Washington, D.C.
October 25, 11 am (flashback)

Skinner walked to the door, determined not to open it, then opened it anyway.

Meg, his part time secretary, gave him a startled look when he stepped into the anteroom. "Yes, sir?"

He stared at her for a moment and then said, "Is there any coffee?"

Her dark eyes studied him without emotion, though she was fighting a smile. He acted like a man being stood up on a date, which could only mean one thing: he had a meeting with Agent Scully. Meg had only been working these Saturdays for a couple of months, but already she knew the only times she ever saw anything even approximating "flustered" in his demeanor was when he was expecting that redhead.

"I'll make some fresh," she said smoothly, not mentioning the fact that she'd made a full pot only half an hour ago.

He looked at her, but said nothing. Just before he went back into his office, he glanced at her over his shoulder and grumbled, "Thanks."

Meg had just pulled down the Brazilian blend from the shelf when Agent Scully came hurrying in. "Is Assistant Director Skinner busy?" she asked.

"I'm sure he'll see you," Meg said, going to her desk. She pushed the buzzer once, and Skinner popped out of his door like a Jack in the Box.

When the two of them disappeared inside the office and she heard the lock snap, Meg finally let herself chuckle softly.

She put the coffee back on the shelf unopened.

*******

Scully sat on the edge of the chair and looked up at her boss, who was leaning over his desk with his hands flat on its surface. She had learned his body language well enough to know that he was upset; he looked at her like that, his head down, eyes watching her over the tops of his glasses, when he wanted to be gentle with some particularly bad news.

"What?" she asked.

"The police found your portfolio in Memphis yesterday, in the home of a Celia Redman, Thomas Hagen's girlfriend...well, her remains were found at her the house as well, possibly a victim of the bacterial outbreak you were down there investigating. Hagen is still missing."

Scully raised an eyebrow. "Do they think I'm involved?"

"No, they don't, Scully, but Spender and Fowley do. Agent Fowley called me at home this morning and informed me that she was going to file a formal complaint as soon as they get back here on Monday."

"Against me? For what?"

"No, against me, for what she feels was the withholding of information that would have helped their formal investigation in a possible murder."

Scully snorted. "That's ridiculous."

"I realize that. It's just her way of saying that she's finally figured out you've been involved in every X-File since Mulder was convicted."

His face suddenly darkened, and Scully knew there was even worse to come. He sat down and regarded her across the desk with his jaw pulsing as if he was grinding his teeth.

"What?" she asked, alarmed.

"I know where Mulder is staying."

Scully didn't move, except to fold her fingers under the edge of her chair and grip it tightly. "Where?"

"His mother had a house in Annapolis. I'm sure you can find it by the deed easily enough. He's moved in to it."

Scully nodded as if he'd asked her a question. "I see," was all she said.

"Scully..."

She held up a hand and he stopped before he even began. "It's all right," she said. "I have the address. I have to take the papers to him anyway, so he can sign everything. I..." She looked up at him, her blue eyes glowing as if they were the only color in the grey room. "Do you mind if I take a couple of days off, sir?"

"Of course not. Do whatever you need to do. But Scully...I know this is hard for you, but now there's a four year old boy missing in Memphis, as well as Thomas Hagen, who was in charge of the CDC investigation. Do you have any idea what's going on down there?"

"I have a meeting set up with one of Mulder's old informants tonight," she said. "He's going to meet me at some professor's house, with a document he says will explain what happened to the kids who originally contracted the...whatever it was. I don't think it was bacterial, though."

"Then what?"

She looked up at him miserably. Only one person in the world would understand what she needed to say, and he didn't want to talk to her. She said, "There are scientific experiments...with clones. Human DNA crossbred with...experimental DNA. This has been going on for a long time all over the world, though we haven't been able to accumulate enough evidence to prove any allegations. One side effect with the resultant offspring of the cloning process has been...when they are killed, they decay at a faster rate than..."

God, it sounded insane, even to her. She ached for Mulder, his confidence, his anger when people didn't believe him. She barely believed it herself, even after all the bodies she had seen melt before her very eyes.

But Skinner was listening intently. "Go on," he urged.

"All the evidence of what I found down there seems to lead to the conclusion that those teenagers were exposed to a...stage of the cloning process, or perhaps were clones themselves. That's what I thought at first, but their skeletons were almost completely intact, and I've never seen that before with the kind of...cloning experiments I'm talking abotu."

Skinner was staring at her, not unkindly. "So what do you think happened to them?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I don't know. My best guess is that it's some new kind of experiment, maybe an improved version of the original process. But why they want to clone with us is something I've never been able to figure out."

Skinner had read her reports, both the ones she turned in for the records and the private ones, the observations, the speculations. He had never made her feel ridiculous for them, or insane. Maybe, she thought wearily, because she didn't come on chin first, like Mulder used to. She was shy, apologetic, reticent about making any sort of conclusion. It gave her files a credibility that Mulder's had never gained, at least not with Skinner.

Skinner said, "He can come back if he wants to, you know. He was completely vindicated. If he wanted to sue, he'd have a case."

Scully laughed softly, looking at her hands.

Skinner said, "What?"

"Can you see Mulder suing?"

Skinner's lips twitched. "I guess not."

"Sir, I'll keep the appointment tonight, and follow this thing through. But as soon as we clear up this case, I really would like to take a couple of weeks' leave of absence."

"You've got the time coming to you," he said.

He may have wanted to say more, but he seemed to feel the whole weight of his thoughts too heavy to sustain in the air as words. He sighed deeply, and looked as if he had aged a few years just sitting at his desk with the sunny October afternoon a backdrop through his window.

Unaccountably, Scully felt sorry for him. She rose and said softly, "Thank you, sir."

"I hope you can talk some sense into him."

Something she had never done before, she did now, on impulse. She held out her hand, and Skinner took it, and they shook formally, a warm grip that was all the communication either of them could allow themselves to express in terms of hope for the future.

*******

There was still an hour or two of daylight left when Scully and her informant, Capricio, walked up the stone steps to the quiet, elegant apartment of Dr. Justin Becker. The long shadows were falling across the courtyard, and Scully looked around as Cappy rang the doorbell. There was so much loveliness in the world, so much to be grateful for in every breath she took. Life is a gift, she reflected, and heard the words in her head as if someone else was saying them: Life is a gift.

The door opened, and a tall, thin man in glasses peered down at them; he was at least a foot taller than Scully, and taller still than Cappy. He brushed a forelock of brown hair out of his eyes distractedly and said, "Ah, Capricio. I'm glad to see you."

Introductions were made, and they went inside. The living room was much as Scully might have expected to find from a professor of Medieval Languages: shelves of books going to the ceiling, simple, heavy oak furniture, paintings that were reproductions of the medieval tryptechs Scully remembered from her art classes in college. Papers scattered on two writing tables which seemed to be the central focus of the room.

Becker led them to one of the tables, and said, "Your manuscript is fascinating, Cappy."

Capricio had been Becker's student, a brilliant, promising prodigy who had dropped out in his junior year of college and had somehow fallen through the cracks in the world. He had at various times tried to convince Scully that global warming was a secret government plot, that irridium was a gift from space aliens who expected earthlings to know how to use it, and that every phone call was recorded by the government so they could later imitate the sound waves of any individual's voice if they had to fake evidence for a political crime in the future.

Yet his brilliance was inarguable, and he had led her several times to the exact people she most needed to talk to. He had adored Mulder, and in the past year or two seemed to yield his small capacity to trust up to Scully. He had called her one night, whispering dramatically the one word "Memphis," which had gotten her interested in the case in the first place.

And somehow, tonight, the first thing out of his mouth when he saw her was, "I hear Mulder's out of jail."

So it was with a mixture of skepticism and hope that she looked over Dr. Becker's shoulder at the battered parchment he smoothed out on the table. Just the way he touched it told Scully volumes; here was a document of precious value, at least to him.

"Were you able to translate it, Doc?" Cappy asked.

"Oh, yes. Oh, yes." Becker took his glasses off and Scully could see that his blue eyes were shining with pleasure. "I won't ask where you got this, Cappy, but I have to tell you, you can't have it back. I've called the Prado, and they're coming for it on Monday."

"What is it?" Scully asked, leaning over his shoulder as he bent forward. She saw the ornate writing she associated with illuminated manuscripts, edges that looked charred, some words that seemed to have simply faded away. But the document itself was clearly very old, and very beautiful, a work of art in itself.

Becker smiled widely and pushed his hair back again. His height, his thinness, his look of scholarly intensity had made Scully think he was middle aged, but up close she could see he was a young man, probably barely thirty years old. She felt her heart squeeze when she realized that he wore the exact same kind of glasses Mulder did.

"What we have here, Agent Scully," he beamed, "Is a ghost story. A five hundred year old ghost story."

"Really?" Cappy's voice might have been disappointed; it was hard to tell. Scully never knew what was going on in his head.

Becker seemed not to notice. He said, "This piece of parchment was written in 1452 by a scribe of some sort for a man named Hubert Eldrich."

Scully blinked. Where had she heard that name before?

"It seems to have been part of a collection in Florence that was thought to have been destroyed by fire in the late sixteen hundreds. God knows where it's been all this time." He raised a hand to abort Cappy's protest. "Don't worry, Cap. I won't even ask. I'm just telling you, it's a wonderful find."

"What does it say?" Scully prompted.

"Well...it tells the story of a woman, Hubert's mother, who was raped. She seems to have left the village of Ruen or Ruel or ... I can't make out the last letters here, but it was somewhere in the northern part of England, in the winter. The woman's name isn't revealed, but she seems to have disappeared for several days, then returned to say she'd fallen down a hole of some sort..." He was scowling down at the paper, scanning as he ran a long well manicured finger along the text. "A very cold place, it says. It says she reported that a demon in the ice had raped her and that she had struck stones together to chase it away. Then...here...four months later, she gave birth to the demon's child."

Scully closed her eyes, holding on to the table as she leaned forward, rocking a little. Unbidden, she saw the slow swing of the child in her dream, heard the creak of the rope, smelled the mold in the grey stones of the buildings...

The men ignored her. Cappy said, "An alien child."

Scully opened her eyes. "What?"

"Don't you see? It's all right here. The woman was abducted, and gave birth to an alien baby."

"But the child was normal," Scully said.

Becker looked at her curiously. "Actually, you're right," he said. "She came to term in only four months, but she had a normal baby. Well... actually, that's where the trouble began. The little girl grew up at a bad time in England, unfortunately. The plague came in 1448 and by 1452 would have been spreading north. And just about then the witch hunts were beginning in earnest. Apparently this child, when she was ten years old, had some kind of altercation with a man in the village known as the "jester," probably the village idiot, and somehow killed him. She was tried as a witch, convicted, and hung."

Scully rubbed her eyes with her fingertips gently. "And this has to do with Memphis...how?"

"Did she die?" Cappy asked.

Becker drew back his head a little to look at the younger man. "Of course she died," he said. "Hubert says that afterwards, everyone began to die, and they all blamed it on the witch's curse. Of course, whole towns vanished by the dozen during the plague years, so that's not so surprising. This is some sort of letter Hubert was writing as his last will and testament. That was frequently done by survivors during the plague, when they realized that they were doomed and it was just a matter of time before they died too."

"What was the kid's name?" Cappy asked.

Scully surprised all three of them by saying, "Alyce." She looked apologetically at their stares. "Her name was Alyce."

*******

In the dingy coffee shop, a place Mulder would have absolutely loved, Scully watched as Carpricio scarffed down his second hamburger. He ate as if starving, and by the look of his ragged clothes and slat thin body, he might have been. She had given him two hundred dollars, but bought him dinner just the same.

He spoke with his mouth full, chewing and talking at the same time. "It's so fucking obvious, man. I don't see how you can miss it, after all this time."

"Enlighten me," she said.

"Look." He leaned forward intently and Scully drew back a little; there were lots of onions on that hamburger. "We got technology, we're doing alien cloning, right? Why? Did you ever ask yourself why?"

Only a few million times, Scully thought. But she said, "Why?"

"Think about it. They come here in the cold, like the ice age or something. They come from someplace cold, colder than hell. I guarantee. So when the world starts warming up, and mammals rule, who dominates the world?" He thumped his chest dramatically. "We do!"

Scully sipped her coffee. Dingy diner, fantastic coffee. Somewhere there was the law of inverse actions at work, but she said, "Okay..."

"So they need to breed with humans, to somehow get it right, make something half human, half THEM. See?"

"No."

"So they can survive!" He leaned forward again and tapped the booth table with his fingertip hard enough to make the coffee in Scully's cup shimmer. "If they could make it in their form now, they'da taken over a thousand years ago. I guarantee. So maybe they've been trying experiments of their own. Get it? The woman somehow contacts one of them. Musta thought it was Satan himself. Gets herself fucked by him, pardon my French. Has a kid. Now, the kid has something human and something alien, okay? She's the experiment."

Scully was getting dizzy trying to follow him. She imagined Mulder sitting across from her, nodding encouragingly. Eating this bullshit with a spoon.

"So," Cappy went on, "The kid gets killed. But you and I know that it's damn hard to kill one of those things. You either gotta get them right here..." He stretched his arm around to tap himself in the back of the neck, "Or you gotta burn em. They hate fire. Like cold, hate fire. Right? Am I right or not?"

Scully nodded. She remembered the ice... Closed her eyes and swallowed, and tasted the bile of a long ago near miss, some encounter so close that they'd had to make sure Mulder was stopped dead in his tracks afterwards.

But then she remembered something else... that bridge...the fire...the strange men whose eyes ("Don't look into her eyes, lass") had been sewn shut...They had used fire to kill anyone who had been abducted by the Invaders. Why?

Cappy said, "This was one witch the assholes shoulda burned. But they didn't. And I'm thinking something very, very interesting here." Suddenly his eyes gained a visible intelligence, a clarity. He said, "Humans are supposed to have something that never dies. You know what I mean?"

Scully ventured, "The immortal soul?"

"Yeah. That. Well, you can kill that soul through sin or something, right? According to religion?"

"I guess you can."

"Well...what if the aliens have something that's almost impossible to kill, too? See how a half human and half alien would always end up in conflict with itself?"

Scully was finally getting impatient. She said one word, a command: "Memphis."

"Okay, here you go. You know the blood of the Invaders is toxic to us, even the clone blood is always poisonous if inhaled. Well...what if when they mate with us, or when they tried that experiment which they musta given up on because the kid was offed so quick and easy...what if that resulted in something like a toxic skeleton? So like, the bones those kids dug up in Memphis was like the witch kid, Alyce. They triggered whatever triggers it, maybe blood or something--"

Scully had a sudden crystal clear flashback of Hagen's hand as she held it under the running water: (Damn kid bit me!)

Cappy said, "So it eats up everything but the skeleton. And it lives in the bones. It resides, however you say it, in the bones, the way those oil worm things have to wait until they find a host?"

"So after five hundred years, suddenly something triggers it?" Scully sighed, wondering if the whole night had been another waste of time. "Pretty far fetched, if you ask me, Cappy."

Cappy smiled, swallowing the last of his burger, and took a long sip of his Mr. Pibb. "Yeah," he said, "Something I might have forgot to mention. That paper I got, the parchment. That was off a black market deal. Seems there was a shipment of ancient artifacts being slipped over from Egypt. Stuff pilfered from graveyards, sold to religious nuts everywhere, private collectors. You know how it goes. Small plane, flying under the radar, big crash in the woods. The people who were supposed to meet it in Memphis cleaned up as much of the wreck as they could find, but some of it, like the parchment, fell into the wrong hands." He grinned widely and held his hands up, palms facing her. "Mine."

Then he stopped smiling and said, "And some of the old, old artifacts just got scattered loose in the woods, where some dorky little schoolskippin' kids found them, and all it took was one drop of blood, one trigger, to set that thing loose on the world again."

"But Cappy...you can't think....I mean, even if... that girl was hanged. And it's been half a millineum since it happened."

"But you and I know all too well," Cappy said solemnly, "That not everything dies."

******

Tomorrow: Troll

TROLL

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