*****
Mulder: "These forces, what do they want?"
Mr. Cryder: "To claim all souls."
"Revelations"
*****
Residence of Nathan Cornell
Bethlehem, Ohio
4:24 pm
"Get out of the car, Nathan," Mulder said again.
"But why can't I come with you? He's *my* brother. I can help--"
Mulder opened his door and stepped out, yanking open the rear door with one fierce pull.
"Out."
It had started to rain while they were at the hotel. First one, then a second drop splashed coldly on the back of his neck. Tears, Mulder thought, randomly.
"Mulder . . . " Nathan groaned, but slid over the seat toward the agent.
Mulder took his arm and pulled the kid to his feet.
"Hey!" Nathan protested, trying to yank his arm out of Mulder's hand.
Mulder persisted, tightening his grip around the boy's thin bicep. Nathan was tall, but he hadn't grown into his height yet, and Mulder knew that this was still a kid he was dealing with, a boy who could be controlled. Protected.
"Listen to me," Mulder said, his voice a hum next to Nathan's ear. "Chancey is dangerous. You are not coming. Every minute we spend arguing about this is another minute that we take away from your brother. Understand?"
Nathan nodded, struck mute. Mulder saw the shame bloom in the kid's eyes, the sudden awareness that he had forgotten how serious the situation was, the guilt. Mulder sighed.
He wanted to hug the boy, to say the words that he had never heard when he was twelve--"It will be all right."--but he couldn't. He couldn't make a promise like that without knowing for sure.
"I'm sorry, Nathan," he murmured. "Go inside. Be with your parents. We'll find Kevin."
Nathan nodded again. "I trust you," he mumbled, brushing his hair out of his eyes. Mulder released his arm and let him go, watching him for a second before getting back in the car.
Scully was sitting patiently, hands folded into still flesh patterns in the lap of her dark slacks. She waited until they were on the road to Chancey's shop before speaking.
"I suppose asking you not to get emotionally involved would be beside the point," she said, her face turned toward the dingy houses and shops rushing past the car window.
Again, Mulder said nothing.
*****
Take a Chance Magic and Novelty Shop
Bethlehem, Ohio
4:37 pm
When they got to the tattered front door, all they found were drawn shades and another index card with perfect penmanship wedged into the door frame. "Not here," it read, " but somewhere else. Not now, but very soon. Revelation 22:13. Take a chance on me."
Scully felt her heart sink. "'I am the Alpha and the Omega,'" she quoted, "'the first and the last, the beginning and the end.' It's one of the most recognized passages in the Bible," she said in response to Mulder's raised eyebrows.
"Uh huh. I don't suppose it tells you where he is?"he asked as they headed back to the car.
"He said something to me when we were in the store earlier, something about coming full circle to find the truth. It didn't seem important at the time." She tossed her umbrella into the backseat, not meeting his eyes.
"Our suspect quotes our victim's insane father, and this doesn't seem important to you?" Mulder's voice smoldered in the car.
He was angry, she knew, but it had just been a coincidence, or a planned effect. Chancey had gotten a hold of the case file, and planted the phrase to make himself look more mysterious, more frightening. It didn't mean anything. She didn't bother voicing any of these rationalizations to her partner.
And then she knew.
"The recycling plant, Mulder! Full circle to find the truth."
That had been almost fifteen minutes ago, one third of the way to the plant in Jerusalem, Ohio. Scully didn't expect Mulder to say anything at all. The wipers swished slowly back and forth, whisking rain from side to side, lulling her fears, her guilt.
"Tell me how it feels," he said.
Scully gaped at him, dumbfounded. "How what feels?"
"How it feels to be chosen."
Horrifying, she thought. It's horrifying.
"What do you mean, Mulder?"
"I've been watching you, Scully. You're on a mission here, some kind of quest, and I just want to know what it is that has turned you into such a believer."
"I wouldn't think you'd have a problem with my belief, Mulder. I would think you'd be pleased that I was opening myself up to extreme possibilities."
He glared at her. "Funny. My answer is the same as it was when you were head over heels with Luther Lee Boggs. I wouldn't have a problem with it, except for the fact that I've seen nothing to indicate that it's warranted. We're here on a whim, because you're convinced that you're this kid's personal savior."
She considered that for a moment, trying to suppress the anger she felt at his unjust accustion. A whim. After all of the things they had been through together, all of the trials she had been forced to endure to prove herself to Mulder, he wouldn't just follow her. He couldn't trust her instincts, her own personal crusades. Kevin Cryder had been the first example of Mulder's stubborn resistance to belief, and now he was the latest. Finally, she answered.
"I went to church last week, Mulder, to confession, to reconcile myself to what happened with Emily, with Roberta Dyer and her sisters. The priest asked me whether or not I could reconcile my belief in God with the physical fact of their deaths. As a doctor, as a scientist, I can't. But as a human being, Mulder, as a person, I believe that God lives, that the divine has a place within the mundane. That's what faith is, Mulder. You of all people should know that. It's belief in the face of convention, it's opening myself up to extreme possibilities, it's everything you have been asking me to do for the past five years, and I want to use it to save Kevin Cryder. Why can't you give me this, instead of fighting me every step of the way?"
Mulder's voice was dark and flat in the rain-beaten car. "What if we don't get him back, Scully? What if Kevin Cryder dies? What happens to you?"
Tears surged behind her eyes, sudden and unexpected. What would happen? She remembered the endless despair of her days in California, her struggle to find reasons to wake up every morning, to shower, to get dressed. She recalled how the visions of her . . . her daughter wrung her heart, made her cry in an instant of anguish. She knew that she had clawed herself back from the brink of desperation, not once but twice, and the last time only eight or nine days ago; she was still not all the way out yet. She could feel the void yawning beneath her. If Kevin Cryder died, could she resist its bleak lure?
"I don't know, Mulder," she whispered.
His eyes were on her, she knew, although she couldn't bring herself to lift her gaze from the hands that lay in her lap. They were simple and flesh colored, their outline sharp on the dark material of her overcoat. They were real. She found herself tracing the lines and patterns of her fingerprints over and over again with her eyes, getting lost in the swirls, pulling away from her own empty thoughts.
"I'll be fine," she said, aware that time had passed, but not sure how much.
Mulder did not answer. Instead, he reached over and took one of her hands, folded his fingers around hers, ran his thumb over the thin skin on the back of her hand. And he drove.
*****
21st Century Recycling Plant
Jerusalem, Ohio
6:18 pm
The plant squatted in front of them, a bleak troll dressed in the tattered yellow ribbons of police tape and hooded by thunderheads.
Scully pushed her jacket back and pulled out her gun, resisting the lure to shoot the building just to see if it would recoil in pain. This had been the Omega the last time she was here, the place where she had come alone to pull Kevin from the clutches of death. She felt her heart racing in her chest, speeding up in anticipation of meeting Chancey, and in fear of what she would find once she opened the door.
Up ahead, Mulder pressed his back against the wall next to the entrance, gun up. As she sidled up next to him he spun out and around the corner, pointing his weapon through the broken window. He looked at her, shook his head. Nothing. He reached through the window and opened the door.
It was only after they got through the reception area and into the back office where the large plate glass window over the plant floor had been busted out that they heard the chanting.
The sound was muffled, fading in and out of her hearing, high-pitched and taunting. It sounded like ghosts whispering torturous secrets.
She peeked out around the edge of the window frame. Nothing. Once she cleared the window frame, the chanting became high and clear, like a boy's choir. It must have been coming from behind the large storage bins to the right, because there was no sign of anyone except those eerie voices.
She opened the office door and headed out, gun first, crouching behind the minimal protection of the handrail. She was exposed, vulnerable, but the chanting did not waver, and somehow she didn't feel that the danger lurking in this place would be from a gun.
She ran lightly across the floor, her shoes brushing through the debris--the old newspapers, the shredded plastic, the rat refuse--gun held ready in her hand, Mulder close behind her. The chanting grew louder, reaching for a peak, some indescribable horrific climax. Scully pressed her back against the rough metal of a recycling bin and took a deep breath.
"FREEZE!" she shouted, spinning around the edge of the bin into the open, gun level and in two hands, Mulder at her back. "FBI!"
The chanting stopped and seven boys stood staring at her.
They were in a circle, six of them, dirty and dressed in the same clothes she had seen them in this afternoon. Ed Brutus had a black eye and a split lip, but he was grinning with the rest of them: Andy, Larry, George, Samuel and Gerry, all standing with their hands loosely clasped, smeared with dirt and something rusty red. Peter stood in the center of the circle, a filthy rag in his mouth.
"What are you doing here?" Mulder demanded stepping to the edge of the makeshift circle.
"What are you doing here?" George mimicked, his voice high and freakish. "What are you doing here?"
"Where's Kevin Cryder?" Scully demanded.
This time they all picked it up, singsonging the name--"Kevin Cryder, Kevin Cryder"--all except for Peter, who was still gagged.
Infuriated, she pushed through their weak connection and pulled the rag from his mouth. Peter was the ring leader, their alpha wolf. If he talked, they all would.
But her question was stopped short by the scrap of fabric she held in her hand, not a gag, but a simple doll, sewn out of two pieces of material, face drawn with a magic marker, a lock of hair tied to its head, and red paint smeared on its blunt hands and feet. A doll, a child's doll, with a crudely drawn smiley face and blood--
"Is this his BLOOD?" she shouted, shaking the doll in Peter Marlowe's face. "Is this Kevin's blood?"
Peter smiled at her, his red-smeared lips parting over orthodontically- perfected teeth.
She slapped him, hard and with her open palm, knocking him back and setting his own blood flowing, mixing with that of his victim.
"Scully!" Mulder was behind her, grabbing her arm. He didn't have to do that, of course. She wouldn't hit the kid again.
"Where is Kevin Cryder?" she asked again, but this time the circle did not mock her. She raised the doll in Peter's face, shook it under his nose, and was gratified when he flinched.
"The Alpha and Omega," he muttered, turning his face away. "You have to go full circle to find the truth. To the beginning."
She turned and left, aware at some level that Mulder was following her. She ignored the wounded catcalls the boys shouted after them, even as she heard them. She had no time for monsters trying to salvade their dignity.
"Mr. Chancey knew you'd be here!" they called.
"He'll kill you all!"
"Kevin Cryder deserves everything he gets."
They faded away behind her. She was thinking of more important things than a wolf pack of children. The beginning, the Alpha. Where did this begin? What had started the whole thing?
"Mulder, what started this?" she asked as they climbed back into the car. "What's the Alpha, the instigating event?"
Mulder turned the key, and sat, considering.
"We were brought on because of the stigmata. The mark," he said.
"But where does that get us? If the stigmata is the beginning, what does that mean?"
Mulder sighed, tapping his fingers on his thighs. "I don't know. I never believed Kevin was marked in the first--"
Scully almost felt the connection, the wheels turning in her head and locking into place. Without belief there was no mark, only coincidence. Without belief--
"Mulder, the church! The stigmata is only the mark of God in the eyes of those who believe, in the eyes of the church."
"How many churches are in Bethlehem?"
Scully didn't answer. She was on the phone already, explaining herself to the police, demanding the names and locations of all of the churches, of all the places where Chancey might be.
Unnoticed, a vulgar doll, sullied with the blood of a child, fell to the floor in the front seat of the rental car and left its mark on the carpeting.
*****end 8/12*****
