Sarracenia
By Prufrock
Leafofgras@aol.com
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998
Classification: XR (mild)
Rating: R (language)
Summary: Mulder and Scully investigate killings in a secluded wooded area.
Their main suspect blurs the line between man and plant -- a product of
science and ambition, let loose.
Disclaimer: I don't own them. I won't make any money this way. It's writing
practice. An exercise. So, to all who are upset, my deepest apologies.
Author's note:
This story began as an homage to the 1951 sf classic, The Thing. At some
point, it developed into an experiment in sf romanticism. That is, the
romantic literature of the 19th century in which nature plays a major role,
often more significant than the characters themselves. The idea is that man,
let loose in a natural environment, is both impulsive and emotional... more
natural. This in turn led to a response to a personal challenge (you know who
you are!) to play with the characters in such a setting. Now, it should be
known that I am not a shipper, and any interaction between the characters is a
literary exercise -- the challenge being how to make such an interaction
realistic. You should note that the romance is mild, brief, not entirely
positive, and more of a tease and/or UST than anything. If you're looking for
a smut fest, lots of kissing, or Mariah Carey song lyrics, this is not the
place. This IS an X-file, and the characters' emotions are created in the
context of the setting, and are also subordinate to the setting.
I hope you enjoy the story! I have some more things to say about it, but I
don't want to bore you with it...if you're interested, there will be some
comments after the story!
Thanks,
Prufrock
comments welcome and encouraged at leafofgras@aol.com
***
"An intellectual carrot? The mind boggles."
from The Thing (from Another World)
***
Morning descended amongst the fog, the light of dawn reflecting off white mist
and brightening the forest in an unnatural glow. Here, among the trees, the
air smelled of fertility, the fertility gained not only by living but by
dying. In death, nutrients were brought forth to nourish the life of
seedlings struggling to grow in this ancient, shadowy world. A cycle of
living and dying, living and dying, circled forth from ages ago and stretched
toward ages as yet unimagined. It was the way of things. Uninterrupted.
Unchallenged. Misunderstood by the few who walked the ancient ground in
search of some transcendental experience. There was no transcendence to be
found here among the towering trees. No secret lingered in the souls of
ancient wood that would illuminate human experience in any truthful way.
There were only illusional truths to be grasped, fleeting glimpses of order
within chaos.
In the shadows, there was a movement. A sound--a scraping, like sandpaper
against wood. A branch seemed to move and flex. More like soft flesh than
green wood. Twig-like shapes reached into a wet ground, testing the uncertain
spring that had lately given buds to trees and voice to wary birds. Within
the solid shadow that moved, spring gave birth to hunger, an aching, insistent
hollowness. Two eyes opened slowly, breaking the seal that had held them shut
in darkness, in hiding. In the brown, swimming without a touch of white, the
film of hibernation began to drain away, and there was a flicker of
intelligence, and perhaps even of pain.
***
Agent Scully stood absolutely still. She could feel her breath and blood
coursing through her, unmolested by movement or thought. She did not believe
in instinct. It was a gift denied humankind. But she did believe in skills
learned so completely that they wove themselves into the very fabric of being.
Reaction became reflex, as automatic as breathing. She squeezed her index
finger and felt her body kick back slightly from the power of her weapon.
Muscles, long used to this manifestation of physics, absorbed the force into
relaxed tissue. Scully fired off three more rounds in succession, not
bothering to check her aim. Setting down her gun gently, she cranked in the
target. Small bullet holes marred the blackness of the letter Q.
Flexing her fingers, Scully allowed herself to feel the pleasurable tingling
in her hand and wrist from shooting and shooting well. All of her stress had
at least temporarily evaporated with the impact of the bullets. As she was
removing her ear protection she caught a glimpse of her partner lurking by one
wall, watching the line of shooters with a languid expression.
"Hey," she said as she walked over to him.
He nodded at her and pulled himself off the wall. "That's some good
shooting," he said, gesturing toward her gun which now hung loosely in her
right hand. She smiled and reholstered the weapon with a shrug. "Time for
recertification?" he asked.
"No," she answered. "What's going on?"
"A case."
"It couldn't wait until Monday?"
He didn't answer. He just held open the door for her as they walked out.
Scully rolled her neck and sighed, longing for just a moment for the mindless
repetition of shooting, for the blankness of mind it not only enabled but
encouraged. But here was Mulder, a reminder of the present, and ironically,
of reality. She unlocked her car door, then leaned against the roof, waiting
for her partner to divulge whatever he had on his mind. "Can I come over to
go over it with you?" he asked. "I'd like to fly out tomorrow if possible."
He rested his hands on top of the car and grinned. "This case is likely to
involve some camping. Nothing like a good romp in the woods to get the
spirits going. Campfires, S'Mores, Kumbaya..."
Scully smiled in spite of herself. "I suppose you have all the material with
you," she said.
"Of course."
She nodded. Typical. It was a little game they played. Mulder pretended to
ask for her approval on X-files. She pretended to disagree, then she went
along anyway. "I'll see you at my apartment," she said.
"I've longed to hear you say that."
She shook her head and got in the car without replying. Her fingers trembled
slightly on the steering wheel. She jerked the ignition, and gunned into
reverse, driving with the recklessness she had been prone to lately.
***
"Knowledge is more important than life, Captain."
--from The Thing
***
"There have been a series of deaths," he explained as he flipped through
channels on the television. "Three campers have died in three months.
According to reports, it appears that they died as the result of multiple
wounds caused by some sort of wooden instrument."
"Wood?" Scully asked. She sat in her wing chair, her legs tucked under her.
The case file rested unopened in her lap. It would be opened after hearing
Mulder's take on the whole thing. The tangibility of case photos and reports
offered some respite from the insanity of her partner.
"Splinters have been found in the wounds, in the deepest part of the
lacerations. "
Scully took a sip of her water and shrugged. "So the killer used a wooden
instrument." She paused suddenly. "Oh, Christ, Mulder. You're not thinking
of a wooden stake are you?"
"No."
"Good."
"You know what else, Scully? The bodies have been eaten." He waved at the
folder resting on her leg. "Look at the photos."
She paged through the contents until she found the black and white crime scene
photos. Impassively, she held them close so she could study their detail.
The body pictured was barely recognizable as human. Several messy wounds had
shredded the skin and exposed organs. Although already in a state of
decomposition, the corpse had been partially eaten. "It looks like whatever
consumed the flesh of the victims began *after* the body had started to
decay," she said.
"Kind of makes me crave sushi," Mulder murmured, leaning over the coffee table
to get another look at the picture.
"What are these marks?" she asked, pointing to a series of lines near where
the body had been chewed on. There were several series of these marks, short
parallel scrapes, seven in number. "They look like teeth marks," she said,
"but that can't be."
"Why not?"
"Well, they're shallow. It's hard to tell from this close up, but it looks
like the cuts barely go deeper than the epidermis. And as far as I can tell,
the pressure looks to be evenly distributed, which would rule out dental
imprints. Besides, what carnivore would have teeth like this? What animal for
that matter?" She let the photos drop back onto the table and settled back
into her chair. Mulder regarded her silently, his hands clasped lightly in
his lap. "Oh, no you don't. I know what you're thinking."
"No, you don't," he said cheerfully,
"I know it's something ridiculous."
"Scully, wood was found embedded in those wounds, almost as if wooden fingers
had scraped out the brainpan to nab a quick snack during the commercial
break." He made a claw with his left hand and gripped his partner's shoulder.
She pulled away irritably.
"Are you suggesting that we have a sentient vegetable on our hands, Mulder?
Some sort of man-eating tree? Wouldn't a traditional serial killer be more
plausible? Besides, why even connect the consumption of the bodies with the
murder? They could be completely unrelated."
"I don't think they are. Those marks, that *resemble* dental imprints,
suggest a creature that has weak teeth. Such a creature would find decayed
flesh much easier to chew and digest." He paused. "Really, who wouldn't."
Scully threw the case file from her lap. "Forget it."
"What?"
"Forget it. This is ridiculous. This is the most absurd thing you have tried
to drag me into for years. You haven't a shred of evidence to support claims
that are at best farfetched and at worse, the panicked reachings of a man
searching for the incredible in the mundane."
"Panicked reachings?" Mulder's voice had risen a tone. Scully recognized the
challenge in it and she leaned forward to meet it, folding her legs out from
under her.
"That's right. Everywhere we turn there is nothing but a dead end, or a new
lie, or some anomaly that, while curious, illuminates nothing about those
things we are striving to understand. You're obsessive, Mulder. When there
is nothing to be found, you create it."
He rose. "I'll go alone then."
"You will *not.* You're my partner." The words came out in a hiss and Scully
stood up slowly. She was only chest high to her lanky partner but she carried
herself with a constrained power, like a coiled spring. Behind her hard eyes
there was emotion, raw and primal. Mulder clenched his teeth but said
nothing. Once he had the argument that the X-files were his baby, that she
had no right to make the calls. He no longer had that claim. Scully was a
living, breathing X-file, her past and future as scripted as his own, her
losses as great. Were they to compare scars, he doubted he would emerge the
victor. He had known that she would have trouble buying this, that the
threads were too thin even for her generous trust in his judgment. He had
toyed with telling her how he had found about the case, about a small envelope
dropped in his lap as he sat near the Washington Monument. About the thin and
somehow artificial seeming woman who had sat beside him with smoky eyes that
suggested promises and information. About how his fingers had itched at the
envelope even as some part of him cried out to leave it there, to rely on only
himself and his partner. Months ago, crouched by Scully's bedside, staring
at skin turned waxy white, at lips dried and tinged with blue, he had sworn
that he would no longer play the puppet. He would no longer allow them to
control his moves by ferreting out information to him as one would train a dog
with carefully spaced biscuits. But promises made in the shadow of death
often lose their hold when the spectre has departed. And when Marita dangled
that envelope, the justifications came more easily than he would have liked to
admit. Not all of their information was tainted. Didn't he have an
obligation to look at it, for both his sake and Scully's? It could have some
valuable clue to the conspiracy that enveloped them in an invisible shroud.
And he had taken it, closed his fingers around its edges. His hand had been
deceptively still even as adrenaline coursed through him, and his heart
trembled with some instinctive fear, and also an undeniable need to know what
she knew, even if that knowledge came to him distorted.
In his silence, Scully had walked away from him and was pacing back and forth
in the room, her arms crossed against her chest, her lips moving slightly as
if she were voicing the thoughts in her head.
"You're the scientist," he said, and he was aware his voice had lost its edge
and now had a hint of pleading to it. "Knowledge is useful for its own sake."
"But there are priorities, Mulder." She stopped her pacing and gripped the
back of her chair.
"I know."
She studied her hands for a moment and then looked up at him. "All right,"
she said. "I'll go."
***
The smell of the morgue was overpowering, although not in the way many would
expect it to be. It did not exude a smell of death, or even of life.
Instead, the overwhelming sensation was one of artificiality, of chemicals and
disinfectants and rough, powerful soap. Here, the messiness of dying was
buried in the clinical aura of science. Bodies that once breathed life were
arrested in their process of decay so that knowledge, and thus, meaning, could
be gleaned from the still cells and silent organs.
Mulder hated it. Deeply. He sat on an uncomfortable metal chair in the
corner of the examination room eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells
into a little paper bag, Should one happen to fall on the sterile floor, he
was certain some alarm would sound and a serious looking technician would
arrive with a broom and a sharp reprimand. He closed his eyes under the glare
of the fluorescent lights and tried to ignore the scraping and squelching
sounds coming from the other side of the room where his partner stood over the
exam table. Instead, he focused on the low hum of the lights, buzzing with
what normally would be an irritable constancy. It wasn't even as if autopsies
disturbed him. He had seen too many, spent too many hours watching over
Scully's shoulder as she sliced and diced. A lot of times, the general
gooiness of a body's innards, the slippery chaos held together by a
deceivingly solid layer of skin, forced a grimace from his lips. But gross
was different than disturbing, and he knew gross intimately, and didn't mind
it.
But today he felt on edge, nervous almost, as if he had forgotten something.
Restlessness brewed within him, and the excess energy made him feel uneasy.
Too much coffee hadn't helped either, and as jumpy as he was, he didn't much
feel like getting close and personal with the blackened, half-eaten corpse
that lay grotesquely on the stainless steel table. Scully worked over it with
her usual precision. Draped in scrubs, with the sharp scalpel glinting in her
hand, he had a sudden memory of the hallucinatory images that had plagued him
in the virtual hell of Artificial Intelligence. He shuddered. Scully caught
the movement and glanced up from the body.
"You okay, Mulder?"
Her voice was neither sarcastic nor taunting, but Mulder bristled nonetheless.
He rose with some relief from the uncomfortable chair and walked over to the
body. She regarded him wordlessly before returning her attention to the
mangled heap before her. She was busy extracting slivers of wood from the
wounds with tweezers.
Mulder bent over and studied the hands which were still completely intact.
"Looks like our hungry predator preferred the fattier cuts," he observed.
"There are a lot of bones in the hand," she said without looking up.
"Have you gotten any dirt out of the fingernails yet?"
"Not yet," she said. Her voice was quiet.
"Did you notice these abrasions?"
"Yes, Mulder."
"What do you think?"
She set the scalpel down with a sharp metallic clang. "Mulder, would you
please let me do my job in peace? I'm not going to miss anything."
"Well, I know how you feel about this case."
"That doesn't mean I'm going to do a half-ass job. Do you think that I would
deliberately ignore certain procedures because I don't think your theory is
valid?" Mulder shrugged and leaned over to look at the other side of the
body. Scully glared at him. "You're in my way," she said finally.
Mulder blinked at her, shifting slightly under her gaze. "I'll go see about
our equipment," he mumbled.
The door closed quietly behind him and the silence that filled the room was
almost palpable. Scully concentrated on pushing her emotions away from
herself, folding them up and tucking them away so she could work. But they
lingered, clinging to the back of her thoughts like pieces of spiritual lint.
Perhaps, she mused, her feeling reservoir was full, and there just wasn't any
more room. Fucking Mulder. He hadn't been this conceited in a long time,
first sitting in the corner as if he were bored with the procedure, and
finally hovering over her like a med school instructor. She was half tempted
to hand him the scalpel and let him do it. And this case-- she tried to keep
an open mind, but he had such little evidence, and there were so many other
important things they could be doing. They were just running in place,
sifting through the pieces of the conspiracy but unable to put them together.
Just questions and questions and no answers. Just more deaths, more bodies
piling up while they shrugged their shoulders and pointed their guns at
shadows.
As thoughts and worries rambled in some part of her head, the rest was tightly
focused on the job at hand. Like Mulder, she possessed the ability to detach
herself from herself, to work intensely while some other portion went about
the process of living. A speck of greenish white caught her attention and she
carefully removed it with her tweezers. It was a shard of something, almost
like a tooth. She placed it on a slide and continued her work with meticulous
slowness.
****
Scully returned to the hotel, drained, hungry and irritable. The autopsy had
taken longer than she had planned; there were anomalies that required extra
notes and observations. Slipping off her shoes, she collapsed onto the bed
and flung one arm over her eyes to block out the glaring overhead light. Her
head was throbbing and the emptiness in her stomach made her feel vaguely
sick.
She didn't have to wait long for the inevitable knock. "Scully?" Mulder's
voice practically dripped with eagerness. Scully sighed and had a brief,
surreal vision of "The Three little Pigs." She could see Mulder out there
threatening to blow her door down. She slid off the bed and opened the door
for him. To her utter disbelief, he handed her a wrinkled paper bag.
"Sandwich," he said. "I figured you haven't eaten yet."
She was too stunned to thank him properly as she opened the bag with hunger
induced panic. Perhaps he was feeling a tinge of remorse, and hoped to buy
her forgiveness with ham on rye. It worked for her. While she ate, Mulder
reclined on the bed with his usual disregard for propriety. His eyes were
closed, and he looked like he was about to fall asleep. Scully found herself
consciously chewing more quietly. "Scully?" he mumbled after a moment, though
his eyes remained shut.
"What, Mulder?"
'You found something, didn't you?"
She set down her sandwich and turned to face her partner. "Yeah." He rolled
over on his side and watched her in silence, waiting. Scully absently played
with her watch and tried to fight down a surge of affection that was
completely incongruous with the irritation and stress she was feeling.
"Well, I thought that the flesh looked like it had decayed at an alarming
rate, so I checked it out. I found the presence of what appears to be a
digestive enzyme, acting as a catalyst to speed up the process of
decomposition. It was not only found on the surface of the skin, but in the
deepest portion of the wounds, which suggests that whatever consumed the
victim had the means of depositing the enzyme within the body."
Mulder sat up quickly. "It sounds like it occurred simultaneously with the
attack."
"Maybe."
He rose from the bed and paced the room in thoughtful silence, as if trying to
wrap his mind around an idea. Scully returned to her dinner, finding that the
irritation had once again surfaced with surprising ease, displacing the brief
wave of fondness she had felt for her partner. He had leapt on the evidence,
using it as he always did to justify a predetermined view of the world.
Typically, he had ignored other interpretations, including her own. Why he
bothered to have a partner at all, she didn't know. Half of the time she felt
like mere backup, hurrying after him in the dark to keep him from getting
himself killed. And she hadn't even told him the big part yet.
"Mulder," she said tersely. He stopped his pacing and walked over to her.
Dropping to a crouch so he was eye to eye with her, he placed his hands on the
arm rests of her chair. Scully realized that he was effectively trapping her
with his body, invading her space. She swallowed and looked away, suddenly
unable to meet his stare. "I found something else," she said. He waited. "I
found a fragment that looks like a tooth, only the composition isn't bone.
It appears to be wood, made up of discernible fibers." She forced her eyes
back to his and said, "It would not be inconsistent with the marks found on
the body." He grinned and gave her kneecaps an ecstatic squeeze as he jumped
to his feet.
"Looks like we'll be making that trip to the woods, Scully."
"Yeah. Great."
"Pack your marshmallows and some warm socks." He leaned forward. "We'll be
in the woods for a week, just you and me. It's a two day hike to the area
where the murders occurred." Still smiling, he gave her a half-wave and left,
swinging the door shut behind him. Scully sat motionless in her chair,
sandwich partially raised to her mouth. She let it drop onto the table.
"A week?" she growled to the empty room. Only the air conditioner hummed in
reply.
**
"It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man's nature -- neither
ghastly, hateful, nor ugly: neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but,
like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious
in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have long lived apart,
solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face,
suggesting tragical possibilities."
--from Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native
**
Morning mist hovered around the tops of trees, enveloping the green in white.
From down on the ground, it was easy to imagine the forest belonged on another
world, one far more silent and ancient than the Earth. Scully stood in the
middle of a small clearing, her head tilted upward, her eyes focused on the
haziness above. Squinting, she tried to make out the very tops of the immense
trees, but they disappeared into nothingness. She shifted her backpack and
breathed in deeply. The air here was moist, and it filled her lungs with the
rich essence of pine and wood. It felt almost like the wind clung to her,
tangling itself in her hair, and in folds of her clothes, saturating her skin
with its fertility. If they weren't out here looking for a murderer, it would
be a simple thing to abandon worry to the uncaring neutrality of the trees.
And even so, just breathing the dewy air and feeling the freshness of nature
fill her nostrils was enough to make her feel like she had shed D.C. like an
old sweater. All that remained was an intense, buoyant energy that burned in
her nerves and tingled behind her eyes.
"Scully?" Mulder's voice sounded behind her, disconnected and surreal.
Scully blinked, the spell of the forest broken. She turned slowly, and with
some regret.
"Do you want to come over here?" he called. "I don't want to go through this
stuff again."
Tucking her fingers under the strap of her pack, she lowered her head and
crossed the little clearing to where Mulder was checking their gear and going
over plans with the ranger. "Here you go," he said, and pushed a map across
the hood of the ranger's jeep. "We each have a copy in case we get separated.
I've marked our camping spots, and the spots of the murders. We'll take two
days to get to the central area and then we'll be able to begin our
investigation. We have a radio in case of emergency, but even by air, back up
will be slow coming. Looks like it's just you and me."
"So you keep saying," Scully murmured. She ran her fingers along the map,
studying the routes they would be taking.
"Most of the hike will be on trails, or at least deer paths," said the ranger,
a stoic, solid man who looked like he would rather be ice climbing than
escorting two suits to the woods. "The maps are very detailed. You shouldn't
have any problem." He spit a wad of chew on the ground and folded his arms
across his chest.
Out of the corner of her eye, Scully saw her partner twitch slightly. He
pulled out his gun and began to check the clip. "Everything look okay to you,
Scully?" he asked, keeping his eyes focused on the weapon.
She nodded and surveyed the equipment spread out on the ground. It was
crucial that they be fairly mobile; she and Mulder would share a tent, and the
food they brought was sparse, although nutritious. She suspected Mulder had
fantasies of playing mountain man and catching some fish from the stream that
would, in its meanderings, cross their paths here and there. Scully tried not
to dwell on the fact that the stream's cold water would also be her bath.
"Let's get started," she said finally. She gave her own personal pack a
final adjustment, making sure it wasn't straining her muscles. Mulder
shrugged on his own gear, turning so Scully could check that everything was
fastened. He took a deep breath and nodded at her.
"Ready."
The ranger grinned at them and leaned against his mud spattered jeep. "I'll
see you here in a week. Radio in if you need help, or of course, if you catch
your suspect." Without another word, he got into the truck and threw it in
reverse, sending chunks of soil flying as the tires spun and finally caught.
In silence, Mulder and Scully watched the jeep disappear along the strip of
mud, root, and rock that passed as a road. It wasn't long before the groan of
the engine faded completely, and all that remained was the occasional,
isolated sound of a distant bird, or a leaf rustling invisibly deep in the
mist.
***
Mulder set the pace. He walked at a steady speed, enjoying the feel of the
springy, soft earth beneath his feet, and the reassuring solidity of his own
body. The woods were surprisingly quiet. Scully had told him earlier that
this was due to the age and size of the trees. The shade of the huge trees
effectively prevented the spread of abundant undergrowth, which in turn meant
that the forest was not an attractive habitat for those creatures that fed on
the scraggly, small vegetation. Here and there, smaller trees found a patch
of sun and struggled to grow as tall as their cousins, but this was primarily
a forest of the old and timeless. A few birds flitted by, singing solitary
songs, and once in a while, a distant rustle suggested the passing of an
animal. Overall, however, the primary sounds were the wind and the steady
crack of their feet against exposed roots, dry needles and leaves.
Mulder had to concentrate to keep down his speed; it was hard to keep his
exuberance from translating to moving muscles. Scully's autopsy had seemed to
confirm Marita's information. Somewhere in these woods was a creation gone
bad, a mismade, ill-begotten Adam. Marita's documents were vague, but there
was a heavy implication that government sponsored scientists had attempted to
give sentience to the insentient, animation to the inanimate. Perhaps, in the
cloud of misguided ambition, they glimpsed longevity, or fame, or even
something as mundane as camouflage. Whatever the motivation, there was strong
evidence that a creature that was neither man, nor plant, stumbled through
these woods, living a life within nature, even in its unnaturalness. There
had been no more information than that, but it was enough. Mulder's mind
craved the image of the wooden man, as he had dubbed the killer, craved the
revelations and knowledge buried in its creation. He wondered if there was
intelligence there, or if it operated like a walking Pitcher Plant, blindly
seeking out nourishment. Did it see, as he did? Was it a man who somehow had
skin of wood, like a malevolent Pinnochio? It would be at least two days
before he found out, but he scanned the woods intently nonetheless. A clue
could be anywhere, and it paid to stay alert.
He paused at the top of a small rise, feeling a comfortable tightness in his
calves. Below him, Scully had paused at the foot of a tree, studying a
strangely shaped root. He glanced at his watch and sighed. He wanted to be
sure to get to the campsite before nightfall so that they at least didn't have
to fumble with the tent in the dark. He watched his partner reluctantly give
up her inspection of the tree and continue walking. Her eyes seemed to dart
everywhere as she walked, absorbing the images of the vast forest from every
direction. From up on the little hill, Scully seemed distant. As he watched
the space slowly close between them, Mulder felt a subtle tightening in his
chest. Physically she was here on the case with him, but her mind was
elsewhere. She stopped halfway up the hill and stood with her hands on her
hips, one leg aggressively forward.
"Am I slowing you down, Tarzan?" she called.
He grinned. She was a firecracker, all right, a ball of pure hell condensed
in female form. And armed.
She stepped over the upper lip of the rise and turned to survey the ground
they had covered. All around them the forest stretched like an eternal
wilderness, perfect in its imperfection. "How much longer to the site?" she
asked.
"We're almost halfway." She nodded and returned her gaze back toward the way
they had come. It was a faraway look, a look that suggested losses and pains
and imperfect healing. It passed over her now and again like a newspaper
skidding and blowing in a windy city street. He had learned to wait these
moments out, to allow her lapses into herself. And so he waited now, filling
the time by retying his boots and eating some seeds. But still she stood,
frozen, staring. He cleared his throat and she blinked, and then focused on
him. "I'll catch up," she said simply, and he resumed his walk, assuming as
he always did that she would follow.
Scully watched her partner's back as he continued through the woods. Head
cocked, lost in his own thoughts, in his own world, he did not turn around.
She knew he would not. She slipped off her pack and sat on the ground.
Something in the forest had spurred her to introspection. Maybe it was the
down time, maybe it was the silence. Maybe it was that for the first time in
a long while there was nothing to do but think and walk. She felt a little
guilty that her thoughts strayed from the case, from a puzzle that needed to
be solved. She also was frightened by her thoughts, by the eddies of memory
that swirled in her brain, churning up images she had thought were safely
buried. She had been charging through life the past few years, whirling
through crisis and loss without bothering to pause and take a breath. It was
best that way, for her, to work through emotional pain as others would walk
off a muscle cramp. But such a strategy meant that issues were never fully
dealt with, and bits and pieces of her past would come unbidden to the surface
when she was least expecting them. But as she walked through these woods,
alone with her thoughts and her experiences, she realized that the pain had
softened some, and when memories of IVs and sick children and stolen futures
surfaced, her primary reaction was a call to arms. The familiar restlessness
had always been a part of her, but now it had a direction and a source--to
unravel the mysteries of her life, and also, some part of her added, Mulder's.
She needed to create meaning within the tragedy, and that need had an urgency
to it. Yet here she was, in the middle of the forest, looking for something
out of The Little Shop of Horrors.
She rose to her feet and shook feeling back into her legs before putting her
pack back on and resuming her hike. She needed to catch up with Mulder.
Despite her overall irritation with him, and with the case, she couldn't help
but look forward to sitting by a campfire with him, listening to his innuendo
and his aggravatingly endearing dry sense of humor. It was only recently that
she had begun to laugh again, to find the absurdity of the world funny. She
had been so angry--a directionless, formless anger that embraced everyone and
everything. She had resurrected her icy wall to protect herself from human
contact. This wall was falling again, but in fits and starts, and she had the
nagging sense that she had no control over its demise. Instead it seemed a
result of emotions bottled too long, spilling out of her unconscious in
unpredictable surges, only to be fed further by the tingling energy that
dominated her spirit.
*******
"Twilight combined with the scenery . . . to evolve a thing majestic without
severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in
its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently invest the facade of a
prison with far more dignity than is found in the facade of a palace double
its size lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of
the accepted kind are utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair
times; but alas, if times be not fair!"
--from Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy
*******
It took about half an hour for Mulder to notice that his partner was no longer
right behind him. It was a sudden sensation, a near panic, as he became aware
that he heard only the fall of his own footsteps. He paused suddenly, his
back and shoulders stiffening as an old, instinctive fear trembled down his
spine. Turning slowly, he studied the woods behind him. They were empty and
silent. He realized that she had probably stayed a little longer where they
had stopped, and the panic and fear faded some underneath the weight of
rationalization. But the irritation remained, a nagging irritation like an
itch that couldn't be reached. He toyed with the idea of waiting for her, but
after a quick check of his watch dismissed the idea. He stared hard at the
quiet woods for a minute more, and then resumed his hike.
As he walked, he noticed that the day was growing cool. The mist that had
evaporated with the afternoon was reforming around him in swirling patches of
cold gray. He zipped up his jacket and hoped it would not rain. It was not
long before the first drop splashed on his shoulder, and the mist gave way to
a steady drizzle. A mass of branches blocked out most of the rain and he
stepped under it to wait for Scully.
He didn't have to wait long. She appeared out of the thick mist, her red hair
sharp against the colorlessness of the earthbound clouds. She looked almost
like a woman stepping out of a dream. Water ran off her jacket in rivulets,
and her hair was slicked back away from her face. He was certain she would be
in a dark mood, a victim to the festering irritation that had plagued him
since he noticed she had lagged behind. As she approached, however, she
smiled, a full blown smile with teeth. Mulder scowled. "This isn't the girl
scouts," he said. "We don't have time to fuck around. I want to set up camp
before nightfall."
Her smile disappeared and she shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the
other. "All right. I'd like to eat, though, if you don't mind, before we get
started again." Mulder sighed and slid his pack off his shoulder.
"What do you want?"
"Cheese."
He cut off a chunk for her and handed it up before slicing up some more for
himself. He sat on his pack and ate in silence, watching the fine spray of
rain that blew outside their little shelter.
"I thought you were excited about this case," said Scully.
"I am."
"Could have fooled me." He grunted, and looked away. Scully rolled her eyes
and then nudged her partner with her foot. "Get up. I want something else."
"Scully, we don't exactly have The Old Country Buffet in here."
"I know. I can ration." Mulder got up and moved to stand at the edge of the
arch of branches that kept most of the rain off of them. Behind him, Scully
rummaged through his bag, searching for the beef jerky. She found it, and was
about to tear off a piece when she noticed the map rolled up in the side
pocket. She pulled it out to study while she finished eating, figuring it
would be helpful to become more familiar with the routes they would be taking.
She tore off a bite of jerky and unrolled the map. She blinked at it for a
moment, surprised by its foreignness. Then she realized. This wasn't the map
the ranger had given them. She looked up slowly at her partner, then back
down at the map before her. On it, several dots marked the locations of the
murders. But south of that cluster were other dots, each marked with a year,
many also with a question mark. The trail of dots meandered slowly southward
until they stopped, finally, near a gray area squared off in the middle of the
woods. A military training and research center. Scully stared in silence at
the map, at the years that stretched back to 1951. She realized her fingers
were trembling, and faint nausea rolled in her stomach. Still there were
secrets, after all these years. Then she noticed one more thing. A
handwritten note, in pencil. "Draw your own conclusions," it read. Whoever
had written it had signed it with a simple capital M. She rolled the map up
carefully, absurdly concentrating on lining up the edges into a clean
cylinder. Closing her eyes, she tapped the roll against her chin. Beneath
her skin, emotion swelled. When she opened her eyes again, they were rimmed
with anger.
"Were you planning on showing me this, Mulder?" she began, and even to her own
ears her voice dripped with cold, each word cleanly enunciated and falling
from her lips with calculated precision. He turned slowly and when he saw
what she held he swore softly under his breath and looked away. "Or," Scully
continued, "is it more convenient to drag me along in ignorance, so that you
remain in control, so that you make the calls and I'm just an accessory." She
stood and slapped the map against the open palm of her hand. It made a dull
echo. She stared hard at her partner and his image seemed to swim before her.
She was aware that she had let go of the thin veneer of control she held over
her emotions and that they now burst behind her eyes and in her throat. She
took a step forward, and to her surprise, Mulder took a step away. The
movement forced him out into the rain and he shivered slightly as it hit his
skin.
"I wasn't certain about the information," he said. He remained in the rain,
blinking away the water that dripped into his eyes.
"That's a real good reason. Mulder-" Scully trailed off. From where he
stood, Mulder could see that his partner was hovering just on the edge of
restraint.
"What, Scully?" he dared. "Does it surprise you that I would move beyond your
narrow sphere to pursue the truth?"
"No. It surprises me that you wouldn't tell me about it." She glanced down
at the tube of paper she held and with a low growl dropped it. It fell with a
soft whump onto the wet earth. Mulder watched it fall, his hands curling
into fists. "Then again," Scully continued, "maybe it shouldn't surprise me
at all. Apparently there are a lot of things you don't think I can handle. A
lot of truths you hide."
"What?" He threw his hands up in exasperation. "So I didn't tell you what
Marita told me. Big deal. You have all the information you need."
"Marita?" Scully said. She rocked quietly on her heels and watched her
partner intently. Energy coursed through her, electric. The static heat
before a lightning storm. She took a step toward him, then one more. Mulder
tensed but did not move away. "Since when have you been the one to decide
what I *need* to know?"
"Let it go, Scully. So I screwed up. I'm sorry. It's one case."
She stopped at the edge of the overhanging branches. "One case? Is that what
you thought when you decided that I didn't need to know my ova had been ripped
from my body? That my DNA was out there, being used for God knows what? Is
that what you thought?" She stepped forward again into the rain. She didn't
flinch as the water ran down her face.
"Scully, you know I was just trying to protect you!" Mulder's voice trembled.
This was it. This was too much.
"Protect me! Jesus Christ, Mulder. You of all people should realize that
ignorance is no protection." She turned sharply and grabbed her bag. "I'll
see you at the camp."
He grabbed her by the jacket and she pulled away violently. "Get your fucking
hands off me, Mulder."
"Is that it? You're just going to throw these accusations at me and walk
off?"
"Accusations? Hardly. It's the truth. I'm a convenience to you. A means to
an end. And you, you're a puppet. You enable them to use us both!" She had
intended to walk away before the thoughts near the surface broke free.
Intended to put some distance between them, calm down a little. It was too
late now. Her throat burned with the harshness of her own words, and she
turned and began to walk. It was a foolish thing, childish. But reason had
burned away and all that remained was raw emotion, unformed, unsocial. And
then Mulder grabbed her from behind. She felt his hands close around her
upper arm and the last bit of control exploded in a barrage of rage. She
opened her mouth to speak, but the words were expended in a grunt of air as he
pulled her around to face him. She pressed her back against a broad tree
trunk, teeth clenched. The world seemed to swirl around her, disconnected.
Surreal. "You fucking bastard!" she hissed, and reacted against him,
struggling against his weight and height. He was holding her tightly, using
the weight of his body and the leverage of his height to hold her pinned to
the tree trunk, as if to force her to a conversation, to calmness. She
stepped hard on his foot and he grunted but did not move, just stood there,
his rapid breaths fogging in the rainy air.
She pressed the back of her head against the tree trunk, pulling away as much
as possible. Her hands were becoming numb from his grip on her wrists, and
she could feel the rough bark scraping against her back. She glared at him,
and there was only a feral sense of anger.
For minutes they remained like that, ferocity, rage, and hurt still too
swollen to find an outlet in speech. Too primitive to be discussed.
Gradually, Scully began to slide out of the daze that claimed all of her
senses. The anger was there, but it had become faded and indistinct instead
of sharp and all encompassing. She became aware of Mulder's narrowed eyes
inches from her, of his breathing, of the weight of his shape. This close,
she could smell the forest on him, could smell the ripe, pungent pine that
coated his skin. She flexed slightly under his grip, suddenly uncomfortable,
and Mulder shifted. Rain ran off his lips and dropped onto her face. She
closed her eyes under the intensity of sensation-- the bright rainy vividness
of the forest, the aroma of fertile wet earth, the contrast of the cold water
against skin scorching with anger. Her breathing felt forced and she closed
her eyes more tightly, tense, too alive. The whole world felt like an ocean,
and she a drowning woman trapped under the weight of the water. Her insides
seemed to empty out of her and all that was left was a sort of electricity,
tingling through her skin. Anger melted into something else, something primal
and out of control.
When she opened her eyes, Mulder was there, his face filling up her field of
vision, his lips parted, eyes half shut. Energy seemed to pulsate from him.
She could feel his fingers trembling on her wrists, could feel the air gushing
from his lungs and brushing her lips, could see the apology in his eyes. She
tensed her neck reflexively, felt it tighten, and her head lifted a millimeter
from the tree trunk. It wasn't conscious, just a movement of instinct, but it
was a millimeter too far and Mulder's lips were against hers and a feeling
like a rush of warm water flooded her mind and spread to the surface of her
skin and beyond. She closed her eyes, abandoning vision for smell and taste,
and her body erupted, discarding reason and rationality like dead leaves.
There was only sensation without thought. She felt his hands drop her wrists
and tangle themselves in her wet hair, felt her body pressed between him and
the tree, felt lightning explode behind her eyes. All that existed was the
now.
Mulder moved slightly, one hand dropping to the small of her back in a gesture
that was familiar. A touch of fondness, affection. A touch from a world that
had seemed to vanish under the surreal breath of the forest. It was a
reminder. A warning. Suddenly, she pressed her palms against her partner's
chest, feeling an odd sense of yearning even as she pushed him away. He
stepped back and stood silently in the rain, soaked now, his hair matted in
tangled clumps, his windbreaker dripping water in tiny rivers. He brought one
shaking hand to his lips and the silence hung around them, punctuated only by
the rain. "Scully," he began, and his voice was strained, hoarse, like he had
just been brought from a coma. And the anger, and the intensity broke and she
felt only a pain in her chest, a physical, impossibly deep pain that stole her
breath and made her ears ring.
"I'll meet you at the camp," she said. Her voice cracked in the wet air, and
she could not look up. Turning quickly she picked up her dropped pack and
rushed down the trail without looking back.
Mulder sat down on the ground where he was and stared at the space where she
had been. He sat in dazed silence while water pooled in the crevice between
his neck and his collar.
*
"...Yet when we came back, late, from the hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed. I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence . . ."
T.S. Eliot "The Wasteland"
*
From: <Leafofgras@aol.com>
Date: Sun, 9 Aug 1998 16:43:28 EDT
Subject: sarracenia part 2/2
Title: Sarracenia 2/2
Author: Prufrock
Classification: XR (mild)
Rating: R (language)
Summary: Mulder and Scully investigate killings in a secluded wooded area.
Their main suspect blurs the line between man and plant -- a product of
science and ambition, let loose.
Disclaimer in Part One
*
Scully stirred as the morning light, diffused by the fabric of the tent,
warmed her face. She rolled onto her side and blinked, waiting for reality to
reassemble itself from the tangled world of dreams and fitful sleep. Beside
her, Mulder's sleeping bag was empty, though still rumpled by a sleep as
restless as her own.
She had arrived at the campsite first the night before, soaked and tired, but
too on edge to rest. She had gathered fire wood, finding some solace in the
tedious search for dry wood, until Mulder had appeared at the edge of the
small clearing, hesitant and silent.
And so began their little dance. Awkwardness was glimpsed and circumvented by
work. She tended the fire, he set up the tent. There were a few half-starts
of apology or explanation, a few looks intended to convey some sort of regret,
a few abortive efforts to joke. In the end, they did what they always did
when emotion got in the way; they talked about the case. Finally, unable to
carry on the charade that nothing had happened, Scully had excused herself and
gone to bed, pausing only once to look at Mulder's pensive silhouette before
she zipped herself into the tent.
She rose slowly and shook her head, as if to clear from it the emotions that
still clung to her. After pulling on her clothes she crawled out of the tent.
Mulder was sitting by the dead fire staring at Marita's map. She sat down on
the ground.
"Good morning," he said, without looking up. Scully nodded. There were no
words to speak. There was nothing to be said when something happened to
redraw the lines that organized the world. She realized that her chest felt
hollow, as if her heart beat in empty space, echoing futilely against her
ribs. A morning migraine had already started, throbbing behind her eyes and
at the base of her neck. All those repressed thoughts, she imagined, massing
together and putting pressure on a mind that desperately wanted to keep those
thoughts at bay. That wanted to remain in control of self and of feeling.
But there were memories. Memories of desire. Of a tingling that started in
the tips of her fingers and reached through all the layers of her skin.
Memories of fear, and longing. And panic. And they wouldn't go away. They
just hovered right under her consciousness, flashing images and sensations
across the flat plane of her mind.
She drew absently in the dirt with a stick. "Mulder?" she said finally. This
time he looked up from the map. "Sometimes," she said, staring at the stick,
"things happen bet--" She paused. "What was that?" There had been a crack
of wood, not loud, but still sharp against the relative silence of the
morning.
"I don't know." He stood up slowly and drew his gun. Wordlessly, aware, they
walked slowly into the thicker woods around their campsite. Nothing but
trees, tall and quiet. "There!" Mulder hissed and Scully turned quickly,
following his gaze. Then she saw it, just for a second. A slender tree trunk
seemed to uproot itself and move slightly, like a shift of color. Mulder took
a step forward, his gun raised. Scully could tell by his darting eyes that he
had lost whatever it was that had moved. She stared at the deep shadows of
the forest. Nothing. She flicked on her flashlight and turned its powerful
beam into the dark. Something, briefly, reflected. Glistened. She held the
flashlight still and thought. It reminded her of something. Suddenly she
grabbed Mulder's arm and tugged. She ran for the darkness, toward the
reflection she had seen. Like an animal's eyes caught in headlights. Only
higher. At her eye level.
****
"Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root?"
--from Macbeth IV.i
****
Twigs slapped against her shoulders and arms as she rain toward the piece of
shadow that had detached itself from the blackness and now moved like running
water away from her. Mulder's feet thudded near her, and as always during
these surreal times, things seemed out of proportion and oddly emphasized.
"Freeze!" she cried after the shape that in movement, seemed only a blur of
brown. It moved strangely, fluidly, easing across the ground as if it
scurried as one with the forest. She scrambled over a small creek, and up a
little bank where she had seen the blur move. Stumbling onto level ground,
she glanced around. Nothing.
Then out of nowhere the forest moved.
There had been space, and then there was none. Bark streamed past her eyes.
Scully felt rather than saw danger and she whirled away, instincts honed too
sharp to be blind-sided. The tearing intended for her neck grazed her arm and
almost instantly it felt like flame licked through her skin. She grabbed
insensibly with her other hand and her fingers closed tightly around rough
wood. She could maintain the hold only briefly, but it was enough to see.
Eyes without whites, skin of bark. Fingers long and sharp on one hand, like
thin, flexible spears. Narrow teeth that flashed in a grimace. There was a
movement, a wrenching, and her grip broke. The creature pulled away and ran
into the woods, blending into the trees even though Scully had it firmly fixed
in her gaze. Mulder stepped beside her and grabbed her arm roughly, checking
quickly over the wound. "It's only a scratch," she said without looking down.
She could not stop staring at the woods. At the space where the wooden man
had been.
*****
"As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, me thought,
The wood began to move."
--Macbeth, V.v
******
There was no need to hike to the second campsite now. The killer, the
*creature*, was here, and the idea of its presence hung over the woods, heavy
and foreboding. Scully sat on a log and scraped idly at a stick with her army
knife, peeling away slivers of green wood that fell in curls around her feet.
"Are you sure your arm's okay?" Mulder asked. Scully glanced at the white
bandage wrapped around her forearm and shrugged.
"For now. I'll have to get it checked out when we get back, though. Make
sure there's no infection." She looked up and frowned. "Or tissue damage
from the catalyst it secretes."
Mulder nodded and looked away, still tense from the encounter, even though it
was hours ago. "Can you believe that thing, Scully? It was like half-man,
half . . . vegetable. Do you suppose it thinks? Or is it just a mass of
instinct, only acting to live a life it is incapable of understanding?"
"I don't know, Mulder. If that thing was truly created by man, it's a feat
next to impossibility. It's a miracle it survives at all. I don't think
rational thought is feasible. In the sense you mean, anyway."
"Are you sure? When I was coming up over the bank, it was right when it
lashed out at you...you dodged, and I swear I something in its eyes, a flash
of intelligence, consciousness, something. And when you got a hold of it, it
seemed to panic." He shook his head.
"I think you're projecting human emotions on it, Mulder. People do that with
animals too, interpret a dog's panting as a smile, for instance."
Mulder leaned forward and poked at the fire. It popped innocuously and he
dropped another piece of wood on it, staring silently at the flames that
reached into the afternoon sky. "Well," he said, "we'll find out for sure
soon enough."
"What do you mean?"
"We'll find out by the way it tries to hunt us."
******
"... Rage on, Whirl on, I tread Master here and everywhere, Master of the
spasms of the sky and of the shatter of the sea, Master of nature and passion
and death, and of all terror and all pain."
----Walt Whitman
******
Hunger. It was one of the only sensations available to it. An emptiness, a
lacking. A need. There was a tingling that burned in the sharpness of its
fingers, where rough wood had sliced soft flesh. That was the meat that was
good. That allowed it to move and sleep and heal. It thrashed silently,
impulsively where it rested in a grove of trees. There was a need to move, a
deep need, and the fluids that coursed through it were agitated. Had the
creature such words, it may have thought of anger. Or frustration. Had the
creature a rich memory, it might have recalled the presence of these
sensations in the majority of years that defined its life. But there were
only remembered sounds and smells and abilities. Here and there an image
flashed of soft things moving, causing him pain. The creature stirred again
and then closed its eyes and dug its lower appendages into the moist ground.
Thus rooted, it drank of the earth and returned to the dim semi-consciousness
that was what it knew of life.
********
Mulder watched the darkness fall. The tops of the trees were already black
against the deepening blue of the sky, and at the lowest points, a few early
stars shone dimly. He closed his eyes and reached out with his hearing,
knowing full well that the creature moved almost invisibly among the trees.
Nothing. Just the wind rustling branches and leaves. Sighing, he stirred the
fire until the flames were thriving, and the light widened the circle of
imagined safety.
At the edge of the circle, the tent was set up. Mulder watched his partner
through the open flap. She was asleep on her back, her bandaged arm thrown
over her head. She moved often, a restless sleep. It was too early, really,
but she had the late watch. He had offered to take it, but she had refused.
He had let it go. There was no reason to argue. He rose slowly off the log
that he had been sitting on and crouched in front of the tent. Scully stirred
at his movements, but did not wake. She hadn't bothered to burrow into the
sleeping bag, but lay instead on top, dressed only in a tee shirt grimy from
the woods. He reached across her and tugged his own bag over her body. She
stirred again and this time sleepy eyes opened halfway, bleary and unfocused.
Frowning, she mumbled something unintelligible, but her tone was unguarded and
almost gentle. Even half-asleep she moved him. God, even then. He let his
hand drop onto her arm, a gesture that had always been casual and unthinking,
but now seemed charged, and maybe dangerous.
He returned to the log and pulled his coat around himself, suddenly cold. But
still the night was silent, and if the creature was near, it made no move to
reveal itself.
He woke Scully near midnight, shaking her by her uninjured arm. It was a
method common between them. She had the uncanny ability to sleep at will, to
steal a moment of rest here and there, and he often had to pull her from
slumber. "Your watch, Scully," he mumbled, surprised at how tired he felt,
how aching and grumpy.
"All right," she said and sat up, blinking uncertainly into the night. She
was up in a few seconds, shrugging on her jacket. Mulder watched her sit down
by the fire and then he was asleep, darkness crashing down instantly.
********
It was near dawn, and the reds and oranges diffused through the haze. Scully
watched the nighttime brighten, her hands cupped around a tin of campfire
coffee. Bitter, but warm. Like so many things.
She stretched her aching back and walked a few times around the campsite. Her
whole body felt used up. All she was aware of was sensation - of muscles sore
from sitting all night in the damp woods, of feet tender from walking, of a
burning in her forearm. And others as well, others harder to identify and
focus. There was just a sensation of feeling, a sort of emptiness in the
chest, and it had no name. A shuffling noise interrupted the meandering
course of her thoughts and she turned slowly. Mulder stood in the clearing,
frowning at her, and pointing at her coffee. She smiled in spite of herself,
in spite of everything. The grooves of habit were sometimes easy to fall
into. She poured him a cup of bitter coffee and he grumbled thanks in a voice
still thick from sleep.
The two of them sat in the dirt by the fire and stared wordlessly into its
depths. Shivering against the morning chill, Scully looked at her partner
through the flickering light of the fire. The weird shadows created by the
dancing flames made him look gaunt, and made his eyes seem sunken. For the
first time in a long time, she saw the hurting boy that hid within the man and
she had to look away. She didn't know why. "Mulder," she said softly. "I'm
not tired. You can go back to sleep."
"I'm fine," he murmured. "Thanks."
She nodded and rested her head on her arms to wait. Always waiting.
"Scully?" Mulder's voice sounded far away and still tired.
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry." He spoke evenly now, and his eyes looked bright in the fire.
"You don't need to apologize, Mulder." She rose and walked the tiny semi-
circle around the fire to sit next to him on the ground. "Things happen
between people sometimes. I don't think. . ." She shook her head and frowned,
unable to find the words.
"I know, Scully." He sighed and checked the clip on his gun. "Let's search
around for the killer tree." Scully stared and then nodded. Without another
word she followed her partner away from the fire and wrestled her mind back to
the case. "I shouldn't have kept you in the dark about Marita's documents,"
he said to her when she had caught up.
"Well, so don't from now on," Scully answered. There was a numbness in her
throat now, and that old sense of the surreal was back. She wondered what she
and Mulder were really talking about, whether the code buried there could even
be discerned.
***********
They walked in a slowly increasing circle around the campsite, searching the
shadows and clumps of trees for the apparition that had attacked them the day
before. Only the wind responded to their careful searching, and more than
once, they pulled their weapons on a tree rustling in the breeze.
"This is going nowhere," Scully muttered.
"I know. I would have thought that it would have made an appearance by now.
We've been looking for what - " He glanced at his watch, "three hours. Maybe
we are too alert. Maybe this thing is a better predator than we think."
"Should we set up a trap?" Scully asked, leaning against a trunk. Mulder
sighed and rested his arm on the trunk near her head.
"Yeah, I suppose we should appear more vulnerable. It's bound to--" He
stepped back suddenly, jerking his hand away from the tree. The first thing
Scully thought was that she was leaning against the monster itself, but that
was impossible. The thing was tree-like, but there was no way in hell she
would lean against it without noticing. But, then, there were more things
Mulder was afraid of than monsters. Many more, and this situation recalled
too clearly a more recent one, one still close enough to the surface that
Scully felt her heart rate pick up, and her breathing quicken.
"Did you think you saw the creature?" she asked.
He nodded. "Yeah. Just a trick of the eyes I guess." Scully pushed herself
off the trunk and followed her partner as he started to head back to camp.
Her lie was as transparent as he was, but they both needed the cover up. They
both needed to pretend that only the case occupied their minds, that their
only concern was finding the murderer. If they pretended long enough and
well enough, pretense would become reality.
******
Scully walked with an exaggerated limp toward the little stream. She held her
injured arm close to her body and sat down near the water, pretending to look
down, but really carefully studying the reflections that were painted on the
stream's sluggish surface. The forest looked blurred in the moving water, a
Monet painting come to life, but the reflection would still would reveal
motion behind her. She eyed the forest warily and massaged her arm, trying to
look weak and spent. With a delicate motion she banged the butt of her
weapon against the rock to signal she was in place. She hoped Mulder could
hear her from his hiding place. And that he could get there in time. There
were many roles she played in her job, but being bait was not among her
favorites.
From the far bank, two white-less eyes watched. And waited.
The minutes creaked by and Scully shifted, uncomfortable and hungry. Maybe
the trap wouldn't work. Maybe the creature was gone for good. But then she
stiffened, suddenly alert, the hair on the back of her neck bristling. Maybe
it was because she had been acting on feeling and intuition for so long that
she felt the pressure of the gaze. Maybe it was because she was already on
edge from the recent attack. Maybe too many years being chased, shot at, and
otherwise endangered had honed her senses like the primal humans who had once
tread as cautiously and with as much awareness as their wild cousins. She
didn't pause to think about it, just dropped her hand to her gun which was
nestled in her lap. Her fingers had just brushed the cool metal when she was
knocked off the rock and into the water, a blow that forced the air out of her
lungs. Her head went under and she felt it hit hard on the bottom. Lightning
cracked inside the blackness of her mind, and she struggled automatically
towards the surface. There was no time to look, no time to gauge her
surroundings-- as soon as she felt the dry shock of air she struck hard with
her arm. It hit nothing but empty space. She sank below the surface to her
neck, feeling inexplicably safer in the water, and scanned the banks of the
creek. Nothing. Gingerly, she touched the bump on her head. Just a
superficial wound. She waited for as long as she dared, but still the woods
remained still. Why would the creature attack like that? Did it strike only
once in hope of a lethal hit? She splashed out of the cold water and grabbed
her gun. With both hands tight on the grip she spun in a circle. Still
nothing. But she felt it. Felt it watching her. But from where?
She climbed carefully out of the creek, not daring to remove her attention
from the suddenly ominous woods. "Mulder!" she shouted. Only the wind
answered, lifting her wet hair away from her face like a playful lover. Why
wasn't he here? The creature was still close-- he should be here to help her
catch it. That was the plan. The trap.
Her adrenaline was still surging, and she was thankful for that. Thankful for
the alertness and strength it provided, as well as the way it dulled the
throbbing in her head and the cold that was beginning seep into her bones.
She walked as slowly as her tension would allow, sweeping all around her with
her gun and her eyes. There was no doubt now that she was the prey. She was
smaller than her partner, and already wounded. The easier catch, according to
the logic of predators. The hell she was, she thought. The hell she was.
She walked slowly toward the area where Mulder was hiding, but each yard
stretched into eternity, each second dragged. Dimly, she was aware that the
pain in her head was returning in force. She clenched her teeth and summoned
the hard kernel of herself that was the survivor. The fighter. She gripped
her gun more tightly and listened to the sounds of the forest. There! A
gliding sound, like something dragging across the ground. She spun, and her
gun locked on the fleeting shadow of something in motion. Without hesitation,
she squeezed the trigger, and then ran in the direction of the shot even as an
inhuman cry gurgled from a clump of trees. She stopped and steadied her
weapon, keeping it trained in the direction she had originally fired. She had
wounded it. She started to walk again, weapon raised, when there was a soft
swish and crackle. She whirled, but too late, and the blurred shape of the
creature was already in midair. She raised her arm to block the blow but the
force of the creature's lunge sent her crashing to the ground. Her gun was
knocked out of her hand and it skidded through some leaves. She was up again
almost as soon as she hit, diving for the weapon. Something like a scream
rent the air and with unthinkable quickness, a gnarled brown hand snatched the
weapon from her. Scully rose slowly to her knees, and then into a crouch,
watching. Ready.
For the first time, the creature stood still. Its long twig-like fingers held
the gun awkwardly, and she realized that the hands were not designed for using
tools, but more for digging and scratching. It screeched, a harsh sound like
fingernails pulling across a chalkboard, and threw the weapon. It knew. It
knew the weapon could hurt it, had hurt it, for a deep gash marred its side.
Scully tried to focus on the creature's head, but her eyes kept drifting to
its side, where thick yellowish liquid bubbled and congealed. Like sap, she
thought. It staggered toward her, and she was for a brief moment lost in
fascination. All over, its skin was like bark. Thick, old bark that was
deeply scarred. And the way it moved, almost sideways, with an unnatural
rhythm and flexibility. Like green wood bent into an arc.
There was no decision to be made, nothing to do but act, and act quickly. So
she dove at it. The movement was unexpected, and the creature had time only
to turn slightly as Scully tackled it around the middle, driving its light
frame against the ground. Breath that smelled of wet leaves and rotting wood
expelled in a rush as its body smacked against the dirt. She clasped both her
hands together and swung, her double fist cracking solidly into its chest.
She cried out at the impact, and then ducked as spear like fingers drove
toward her face. One grazed her temple and she rolled off its body and leapt
to her feet. She kicked hard and down, connecting with its neck. There was a
snapping sound, and then the creature gurgled, opening its mouth in a weak
scream.
It was dying. It thrashed on the ground, digging its fingers into the rich
dirt, lost now in pain. She walked slowly over to where it had thrown her
gun and picked it up, absently wiping dirt off its barrel. Expressionlessly,
she returned to the creature, knelt by its side, and fired a single round into
its head. The thrashing stopped instantly, and thick, pus-like sap bubbled
onto the forest floor.
******
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"
--from "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot
*******
Numbly, she finished the walk toward the copse of trees where Mulder said he
would be ready. She kept her mind blank, composed. Thought only of walking.
She came around a tree and saw his form in a heap near a tree. Her legs burst
into motion instinctively and she finished the last of the distance in a run.
Dropping down beside him, she heard his name emerge from her throat in a
repetitive chant while her hands moved with long practiced automation. With
deft fingers she found his pulse point and it was strong and solid, thumping
evenly under her fingers. She ran her hands over him, checking for wounds,
until at last her palm grazed a lump on the back of his head. He groaned and
twitched. "Damn it," he whispered.
She rocked back on her heels and waited while he swam up into consciousness.
At last his eyes peeled open and he stared up at her, blinking. "You look
like hell," he gasped, and started to sit up. She pressed him back down
gently.
"Not yet, Mulder. I want to make sure you don't have a concussion."
"We're not safe."
"Well, we're never completely safe. But I killed the creature."
"It's dead?"
"Yeah."
"The trap didn't work so well, huh?"
Scully smiled and shrugged. "Guess not. It cold cocked you?"
"Yeah. I wonder why it didn't just kill me?"
"I'm sure it would have gotten to that eventually."
Mulder turned his head to the side and frowned. "I think it was intelligent,
Scully. It planned that attack. It was patient. This is more than just
animal intelligence."
Scull frowned slightly and brushed away some sweat soaked hair from her
partner's forehead. "Maybe so, Mulder," she said quietly. "Maybe so."
********
The helicopter churned up leaves and dust as it settled to the ground. Mulder
squinted and shielded his eyes. The door creaked open and a pilot jumped out,
head bowed against the wind whipped around by the spinning blades.
"Agents Mulder and Scully?" he yelled.
Who the hell else would it be, Mulder thought, but simply nodded. His head
hurt too damn much to screw with sarcasm. The pilot helped them both into the
chopped with quick efficiency, face impassive. Just a boy, Mulder thought.
The pilot looked barely twenty, with a crew cut and a fresh face... a crew
cut. "Scully," he murmured.
"What?"
"Why do we have a military pilot?"
She whirled in her seat, trying to see through the window of the chopper.
Angrily she undid her seat belt, leaping out nimbly onto the ground. She
froze. "Mulder," she whispered. He slid out beside her, following her gaze.
In front of him, a fire burned. At the base of the blaze, wooden limbs
twisted in the flames, popping like green wood. Wordlessly, the soldier
smoked and watched the fire burn, eyes uninterested. A blow torch hung from
his shoulder -- a detail that had escaped them both until too late.
"We were bringing this body back for further study," she yelled, advancing on
the pilot. The pilot dropped his cigarette and ground it under his feet.
"I'm sorry, Ma'am. I had my orders." He saluted once, without irony, and
returned his attention to the fire.
And there was nothing left to do but watch the flames crack, and watch the
blue-gray smoke billow silently into the sky.
****
the end
****
Thanks for reading this far! All comments welcome at: leafofgras@aol.com
More Boring Writer's Comments:
For those of you who are interested, I really did intend this as an exercise
in X-files meets 19th century romanticism. My idea is that the characters,
out of their world for a while, are more irrational, impulsive and emotional.
I wanted to make them "natural" characters, like Heathcliff in Wuthering
Heights. The landscape is supposed to be big and wild, like the heath in
Return of the Native. I'm not trying to be "literary" really, just thought it
would be fun.
As far as the UST or Romance goes, my theory regarding this has always been:
1: it has to be considered within the context of an X-file. 2: it would not
be a fairy tale, happily ever after, 3: it would come at a time of high
emotionalism, whether positive or negative. Both characters are too guarded
most of the time.
I also wanted the story to fit into the X-files storyline...that means that
there can be no extended romance, or anything that would alter the universe,
as they say. I applaud those of you that can play with the characters and
plots in new ways -- I'm too anal retentive!
Anyway, these were just a few more thoughts I had. Thanks for reading the
story!
--Prufrock