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"Since the day he was born they've been watching him .
. .
the forces of
darkness."
Mr. Cryder "Revelations"
*****
Starlight Motel, Room 108
Bethlehem, Ohio
4:10 pm
"We should take him home, Mulder."
Her partner looked over at the kid sprawled on his bed, chin in one hand, remote in the other. Nathan flipped channels idly, a connoisseur sampling from every dish. Scully sighed.
They weren't going to take him home--she could see it in the consideration on Mulder's face. He should be with his parents, with the nice, solid, worried, middle class people who had raised him, but Nathan wanted to be here, in a dingy motel room, with two FBI agents fast running out of leads, and Mulder wanted to let him stay. In a strange way, Nathan seemed as if he belonged there, lost just like she was, just like Mulder.
"What have you come up with?" he asked, leaning up against the cheap motel table on which Scully had set up her laptop.
"Nothing. He doesn't seem to be in any of the databases, Mulder, not as Chancey and not as Simon Malachai. He's nowhere." She had run searches on every database and search engine she could think of, had called in favors from other agents, other departments. She wondered if the Lone Gunmen were in.
Mulder closed his eyes, templing his fingers in front of his mouth. "Try alternate spellings," he said, giving her an apologetic look.
She said nothing, but her fingers moved over the little keyboard. Simon Malachay.
She felt him slink to the side of the bed and knew he had nothing to offer. He was doing his best, they both were, but Chancey wasn't talking, and if those lab results didn't come back on their side, they would have to let the bastard go. Simon Malichy, she typed.
Nathan was flipping channels with monotonous regularity, through ESPN, through MTV, through Baywatch. Flip. Flip. Flip. He was watching everything and nothing. She still thought they should take him home, but it comforted her to know that someone was still convinced they could do something.
Symon Malachai.
"What about the blood?" Nathan asked, not shifting his eyes from the screen. Of course the boy had been listening.
"We don't know whose blood it is, yet." Mulder answered. "It could even be his."
"So you only arrested him on that, whatchacallit, um, probability clause?"
Scully smiled a little, ducking her head. Simon Malachey.
"Probable cause," Mulder corrected.
"Right. So he could get out?"
Mulder nodded.
"Tonight?"
Simon Makela--Malekai.
"You said you have a sister." It was a statement, but Mulder answered anyway.
"Samantha."
"Anything like this every happen to her?"
Scully paused in her typing.
"Anyone ever told you you're a perceptive kid?"
"Kevin." Nathan laughed a little, and Scully felt her stomach clench. She turned her head slightly so she could watch them. Mulder sat with his elbows on his knees, hands dangling. Nathan did not look at him, but stared resolutely ahead, his shoulder close enough to touch the agent's thigh. Poor kid.
"She was taken when I was twelve."
"But you got her back." Nathan's face stayed bland and serene, toward the television, but his fingers tightened around the remote.
"It's a long story."
"I've got time," Nathan said.
Mulder sighed, and Scully fought to keep her mouth closed.
She found herself leaning forward, longing to answer this question for her partner. She knew what to say to this boy who wanted so desperately to be reassured, and the right answer did not include alien abductions or government conspiracies.
"Okay," he said. "For a long time I was convinced that Samantha had been abducted. By aliens. I don't believe that now. This year I met a woman who says she's Samantha. She might be."
Scully exhaled. Samantha. She wondered if Mulder had heard from that woman again, since the night in the diner. Since the night with the Cancer Man. At least she had the cold comfort of Emily's certain death.
"You're bullshitting me! Aliens?" Nathan really laughed this time. "How stupid do you think I am, Mulder?"
Scully returned to her search. Mulder had reached familiar ground. She heard the channels start flipping past again. After a while she realized that Mulder had not answered.
"So you got her back," Nathan said finally, his voice gritty with determination.
"You could say that."
You could, Scully supposed, but it didn't feel that way. In some ways, it seemed to her like Samantha was farther removed than ever, since Mulder had seen her. If that woman really was his sister, then she had been closer to Mulder when she was just a memory, but that wasn't something you said to a sixteen-year-old kid who needed someone to tell him everything would be all right.
She returned to her typing. Simon Malechay.
"We might not find him," Nathan said. His thumb worked on the remote control. Flip. Flip. "Kevin might be dead or gone." Flip. "The moloch might have gotten him after all." Flip.
"The what?"
Scully heard the sudden interest in Mulder's voice and paused again. That was the name from the message Nathan had left, the one Mulder asked about, the one that she was sure she had heard before. Moloch. Why was it so familiar?
"The moloch." Nathan's lip quivered and he brushed his hand over it. "It was like the bogeyman for Kevin. When he first moved in with us, he had dreams about the moloch taking him away. My mom said that it was because of what happened with his parents and that religious freak, but they started again last week. Kevin didn't want me to tell."
"Scully." Mulder was up off the bed. "Moloch. Simon Moloch."
She typed, hit enter, and the icon on the screen swirled. There was a pause, and then a face on the screen.
"Fuck!" Mulder swore in jubilation.
Scully felt no jubilation, only a sudden sinking in her gut, a chill of nausea. Mr. Chancey, a.k.a. Simon Malachai, was also Simon Moloch, Simon Molech, and Simon Milcorn, wanted in two states on charges of sexual misconduct with a minor, aggravated rape, and first degree child abuse. There were fingerprints, warrants, separate and discrete dockets of corroborated evidence, enough to hold Chancey for forever. Enough to indicate that if Kevin was still alive he was in more danger than she had imagined. She found herself gazing blankly at the screen.
And then she saw it.
"Mulder, there's more."
She pointed at the highlighted word, the blue word she hadn't noticed at first because of the multicolored images on the screen. Moloch. Mulder crouched next to her chair, arm resting along her back. She clicked.
The page was a calm light grey, the font normal, but the picture on the screen was a reproduction of her nightmares, a dark swoop of a figure hovering over a boy child offered up on the stone arms of a statue. A figure with teeth, surrounded by flame.
"'Moloch is Hebrew for king," she read in a voice muffled by her hand, "and is also thought to be the ancient god of the Ammonites. He is often equated with the god Baal, and the golden calf worshipped by the Israelites when Moses when up Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments. Moloch was a god of seven sacrifices offered in order of value and importance: flour, doves, a lamb, a ram, a calf, an ox, and a male child.'
"'Some Biblical scholars contend that children were thrown into bonfires or crucified as sacrifices, while others claim that Moloch was worshiped via hollow bronze statues. Children were placed inside the statues which were then heated from below while drums played to muffle the screams. More recent research has turned up evidence that the phrase "passing through Moloch" which appears in the Bible meant that the male children were given up to become temple prostitutes.'
"'Although the Lord forbid worship of all false gods, Moloch was one of the few mentioned by name, the regular sacrifice of children being especially heinous in the eyes of Christianity.'"
Silence. Scully's cupped her hand over her mouth, tasting the bile on her tongue. "Oh my God, Mulder," she murmured.
Suddenly, she knew where she had heard it before--in church, when she was a little girl. In church, where the Sunday school teacher had told a naughty little Dana Katherine Scully that children who wet their pants would be taken by the Moloch and devoured by a mouth of fire. Moloch, the demon god.
She glanced over Mulder's shoulder, but for once Nathan appeared oblivious, lost in the gyrations of some music video.
"We need to get a hold of the details of these other charges," he whispered. "Find out why they believe Chancey is responsible. His modus operandi. He might be following a pattern of escalating violence, moving from abuse to murder. If Chancey thinks that he's the incarnation of--" The chirp of the cell phone interrupted his whisper.
"Scully," she said, struggling to find her voice.
"Agent Scully, this is Officer Johnson from the Bethlehem PD."
Officer Johnson, the young patrolman, so proud of his uniform, eager to do as she asked at the scene. Chancey was probably his first big perp.
"I just thought you should know that we've released your suspect--"
Scully felt reality swim before her. Chancey gone, released, when they had so much proof . . . but the Bethlehem PD didn't know about the aliases, about the warrants, and they didn't know about Moloch, the god of child sacrifice.
"--tests came back, but the blood was Peter Marlowe's. He says . . . he says it was voluntary, Agent Scully. We couldn't keep him."
"You listen to me, Officer Johnson. The man you know as Simon Malachai has warrants out for his arrest in at least two other states. He is a known child molester and a possible child murderer. I need your every resource devoted to finding and capturing him or we may not find Kevin Cryder alive. Do you understand me?"
She heard her voice from a distance, as if someone else were using it, someone lucid and coherent like her father had always been in a crisis, someone who wasn't churning and boiling inside, someone who wasn't afraid that she would fail a boy who had asked for her help.
She hung up without waiting for a response, and grabbed her jacket.
"We have to go, Mulder. Chancey's out."
*****end 7/12*****