"Just because you don't understand sacrifice, because
you're unwilling, don't
think for a moment that you set the rules for me."
Owen Jarvis "Revelations"
*****
Somewhere between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, Ohio
7:11 pm
Dana Scully didn't want to talk on the way back. She wanted the phone to ring, to hear an officer's voice on the phone saying that Chancey was found, wanted even more to hear that Kevin had been found, safe, alive, warm, but that wasn't happening and the waiting silence pounded against her ears in time with her heart, so she spoke, asked the first question she came up with.
"How long has it been since you've been in a church?" she asked. "I mean not for . . . not with me."
Mulder glanced over at her. "Almost five years, I guess. Why?"
She considered not answering him, letting the question fade like so many other questions between them.
"Why don't you believe, Mulder?" she blurted. "I understand not being religious, not belonging to a church, but why are you so resistant to the possibility of God?"
"It's a cliche, Scully, a mythology left over from days when humanity needed reasons for the rise and fall of the tide, for dawn and sunset, for flood and famine, for bad things happening to good people."
"But why don't you believe, Mulder? I don't want a rational explanation, I want a reason."
"I want to believe," he said and his smile was hollow. "Fine," he sighed. "You want to know?"
Scully knew she was nodding and knew that even if she wasn't, even if she had changed her mind about this particular question, he would tell her anyway. She had opened the gates and the words were stampeding toward her.
"I tried, Scully. After Samantha, I tried. I prayed a thousand times a day, not those kid prayers like 'let me pass this test', but actual prayer. My knees were black and blue from supplication. I went to every church I knew of--Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, Jewish Orthodox and Reform, Northern and Southern Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Unitarian . . . I even fucking went to the snake handlers, and I asked them all the same question- was God hearing me, and if He was, why didn't He answer?
"That was the kicker, Scully, the thing that really got to me. It wasn't that I was denied in my pleas for my sister; I could understand denial, but what I got was silence. Emptiness. And do you know what they all said? Every single one of them?"
"God works in mysterious ways."
His eyes locked on hers, then drifted back to the road. "Exactly. But that's not good enough. It's not good enough when the only thing you want is an answer, not a yes, not a miracle, just an answer."
She could see the tears glimmering in the corner of his eye, but he kept driving, jaw clenched against the words.
"So you want to know why I don't believe. God doesn't work in mysterious ways, Scully. I found that out when I was thirteen years old. God doesn't work at all."
"Is that what you think, Mulder?"
She could not take her eyes off him, off the misery etched in his face. His hands clutched the wheel. Finally, he shrugged.
"I don't know, Scully."
They rode the rest of the way in silence, hearing nothing but the sound of the rain on the roof and windows, and the metronome swish of the windshield wipers.
*****
St. Peter's Catholic Church
Bethlehem, Ohio
7:26 pm
It was an instant that Dana Scully would remember for a million nights of bad dreams, a split second that would haunt her at random for the rest of her days: when she burst into the basement of St. Peter's Catholic church and saw Kevin Cryder for the first time in over three years, she froze.
The Bethlehem police had found him through the elimination of the eleven other churches in town, and surrounded the building, waiting for some sign. They had attempted to enter the church, but shots rang out whenever they approached the door, and Mulder and Scully found the cops hunkered down behind open car doors, service pistols out and vests on.
"Watch," Officer Johnson said, as another team of officers approached the building, hunched like a string of trolls. Scully watched.
As the first officer stepped onto the grass in front of the church's sign, he was met with a barrage of bullets. She heard the whine as one passed her ear, heard the crash and shatter as they fragmented the trees above her, and sent branches and leaves fluttering to the ground. She dropped behind the car door, squinting through the open window to see the officers do the same, then bolt back away from the lawn.
"It happens every time," Johnson said, "But there's something strange going on."
Scully exchanged a look with her partner.
"Explain strange," Mulder said.
"No one's shooting. We hear the bullets, we see the effects, and one of our guys said it felt like he got hit, but there was no wound, and we haven't been able to find a single shell. It's like . . . like an illusion."
Scully heard Mulder's soft murmur--"Smoke and mirrors."
Officer Johnson's face twisted in frustration. "No one's been hurt, but there's procedure for this kind of thing, and--"
And it was clear that Bethlehem police would not be attempting to storm the building. Scully looked at her partner, then back at the officer.
"We'll go," she said.
*****
After some short deliberation about techniques and procedure, Bethlehem's finest were left outside to watch for Chancey while Mulder and Scully donned flak jackets and actually entered the building, hunched over as they ran toward the edge of the property. Scully flinched as she hit the lawn, waiting for the shower of gunfire. There was none.
They raced across the well-manicured lawn, slid through the heavy doors and slunk through the vestibule into the church unmolested, walked up the center aisle like a guerrilla bride and groom, and found nothing. The church seemed entirely deserted. Mulder headed off to the right, to check out the priest's closets.
"Clear," he called softly, and after a moment came back through the engraved doors.
Scully sighed. Where was Kevin? She could feel herself growing more and more desperate, wondering where she had messed up this time, what kind of wild goose chase she had led them on, what was happening to Kevin while she was in error.
The crucifix loomed large and impassive behind the altar. Here at St. Peter's they had opted for the passive and suffering Jesus lit beatifically by a shining back light, not the massacred one, face stiff in a rictus of pain. This Jesus had His face lifted to heaven. He was at peace.
Scully paused before the crucifix, mind racing. Kevin was here somewhere, here. What other explanation was there for the dog and pony show outside, for the boys at the recycling plant. Kevin was here. She found herself staring up into the face of the icon, thinking over and over again, like a rosary--Please, Kevin has to be all right. All right. Kevin has to be all right.
She bowed her head suddenly, Mulder's voice only background noise as her hand painted the age old design across her chest. Please, let him be okay, she thought as she genuflected, and when she opened her eyes they followed the shadow of the crucifix cast by the back light. At it's edge, she saw the black outline of the trap door.
She would have walked right over it in another step or two. It was embedded in the hardwood floor, its thin border partially concealed by the persian rug that lay under the altar. The ring that would pull it open lay almost directly under her foot. For a spilt second she was lost in a recollection of the sunny dust motes in Owen Jarvis's kitchen over three years ago, and the plastic circle on a string that pulled down the attic stairs. Alpha and Omega. The first rescue and the last.
"Mulder," she said, pointing. He came over, and nodded. As he crouched down and grabbed the ring, she readied her weapon, stepping quietly to the side of the door and pointing it down and forward. Anyone aiming up through the trap door would shoot right past her. Mulder pulled up on the ring.
No one was aiming.
She peered down into the darkness and saw nothing.
She eased herself down the wooden ladder, keeping her gun out and pointing, one eye on the rungs beneath her feet. When Mulder started down, she had a chance to step back and survey the surroundings.
Then she saw him.
Kevin.
O, Kevin.
Like a beaten angel, he hung from the wooden beam that supported the ceiling, his arms outstretched on a crossbeam, hands crusted thick with blood. He was an arrow pointing downward, a martyr, a mark of her failure dressed only in loose and soiled jeans, and his own blood. His chin sagged against his chest, and his hair fell limply in his face. His mouth hung open. Dirty light from a small basement window slanted across his body, lining the bruises and scratches that decorated his pale skin. He did not move.
Dimly, Scully felt Mulder's hand on her arm.
"Kevin," she choked, gulping back tears.
Later she would not remember moving, but she would know that she was at his side, reaching up, relieved to find that Kevin was only bound to the beams with thick rope, not nailed as she had feared. She would remember tugging at the rope around his feet and feeling the boy slump over her shoulder as Mulder freed his arms. She would remember his dead weight through the heavy throb of her tears, her lowering him to the grimy floor and crying out his name over and over again, and the rush of relief that bathed her when blood flowed fresh through the wounds of the stigmata because blood meant life. And she would remember the hot and frightening joy that burned within her when Kevin opened his eyes, his beautiful blue eyes, and saw her, and gripped her hand with his own blood-slick fingers, when he pulled her toward him to whisper in her ear: "I knew you'd come."
And she would remember how her blood ran cold when she heard the voice behind her, placid and amused, echoing Kevin's very words in a parody of intimacy.
"Well, Miss Scully, Mr. Mulder," Chancey said. "I knew you'd come."
And she would remember him laughing.
*****end 9/12*****
