"The torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree..."

Scully rolls over on her back, eyelids twitching. Safe enough in her own bed, at home.

A long dirt street with a banked up curb, and puddles along the gutter, stinking of urine. Woodsmoke pervasive in the air. A pig snuffling and shoving in a pile of refuse. Two naked children, four or five years old, shrieking and chasing each other, laughing, their cries echoing off the stone structure. Above the stink of unwashed humans and open sewage, a stunning, glorious smell, fresh air, free lungfuls of it, trees everywhere, and lush grass, and the distant scent of sweet clean rain.

Scully walks down the street, and no one seems to see her. She knows she is in a medieval village, possibly in England, maybe in France or Germany; she can hear people talking in a dialect that might be Middle English, the soft vowels of French punctuated by the gutteral German consonants. There are horses tied outside a small building, a sign above it with a picture of a rooster painted red on the wood, just a crude drawing splashed with paint. It is tied on a mast with rope, and swings a little in the wind, reminding her of something, something horrible. Two women walk by, carrying baskets of potatoes. Huge baskets; the arms on the women are muscled like longshoremen, and glisten with sweat in the pale sunlight. Coarse faces look past her, unseeing or uncaring; they have the hard expression of laborors.

Scully stops as she comes to a corner, hesitant to go on. After a moment she takes another step, and finds herself facing a square, the village green. It's no bigger than the average vacant lot, and the grass has been trampled recently to mud and rubble. In the middle of the square, a scaffold, and on the scaffold the rotting corpse of a child, hanging by the neck from a weathered rope thicker than her withered, pipestem arms. Little bare feet point down together, like a ballerina up on her toes.

Scully stands staring, her mouth slightly open, eyes wide in pity and horror. She jumps a little as a voice speaks from behind her.

"Don't look into her eyes, lass."

She turns and sees a man of about twenty five, darkly handsome, his features broad, dark brown hair down to his shoulders. His eyes are frosty blue, very intense as he glares at her. "Whatever you do, don't look into her eyes," he says.

Scully says in a conversational tone, "I'm dreaming, aren't I?"

His mouth makes a sort of grimacing smile. "Well, in the end it's all a dream, isn't it?" he asks. "But wait and see, lass. Wait and see."

There is a screech of rusty hinges, and Scully looks back to see the door to the rooster building open, and two men come out. They speak to each other briefly, clasping hands and hitting each other on the shoulders in friendly parting. Dust rises in the still air from their pounding of coarsely spun cloaks. Then they mount their horses. One rides away at a fast trot. The other, an older man with a yellowish beard and not much hair on his head, climbs heavily into the saddle of his bay and reins it towards the square. He rides at a slow walk as he passes the dangling corpse, never taking his eyes off it.

Just as he comes to the end of the square, he draws his cloak back out of the way, leans forward, and spits in the mud, an obvious sign of contempt. He says something Scully can't hear, and couldn't understand if she could, and touches his fingers to his forehead, his chest, each shoulder, in the sign of the cross.

Then he rides on, the big rump of his horse rolling from side to side as it ambles unhurriedly away.

Scully's gaze is drawn back to the corpse, which is swinging a little. Long black hair. Hands tied behind her back. Just a kid, probably not even pubescent. Rocking a little in that wind. Swaying a little. Mesmerizing.

"Don't look, lass," the voice warns, but the sound is beginning to fade in the pungent air.

When Scully looks again, the handsome young man has darkened in some strange, unhealthy way, and she can smell the stench of death wafting from him as he moves past her. A cloud of black flies are settling in clumps in his hair, and his face has a sick greenish hue. She puts her hand over her mouth and turns away.

When she does, she sees the swaying corpse open its eyes. The dark man is standing under it, and his clothes are rotting off in filthy strips of cloth as he reaches up with a knife to begin sawing at the rope.

******

Scully opens her eyes, sees her own ceiling, the slow swing of fan blades overhead. She hears the refrigerator motor in the kitchen cycle on, and shifts her head a little on the pillow, closing her eyes again.

*****

A long slow swell of wind, and the world flaps and falls, a sheet hung on a line in some faraway backyard...

From a distance, in the deep grass with the old growth forest in the background, the running figure could be anything. A man, a dog, a fox, anything. Just something moving fast through the grass in a bounding motion, with no perspective to determine its size.

The grass parts. Scully jerks back. Out from the parted grass a child bursts, a girl of about twelve, running, running as hard as she can down to the dirt road, her feet kicking up scarves of dust, racing around the curve of the lake.

The surface of the water ripples passively, the reverberations from her rapid footfalls echoing in the water, splintering light into painful sparks. Scully can see the man on horseback in the distance, the man on the slow walking bay horse. He is almost out of sight, almost over the horizon.

The girl stops at last on a slight rise, blocked by a thin stream of water that feeds into the lake, which for some reason she seems unwilling to cross, though a single leap of her young legs would clear it. She holds her hand to her eyes to shade against the hard sun, squinting, her long dark hair blowing in the wind, her loose skirt beating against her legs above her bare feet. And she watches with a fierceness that rivets the world with her gaze, like a cat watching a string trailing the ground, like a lion watching an antelope graze by.

Scully can hear the whoosh of wind as the girl casts her curse like a net, far, far into the future, and she can feel it swirl and settle in some unimaginably distant place.

"Don't look into her eyes, lass."

The girl turns as if she's heard the words, and Scully fights to wake up now, because if her those strange faraway eyes find her, if the child sees her, then something terrible will happen. Scully knows it with perfect dream logic: something worse than death will come. That's what the man has been trying to tell her, though he himself has faded away to nothing now. Scully struggles to wake up, to get back into her own life, before she is pitched forward and falling into someone else's dream.

She wakes and lies breathing without moving in the dark, her retinas still blind from that other sun, the world upon worlds crushed together and collapsing on her, the weight of all matter condensed into the stone laid on the top of her grave.

Then she kicks at the blanket and rolls onto her side, blinks sleepily, trying to remember the vividness of the colors in the village, the smells, the sounds.

In the morning, she thinks; I have to call Mulder in the morning.

And she goes back to sleep.

*****

tomorrow: On Halloween Day