Title:  The Mill

Author:  cofax

Email:  cofax7@yahoo.com

Category:  X, A

Rating:  R for content

Spoilers: through season 5

Content Warning:  Deep dark angst.  Don't say you weren't warned.

Summary:  "A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, bitter
weeping; Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be
comforted for her children, because they were not."  Jeremiah 31:
15-17.

Disclaimer:  Infringement is obviously intended, but no money is
changing hands and therefore no damage is being done to Fox and
1013's intellectual property.

Notes:  Many many thanks to Marasmus who told me a year ago that
I simply had to finish this.  All my love to the unstoppable
beta-team:  Maria Nicole, Kelly Keil, Alicia K, M. Sebasky,
Magdeleine, and JHJ Armstrong.  Special credit to Shannono for
last-minute corrections.

Yes, Virginia, I am.
 
 

The Mill
by cofax
October 2000

***

1:17 p.m.
November 6
 

He found her in the third church.

Saint Aidan's was a small neighborhood church, abutted, as so
many were, by the brick walls of its affiliated grammar school.
A multi-colored swirl of children raced across the fenced
playground, their squeals cutting across Mulder's mind like
knives.

The main door was unlocked.  Mulder edged the heavy slab of oak
open a few inches and slipped inside.  There was nothing in
the entry hall but some old church bulletins and the holy water
font.  On a corkboard, a yellow flyer advertised a pancake
breakfast and silent auction.  Through the glass doors Mulder saw
candles glimmering softly on the altar.  The overhead lights were
dim.

He moved towards the inner doors, but before his outstretched
hand reached the handle, the door was thrust open from inside.
An older man stumbled through the doorway and careened into
Mulder.  Mulder grabbed him by the arms and steadied him, and not
until he felt the smooth catch of silk under his fingers did he
identify the man as a priest.

The man opened his mouth once, twice, but said nothing.  His pale
hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat.  Mulder shook him
gently, then opened his hands and touched one finger to the
purple stole around the priest's neck.

"Is she here?"  His voice was so soft, he could hardly hear
himself.

The priest nodded rapidly several times.  A droplet of sweat ran
down his nose and dripped onto the immaculate silk of his
cassock.  He waved vaguely in the direction of the altar.  "She -
- she's in there.   I -- um, I don't know --"

Mulder flipped his badge at the priest, then pressed a business
card into the man's sticky palm.  "Give me ten minutes, then call
this number and ask for Assistant Director Skinner.  Tell him
I've found her."

He went through the doors without waiting for an answer.
 

***

August 18

It was an evening in late summer, one of those nights that was so
balmy that only the truly delusional spent them inside instead of
counting fireflies and swatting mosquitoes in the soft air.
Mulder was in the office.  Scully had had a dentist's appointment
late in the day and hadn't returned to work afterwards.  It was
after eight o'clock but thin rose light still filtered through
the high windows on the rear wall.  When there was a soft knock
at the door, Mulder swiveled his chair toward the door without
removing his eyes from the file before him.

"Yeah?"

"Hey, Mulder.  You got a moment?"

Mulder put a finger on the text to hold his place and turned his
head.  The filtered light of the basement office shimmered off
Jerry O'Connor's ever-growing forehead as he hesitated in the
doorway.  O'Connor's voice was as hesitant as his manner,
although Mulder remembered him as one of the more competent and
stable staff members in BSU.

"Sure, Jerry." Mulder waved him to a chair.  Instead O'Connor
came around the edge of the desk and dropped a file into his
hands.

With an inquiring glance at Jerry's face, Mulder flipped the
folder open.  Inside were crime scene photos and forensic
reports, detailing the death by carbon monoxide poisoning of a
five-year-old girl.  Mulder raised a brow and flipped to the
front of the file.  Teresa Campbell had died three months ago,
and her death had been determined by Silver Spring police to be
an accident.

So.  Jerry wouldn't be here if this was all there was.  "Another
death?"

O'Connor nodded and handed him another file.  This one was brand
new, the edges of the manila folder not yet softened by handling.
Jeffrey Sullivan had also died from carbon monoxide poisoning,
three days ago, in Georgetown.  This time there were enough
anomalies for the DC police to consider it a possible homicide,
and it was being investigated as such.

Both kids were about five years old, both had fine light hair,
but other than that there were few similarities.   Jeffrey
Sullivan was a chubby child; the photo in the file showed him
perched on top of a pony at a birthday party, his face fixed with
fear.  Teresa Campbell's photo was a softball picture, her tanned
face grinning cheerfully at the camera from under a cap.  On the
flip side of the photo were her stats: Age 5, height 3'10",
weight 45 lbs, position shortstop.

Mulder put the pictures of the two children on the desk in front
of him.  After a long moment, he looked up at O'Connor.

"You think there's a connection?"  He didn't see it, not after
only a glance at the files.

O'Connor nodded vigorously and pulled up a chair next to Mulder.
"I'm sure of it.  But I need you to help me find it."

***

1:20 p.m.
November 6

Mulder eased the door carefully shut behind him.  At first glance
the church was empty, the soft light of the candles rippling on
the old wooden pews.  The altar at the head of the church was
covered with a long white cloth, stained faintly pink by the red
lantern behind the altar.  He wanted to ask her how she could
come here, after all that had happened, but he doubted she would
be able to answer him.

The church was warm; Mulder shrugged out of his overcoat and
threw it over the nearest bench.  He moved forward, stepping
softly down the main aisle.  He saw Scully finally, a dark figure
slumped mid-way down the pew.  Her hands were up over her face,
and she was perched on the edge of the pew with her knees on the
cushioned bench below.

She didn't move as he slid down the row toward her.  She was
speaking rapidly, each word barely escaping her mouth before
another followed it.  Prayers, he realized.

"Hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswiththeeblessed
artthoughamongwomenandblessedisthefruitofthy
wombjesusHolymarymotherofgodprayforus
sinnersnowandinthehour--"

He couldn't see her face.  Despite the heat in the church, she
had not removed her overcoat.  It was stained and muddy at the
bottom; she must have walked a long way.  Her hands were white
with pressure, forcing her fingertips against her eyes.

Mulder closed his own eyes rather than keep watching her.  Oh
mill, what hast thou ground?
 

***

September 22

They entered the office together, both slinging briefcases onto
desks: one with a thump and a scatter of paperwork, the other
with a quiet sigh.  The Wisconsin case had been fascinating but
exhausting.  It was after five on a Friday and all Mulder wanted
to do was check his e-mail, go home, and sleep late into the
morning.

As he powered up his computer and struggled out of his coat, he
heard Scully sorting through paperwork behind him.  Outlook
slowly expanded to fill the screen with the dozens of notices the
Bureau felt necessary to keep all division chiefs informed.  He
glanced at Scully to see her stuff some papers into an accordion
folder and slide the entire pile into her briefcase.

"Leaving so soon?"

She slung the bag over her shoulder.  "Yeah.  I need to get to
the dry-cleaners.  I picked up a nasty stain on my overcoat and
they're not open on Saturdays."

The most recent message was from Jerry O'Connor.  "Urgent" it
said, with a red exclamation point next to the subject line.
Mulder frowned; he had given his preliminary profile to Jerry
just before they left for Wisconsin on Monday.  What had
happened?

Another death.  Katie Somerville's body had been discovered three
hours ago, as Mulder and Scully had caught their connection at
O'Hare.  While they had raced to the next terminal, dodging
anonymous wheeled suitcases, the Alexandria PD had been snapping
shots of the body of Katie Somerville, found curled as if
sleeping in a long-abandoned tree house six blocks away from her
home.  She had been missing for five days.

"I thought you were going right home?"  Scully was paused at the
door, her hand on the knob.

"Hm?"  Something was very off about this one.  According to
Mulder's analysis, the killer should not have moved again so
quickly.  He was going to have to revisit the profile.

"Mulder.  Home.  Bed.  Sleep."

"Oh, yeah.  I'll leave soon.  Something's just come up on that
case in BSU . . . "

"Oh?"  There was a pause.  "Okay then.  Mulder."

"Yeah?"  Something in her voice made him turn toward the door.
She flashed him a smile.

"Have a good weekend, Mulder."

"You too, Scully."  By the time the soft chime of the elevator
sounded, he was pulling files up from the archives, looking for
something to explain this discrepancy.
 

***

1:31 p.m.
November 6

He gave her a minute, but they didn't have much time.  Skinner
wasn't going to wait; this was too sensitive to screw up.  As it
was, the Bureau was in for a hard time, and the press would
pillory Skinner.  Mulder tried not to think about what Scully was
going to go through.

Mulder leaned against her, telling her with his warmth and his
presence that she wasn't alone.  "Scully . . ."

"No."  The word was clear behind her muffling hands.  Mulder felt
her start to shake, her shoulder twitching against his.

"Scully--" This time he raised his voice a little more.  They
were running out of time, and he had to connect with her before
the task force arrived.  This might be his last chance for a long
time.

"I have to -- I have to finish ---" Her words were whispered,
desperate, but her body had begun to shudder now, and Mulder
spotted a drop of liquid sparkling on her chin below the heel of
her hands.

Enough.  He had to see her face.  Gently but firmly, he pulled
Scully's hands away from her face, and shifted around until he
could see her as clearly as possible in the shadowed church.
Then he wished he hadn't.

Even in the very worst of times, even during the cancer, or after
Pfaster, she hadn't looked like this.  Her eyes were wide, wide;
he could almost see fissures opening as he watched.  Her skin was
so pale, her hands so cold.  Something else he recognized in her
face, something Mulder saw in the mirror at far-too-frequent
intervals.

Leper outcast unclean.

It's true, then, he thought.  He hadn't accepted it until now.
 

***
 

11:15 a.m.
November 6

"Scully."  Her voice was curt, and Mulder blinked a little in
surprise.  She had been quite agreeable when he'd called her last
night with his request.   Remarkably so, really, given that she
always hated any cases where children were victims.  Not that he
could blame her; children were the worst, and the closer to the
holidays these cases happened, the less she liked them.

He shifted in his chair.  He'd been up since four a.m., and had
slept only for a few hours, hours snatched on the cot in the
storage room down the hall.  He wondered sometimes if the
janitors knew he crashed there, and whether they cared.   He
stretched, trying to work out the kinks in his back without
actually getting out of the chair.

"Have you found anything?"

"Not really.  I've compared it to the report on Katie Somerville,
however, and the killer's methodology has definitely changed."

"Because he used chloroform and a knife this time."

"Not just that.  This death was much faster.  I think the killer
was in a hurry."

Mulder sighed.  What had changed?  His brain was functioning more
slowly than he'd like it to. This morning he'd visited the
Augsberger household, where yesterday five-year-old Timothy had
been found by his parents dead in the backyard.  He'd been out of
sight for no more than twenty minutes and in fact they'd thought
him still in the sandbox.

He was in the sandbox, but he was dead.

"The only thing that's changed, Scully, is the press leak.  He
knows we're watching for him."  For the thirtieth time in the
past four days, Mulder cursed the moron who had talked to that
reporter.  Saturday's Washington Times had run a banner headline
about the "Washington Child Killer".  The emergency press
conference had been one of the least pleasant moments in his FBI
career.

"Yeah," she said, but her voice was dubious, and somewhat
distant.  "So, did you get anything at the crime scene?"

"Actually, we did.  We lifted a set of prints from the brim of
his baseball cap.  They're very small, they might be the
mother's, but ..."

There was a long silence.  He heard some clinking sounds through
the phone.  "Scully?"

"I don't know, Mulder."  He could hear her thinking; he knew the
expression on her face as she tried to fit the puzzle pieces this
way, then that.  "I just -- why assume this killer is a man?"

"Because most of them are."  But he knew as he said it that was a
stupid reason.  There was no evidence of sexual abuse or other
torture.  No indication one way or another as to the gender of
the killer.  Statistics were just statistics, and couldn't be
relied upon exclusively . . .  he should have caught that before
making that assumption, dammit.

No abuse.  Painless deaths.  He sat up in the chair, letting his
feet drop to the floor.  Perhaps . . .  perhaps this was not a
crime of abuse, but a crime of salvation.  Like Gerry Schnauzz,
perhaps the killer was saving the victims, saving them from
horrors only he, or she, could see.  That would require an
entirely different approach to the profile; he was going to have
to scratch it all and start again from the beginning --

"Mulder?"

He caught his breath.  The last time he had heard that note in
her voice they had been huddled on an ice field.

"Yeah?  Scully, are you okay?"

"I know why they died."

"What?  What did you find?"  Trust Scully to find something any
other pathologist would miss.

Her voice was soft and uncertain.  "He was alone in the backyard.
He would have thought she was safe, a teacher, a babysitter.
Women aren't dangerous, and she would be pretty, soft, maybe
smell nice -- maybe he would walk right up to her -- "

Mulder raised a brow.  He knew Scully could profile, and she'd
done it on several other cases.  But it was usually far less
intuitive and stream-of-consciousness than this.  "That makes a
lot of sense, Scully.  Have you found some evidence on the victim
to support it?"

There was a long pause.

"Oh, God."

He had never heard her like this.  It was as if the words were a
body that had been dragged to shore over water-sharpened coral,
and emerged bleeding.

"Oh, God, Mulder.  I know how they died.  I can see it.  He was
on the swing set and they were at the front and you could just
tell he was one of them.  That red hair, the right age, such a
sweet little boy.  He looks just like Charlie did, like Emily.
Such a beautiful boy, he had to be one of them, he had to be
saved -- oh God oh God oh God -- "

Mulder's brain stopped.  It felt as though the synapses had
frozen.  All the little chemical and electrical processes in his
head paused, every thought suspended.  He opened his mouth, but
there were no words.

Her voice faded; she was going away from the phone, and then
there was a piercing clatter, and Mulder yanked the receiver away
from his ear.

"Doctor Scully?" Another voice, faint and alarmed, came over the
line. "Doctor Scully, are you all right?"  And then there was
only the dial tone.
 

***

1:34 p.m.
November 6

"Scully -- " His voice broke.  He couldn't say the words -- what
could he say?  There were no words that could touch this.  He
pulled her, unresisting, into his arms, wrapped them around her,
and clung to her in desperation.  Her hair still smelled of
lemons -- she always used lemon shampoo after an autopsy -- and
he fought back a sudden rush of bile in his throat.

She rested in his arms, soft, quiet, as he'd never known her.
Even in their closest moments, in the stolen intimacies they
sometimes found amidst the crazed whirl of events, she had never
been this passive.  After a few moments he released her, leaned
back to look at her face.  And realized that, for her, he wasn't
even there.  Oh, she knew who he was, but she wasn't seeing him
or feeling him.  Nothing could comfort Dana Scully now.

He brought a hand to her face, wiped a tear from her cheek.  She
turned her face away, back towards the altar.  She stirred
restlessly in his grasp.  "I need -- Mulder, I need to --"  He
let his hands fall away then, shuffled backwards, trying not to
catch his feet in the kneelers, until he was in the aisle again.

Scully stumbled to her feet and climbed out of the pew.  Oh God,
he thought suddenly.  What can I tell her mother?  Her step was
very soft, tentative; he saw her pause and balance herself
against an armrest twice on her way towards the altar.
 

***

11:23 a.m.
November 6
 

The hallway between the office and the elevator was, as usual,
cluttered with old cabinets and boxes of files too unimportant
for the archives but too useful to throw away completely.  Mulder
kicked away a box empty of anything but a broken coffee mug and
stabbed the call button.  There would be no answer on her cell
phone, he knew; he had to get to her, had to --

The elevator door opened, and Mulder swung through it, his eyes
blind  -- to knock Jerry O'Connor nearly off his feet.
O'Connor's face was sweaty, and as Mulder reached out to steady
the other man, Jerry fumbled with the file-folder he was
clutching in both hands.

"Mulder, I  -- "  He swallowed, and let go of the file with one
hand to smear a hand across his face.  "Here's the fingerprint
results.  I think you need to see them."  Jerry held out the file
to Mulder, but Mulder couldn't take it; he simply stood with one
hand on the elevator doorframe, keeping it open.  After a moment
Jerry dropped the file, and as it fell it opened.  The thin
sheets caught the air and floated gently down to land askew on
the stained brown carpet of the elevator floor.

Jerry put a gentle hand on Mulder's arm and walked out of the
elevator, looking anywhere but at Mulder.  Mulder watched as
Jerry passed the door to the office and disappeared around the
corner leading to the fire stairs.  The fingerprint analysis
rustled as Mulder shifted his feet.  After a long moment he took
his hand down, and the elevator doors closed.

All the doors were closed now.
 

***
 

1:36 p.m.
November 6
 

Scully reached the railing before the altar, paused before the
low gate separating the sacred from the profane.  She dropped to
her knees on the marble.  Mulder shook himself into movement and
leaped forward, but not soon enough to catch his partner's body
as she slumped onto the floor.  Her sobs echoed in the quiet
church, and the room blurred before him.

Mulder knelt on the cold marble before the altar to a god he
could not know, and gathered her in.  This woman whom he loved as
his own soul, this woman who was now wreckage.  Even with her new
burdens, she was a light weight, and he stood easily.  After a
long moment in which he pondered the cross above the altar, his
eyes hooded, he turned and walked down the long aisle towards the
church doors.  Shafts of afternoon sunlight pierced through the
side windows of the church and striped the carpet like bars.

Sirens were screaming in the distance as Fox Mulder stepped out
of the vestibule onto the front steps of the church, one last
victim in his arms.
 

END
***

Notes:  I don't have much to say except to apologize to any
readers who feel I must have lost my mind.  This story has been
brewing for about a year, since shortly after I saw "All Souls"
and the "Christmas Carol/Emily" sequence for the first time.  I
added those two together, and came up with this slice of horror.
Also, I've been a bit blocked for the past few months and digging
this one out of the files helped get me writing again.  It is
probably the darkest thing I've ever written.

I look forward to hearing your comments at cofax7@yahoo.com.