Trick or Treat

Through the Fire 07/13

Chapter Seven: Flashback

by jordan

Memphis, Tennessee
Oct 22, 1PM

Diana Fowley fingered the bones of the skeleton on stainless steel table idly, wondering what the boy had looked like in life. Even with latex gloves on, and a complete all-clear from the medical team, she was reluctant to do more than push at a leg bone a little, then draw her hand back and wipe it on the hem of her jacket.

Even that was more than Spender was willing to do. He peered over her shoulder nervously. "I don't care what they say," he told her, his voice muffled by the mask he'd insisted on wearing. "This thing shouldn't be out in the open like this. It could still be contaminated."

Fowley glanced up with amusement at the young resident, whose eye she caught as he pulled the table backwards towards the door. He looked away, trying not to smile. Spender was the most careful man Fowley had ever met, forever walking the line between fastidiousness and fussiness.

He tugged the mask off when the autopsy bay doors swung shut. "What the hell are we doing here, anyway? We don't know what killed those kids anymore than they do."

Fowley had laid her papers on the lab table and was poring over them. "There's something not right here," she said.

"There's a whole LOT not right here."

"Jeff, there were supposed to be four bodies. We only saw three." She looked up at him. "Where's the fourth?"

He leaned over her shoulder again, looking down at the report.

"Three that were found dead from whatever the bacteria did. But the original report by the police says that there was a fourth skeleton found in the woods, too. That's the one I want to see."

"Coincidence, Diana. There are probably bodies buried in every stretch of woods along the backroads of this whole country. So this one happened to be nearby when these kids contacted whatever it was that killed them."

"Mmm," she said. "Maybe."

"Maybe?" He cocked his head at her. "What's your theory?"

"I don't have one yet. But even if the fourth body was found coincidentally, where the hell is it?"

Spender shrugged. "In the morgue?"

"This IS the..." She shook her head. "Let's go find out what's going on."

Upstairs, at the front desk, they were met by a Dr. Harboro, a tired looking older man with a weary smile. After handshakes and introductions, he said, "I'm sorry for the mix up. Tom Hagen was supposed to handle this whole thing. He came down from the CDC with a team of medical personnel, but then he disappeared, and apparently they flew back without him."

Fowley and Spender exchanged looks. Spender said, "His original report included a fourth body, or remains of a body. Do you know anything about that?"

"I know what you're talking about; I read that, too. But I don't know anything about a fourth body. If Dr. Hagen received another body from the police morgue, he didn't report it anywhere but in his personal notes."

"You said he disappeared?" Fowley asked.

"That came out a bit more dramatic than I intended," Harboro apologized. "He was dating a physical therapist on staff here, Celia Redman. They both went off together a few days ago and neither reported back."

The nurse at the desk spoke suddenly. "We figure they must have eloped," she said. Her face flushed, and she looked down, smiling, as the candystriper behind her giggled and nudged her arm.

Harboro gave them an indulgent look. "Never a dull moment in the West Wing," he said, and the two women laughed delightedly.

Spender managed a sour smile, though Fowley shook the doctor's hand goodbye with more warmth.

Out in the limpid sunshine of a wan October afternoon, Spender stretched and yawned. "Well, where do we go from here?" he asked.

"I don't want to go back until I've talked to someone on that CDC team," Fowley said. "I don't care who it is. Someone must have some sort of explanation for what happened."

"What's your theory?" Spender asked.

"You already asked me that, and I already told you, I don't have one. But I am wondering. I mean, this thing feels like it's got too many loose ends to just let go of."

"Even if it wasn't bacterial," Spender pointed out, "That wouldn't necessarily mean it was some kind of paranormal event. In fact, I'm wondering what we're doing down here at all."

She glanced at him. "I know what you mean. But Skinner assigned us, so presumably he was acting on information from some source he trusted."

"Well, okay. How do we find this Hagen guy? Any suggestions?"

"We can start with the usual suspects," Fowley said, jacking open her car door. "As they say in France, when a man is missing, look for the woman."

*********

It began it began it began a long time ago. A long long long long time ago. And now he was in the middle of it.

The former Thomas Hagen rocked back and forth on his heels as he squatted in the foyer of his former girlfriend's house. He was in unspeakable pain. A low keening sound came from him, a sound with an edge to it, like a cat purring, or a high voltage electrical line.

He could remember a little bit at a time. A long long time ago, something had happened, and it had begun. *Her* blood told secrets to *his* blood as it nursed and sucked and slowly devoured every delicious cell, and every cell groaned in pleasure at its devouring, but the Thomas Hagen that could not be changed groaned and ached and fretted and made the strange rowling sound in his throat.

He could remember the village very clearly. The women who shouted at him, the grey stones in the buildings, the tavern with the red rooster where the bad men made their pacts. He remembered the idiot drooling down on him, saying Come, Come, and trying to lure him into the woods. He remembered killing the idiot, the gorgeous bright red arc of blood sything across the golden tips of the rye.

He remembered the first time he'd seen Celia Redman, wearing that blue dress with the black roses on it. And he remembered the solemn voice of the executioner saying, "Thy immortal soul shall NOT be lost if thee but confesseth thy sin." And they'd had the redfish with wine sauce for dinner, and both of them were too tipsy to drive on the way home, so he stayed the night at her apartment for the first time, and her kiss, so sweet, so unexpectedly passionate; was that before or after they came to take him from his mother's house, and tied his hands, and hung him in the Green?

He reached out with one impossibly long arm and teased a bit of bone from under a newspaper where it had rolled last night. He could see his own tongue, vermillion, pointed, tasting the femur again wistfully.

The air around him was murderous, like a dim red haze of pain and death. It was a fire lit inside him, burning him up. He rose on his haunches, his legs no longer working the way he remembered, but a new, better way now. The Old way, before they bent in the middle.

He took a step. Another. Another. Purpose drove him on, as the Tom Hagen in him told the Old One in him what he had to do to save himself.

**********

Twenty minutes of standing around on the porch had made Fowley and Spender snappish with each other. Normally they were a good team, with Spender deferring to her most of the time, but occasionally setting his mind for or against something, and managing to persuade her to his point of view. Fowley had gained a good deal of respect for Mulder during her work with the "new" X-Files, and she suspected Spender had, too, though there seemed to be some unbreachable animosity between those two, a guy thing, some rivalry as old as Cain.

Spender punched the doorbell with a rigid finger one last time, and then said, "Well, that's about as long as I'm going to try this. What do you think?"

Fowley sighed and walked down the three front steps of the porch to stand on the sidewalk, looking around at the driveway. A late model silver Jag was parked in the open garage, a red Nissan was in the drive. If they weren't home, they had either left by foot or by cab. Both choices seemed unlikely.

"Something's wrong," she said.

Spender smiled. "Woman's intuition?"

Fowley started to say, Both cars are here in the middle of the afternoon. No one's answering the door. No one has heard from them in forty eight hours. Two responsible adults don't just walk off the face of the earth, even in the name of hot monkey love.

Instead, she said, "I think they're in there, Jeff."

Instantly, his eyes narrowed, and he reached back and pulled his gun from his holster. Say what you would about Spender, he could handle a gun, wasn't over-quick on the trigger, and if he shot at something, he hit it.

"Let's go," he said.

Fowley moved to one side of the door and reached across to try the knob, while Spender moved to the other side, his gun in both hands, raised at the sky.

The door was unlocked, and swung open easily.

They rolled around to the entrance, both with guns in front of them, pointed forward. There was a strange, settled silence in the house, a feeling of being just vacated, but definitely a sensation of echoing emptiness. But houses with corpses in them often felt like that, and smelled like that, too. The stench hit them the minute they opened the door: rotten meat. And worse.

They entered, their shoes uncomfortably loud and hollow on the oak floors as they moved away from each other, each taking a different doorway.

Fowley's led to the living room. Spender's led to the kitchen.

"God, what's that stink?" Fowley called softly. It was vile, a smell of raw bacon mixed with sour milk and something else, something hot and coppery and—

"Oh, shit," she said.

The living room was a murder scene in red and white. The walls were splashed with blood, in an arcing pattern, the way violent death sometimes imprinted itself on a killer's last canvas.

"Jeff! Come in here!"

Spender appeared a moment later. "You should see that kitchen," he said. "It's absolutely filthy. Someone--"

"There." He pointed.

The end of some long bone of the human body poked out from beneath the sofa. "Sweet Jesus," Spender whispered.

"We need to call the police right away," Fowley said. She already had her cell phone out and was punching in numbers. While she gave terse directions to the police, Spender made a quick search of the other rooms. Bedroom, study, bath. A little add on room for the washer and dryer. A couple of closets. Being Spender, he checked them, and under the bed as well.

He was just closing the undersink cabinet door when Fowley came in, wrinkling her nose. "This is so creepy," she said. "What on earth happened here?"

The counters were oozing with rotted meat, empty ice cube trays, jars of olives, pickles, mayonaise. A maggotty hunk of some kind of fowl carcass stank as bad as a dead rat in an attic, and a bowl of mouldy grapes bred flora on a kitchen chair. Bottles of beer, unopened, were strewn across the floor, a dish of butter melted into a pool on top of the stove.

Spender opened the back door, leaving the screen door shut, to air out the small, putrescent kitchen. Fowley surveyed the countertops, the stovetop, the linoleum floor, food scattered everywhere, uneaten, stinking and crawling with insects...

And then she did the math. Her horrified gaze swung to Spender's as he leaned against the tiled counter, wiping at his hands with a paper towel he'd torn from a roll above the sink.

"What?" Her look alarmed him, and he darted his gaze around the room as if expecting to see someone else.

Fowley pointed at the refrigerator. All the food, all the groceries all over the counters and floor, were items that belonged in the refrigerator. Someone had dumped everything in a hurry, for some reason. Some very good reason.

She said, "I think--"

But Spender was already pulling on the handle, one hand protectively over his nose and mouth at the smell he expected to encounter.

What he had not expected to encounter was the thing that had been Tom Hagen pressed inside the thermal box. The light came on, and the creature sprang out of the darkness with a scream like air brakes on an eighteen wheeler.

It moved with the blurry speed of a coiled snake striking. It was huge; how it had been folded up inside the 22 cubic feet was a mystery they would argue for weeks to come. It was so fast there was only a flash of greenish grey, a reptillian stink, a howl that might have been the creature, might have been Spender, and then the muzzle flash and deafening blast of Fowley's gun going off as she fired at it.

The thing knocked Spender down, rolled over him, and came to its feet. Fowley didn't have another clear shot without risking Spender, but even in her panic and horror she knew enough to fire over it, to let it know she meant business. The thing gave Fowley one look, one quick, impossibly human look from its yellow gold eyes, before smashing through the screen door and bounding like a giant cat across the back yard and over the fence.

Spender sat up groggily, pulling out his gun and waving it in the air with vague intentions of self defense. Fowley leaned back against the kitchen table, breathing in short shallow gasps, her eyes wide and fixed, clasping the gun in hands that trembled almost too much to hold it.

And that was how the police found them ten minutes later in Celia Redman's kitchen.

*********

Tomorrow: Ghost Story