Mulder, you can’t be serious.”

“I'm extremely serious. My treat. You know my policy on my father’s money.”

Scully rolls her eyes, mimes a little hand puppet with a talking mouth. “My paychecks are for living expenses, my inheritance is for my side projects.” She does a credible impression of his monotone.

“I’m glad at least some of what I say stuck with you. Seriously though, Scully. Let me do something nice for you.”

She considers this. “Mulder, your ‘side projects’ generally refer to subverting the government in some way or another. Are you trying to get me in bed again just to lob a stone in the eye of the government?” 

“Yes,” he says. “You are my ultimate middle finger to The Man. That is literally my only motivation here. Come on, Scully. You once told Congress to go fuck itself - surely you’ve got room in your arsenal for a moisturizing salt scrub and Swedish massage.”

“We’re like Bonnie and Clyde,” she says, and bumps her shoulder against his. She’s right about the dog fur, he notes.

“Whaddya say?” he asks. It feels silly to have his heart in his throat over this, to worry that she’ll turn him down like a long-shot prom date. “Two empty hotel rooms in Hooterville on the federal dime while we sneak off to live it up on room service. You know you want to, Bonnie.”

Scully drops her chin for a second, then looks up at him, resigned. “What the hell, Clyde.”

He kisses her hair. “Attagirl. I’ll have you fully corrupted in no time. Soon you’ll be stealing office supplies and blowing off mandatory training seminars of your own volition”

She shakes her head, grinning. “Is this where you remind me that a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step?”

He shakes his head. “No, this is where I point out that a journey of a thousand miles is pretty intimidating, so maybe starting with smaller day spa trips is more manageable. Hell, Scully. Even The Pretenders broke it into two five-hundred-mile walks.”

“Go take a shower,” she says.

***

When he comes out of the bathroom she’s sitting in his room with her luggage, looking like a waif at a train station.

“Jesus,” he says, flustered. “Glad I still had a few clean towels.” He rifles through his bag, looking for underwear. He wasn’t expecting an audience.

Scully looks politely away as he tugs them on. “I changed out of that be-dogged suit and figured I’d just pack up and we’d head out when you were ready. I already turned in my key.”

He notices now that she’s in a pair of leggings and a black sweater. Somehow she still looks chic. “You’re in quite a hurry to leave this charming hamlet,” he observes. “Or is it just the lure of the forbidden?”

“Mmmm, maybe both. Mostly it’s the lure of the sauna.”

“Fair.” He sniffs his jeans and, dismayed, pulls them on anyway. Fuck it, he’s a rich man. He’ll take them both shopping. Scully is an indulgence he’ll happily spend his father’s ill-gotten gains on. He’s long suspected some distant connection between his parents’ money and her chip; it would be poetic justice to spoil her.

She curls onto her side in the middle of the bed, watching him dress. “Mulder.”

“Hmm?”

“Nothing.”

When she’s ready, he knows. When she’s ready. Mulder ties his shoes, then retrieves her mousse from the bathroom. He styles his hair in the mirror above the dresser, waiting.

“Mulder.”

“Hmm?”

“When I was a kid, my Aunt Olive would tell us stories about this farm she grew up on outside Killarney. She lived with her grandparents, pretty staunch Catholics you know, but they believed in a lot of the old stories too.”

He’s listening attentively now, but she has a tendency to be skittish when discussing the intangible. He pulls a pair of tweezers out and plucks at imaginary stray hairs. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. After milking, Aunt Olive knew to leave a bowl of milk out for the Tuatha de Dannan. And a slice of bread from the new loaves.” She pauses, thinking. “I mean, I don’t know that they actually believed it, but you know how these things are.”

“Belt and suspenders,” he says.

She chuckles. “Something like that, yeah. Anyway, Mulder, I was thinking about that milk bottle. And then I started thinking about my Aunt Olive’s stories. And I wondered if maybe you bought Tallulah some new milk and fresh bread.”

Mulder puts the tweezers down. He joins her on the bed, sitting in the curve made by her body. He pets her side, her shiny hair, and savors the sheer pleasure of touching her. “It wasn’t super new,” he says. “It was pasteurized.”

“Oh, Mulder,” Scully says. She rubs his thigh.

He stretches out onto the bed, facing her. She has aged with obscene grace. Distilled more than aged, really, he thinks. Refined to a more essential Scully-ness. “Sometimes all that people need is to be seen,” he says. “I figured even if she’s just some weird transient hillbilly who sells weed and tells horrifying lies, she might appreciate a snack.” 

Scully smiles and scoots closer to him. She strokes the bridge of his nose. “Fox Mulder, you big softie.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Should I take that as a personal indictment?”

“You’re a riot.”

He strokes her cheek with the backs of his fingers. “I don’t know, when I was a kid I read To Kill A Mockingbird for school, and the part where Atticus said you had to walk around in someone’s skin to know them really resonated with me. I guess I wish I had been extended that courtesy.” 

Scully smiles. “Mmm, I used to think about how I would have made Boo Radley come out.”

Mulder laughs, imagining a tiny, serious Scully laying artful traps. “Like Bugs Bunny?”

She laughs too. “Something like that, yeah. I guess I just connected with the idea of the unknown being concretely knowable if only the right methodology were applied.”

“Nerd,” he says.

“Always. You would have snuck into the house and said, ‘Hello, Mr. Radley. I’m Fox Mulder.’ No tricks for you.” 

He probably would have, at that. “Yeah, but then comes my usual trouble. No evidence, no witnesses.”

She kisses him softly, bumping his nose with hers. “Maybe I need to walk around in your skin more. You say you got to walk around in my head.”

“I didn’t peek anywhere untoward,” he says, and wraps his arms around her.

She regards him seriously. “I trust you. But I do wonder what you saw. I’m not an angel, Mulder.”

“I wouldn’t want you to be.” He runs his thumb over her lips, and she nips at it. “You’re incandescent, Scully. Like a lighthouse at the edge of a vast, nighttime sea.”

She looks pleased and shy. “Well,” is all she says. “Well.” She tucks her head beneath his chin.

He holds her there, in this bland little room in the heart of nowhere. Her body is warm and compact and trusting, her fingers soft on his neck. She doesn’t always believe in his ideas, he knows, but she believes in him, and it’s more than enough.

Eventually he rouses her, the promise of more luxurious accommodations his only motivator for breaking this gentle peace. They gather their belongings and head to the car. The sky is purple and orange around them and ahead, an infinite sea of stars. He drives west, towards the setting sun. Scully takes his hand and smiles; a flame in the dark.