Memphis, Tennessee
October 24, 10pm

"Paul..."

Sharon Landers, a 43 year old tax accountant in Memphis who was at the moment dressed in a red leotard with sequinned hose and a short red cape, called impatiently to the four year old Batman lagging behind her. "Paul, are you tired? D'you want to go home?"

"NO!"

"Well, come on, then. Let's git acrost the street."

She held out her hand, but he twisted away, gripping his bright orange plastic pumpkin with both fists, making a long "nnnnn" sound of protest.

Sharon sighed. There were five other children in her care, somewhere on the block, all between the ages of six and fourteen. Taking them out for the evening had been an experience not unlike shepherding cats. Occasionally she heard voices piping "Trick or treat!" in harmony, and skittering footsteps as they raced behind her, but it was past ten and she'd had a long day. The sugar rush that had them darting up and down the sidewalk had to be wearing off soon, thank God. It must have been the unusually chilly autumn night that kept them spiked; her grandfather would have said there was "frost on the pumpkin" that evening.

She was in the middle of Sweetbriar Lane, a wide street canopied by oaks, in a well lit, affluent neighborhood. The children were only allowed to visit houses that were "flagged" by participating community members, marked by a pumpkin hung in the front window of each house. Except for the occasional car, the children had no natural enemies. But with fifty four participating families, there were enough children involved so that they could hold Halloween a week early, on a Friday night, to avoid the dangers the regular holiday seemed to bring out. That way the kids could all have the kind of good old fashioned Halloween the way their parents imagined they'd had, a safe and wholesome way to celebrate Samhain, and the return of the Dark Lord from the netherworld along with all the other spirits of the dead.

Most of the other monitors had quit, or taken their kids to the next street by now. Paul, Sharon's nephew, had slowed them down by refusing to keep up and refusing to be carried. Occasionally he simply sat on the curb and sorted through his candy, staring in fascination at the bright colors of the wrappings. When she had picked him up by force, cupping his baseball hard buttocks in one hand and spreading his legs around the natural child carrier curve of her hip, he had screamed so loudly in her ear that she was still hearing echoes now as they meandered down the sidewalk.

She put her arms around herself and tried to rub some circulation back into them. Paul suddenly scrambled ahead of her, his hard shoes clattering on the concrete for a few yards before he came to a dead stop beside a tree.

"Paul?"

He gave a little yelping sound like a kicked puppy and came hurtling back towards her legs, throwing his plastic pumpkin in the air, where it did a neat flip and landed in the stiffening grass. Sharon looked down at him as he flung his arms around her knees, almost knocking her down, and then looked up at the thing that stepped out from behind the tree.

It was greenish grey, fanged, with a heavy brow and sunken eyes that glittered out at her menacingly. It made a grunting sound, and took a step towards her.

Sharon gasped, reaching down to peel the four year old off her legs and thrust him forcibly behind her. As the creature approached, she braced herself for impact; it moved at a slithering speed that seemed to make a collision inevitable.

Then it stopped.

And it laughed.

Sharon had squeezed her eyes shut; now she opened them suspiciously. "Brian Farris?" She gasped, a hand over her heart. "Oh my Lord in heaven, son. Is that you?"

The creature pulled its demon mask back to reveal the redheaded neighbor boy who sometimes babysat for Paul. He grinned, "Did I give ya a scare, Mizz Landers?"

"Oh, Lord, yes!" She had to laugh at her own reaction, but the green, slimy looking mask, the clawed feet, the extra long reach of the arms, all had such realism. "Me and Paul both liked to wet our pants!" She turned, hand extended, for the child. "Paul, git over here and look at who this is."

"We've been studyin' makeup and all in drama," Brian said, "And we been doin' special effects. Pretty good, huh?"

Sharon had her head turned, not listening to him. "Paul?" she called.

The name seemed to echo through the empty spaces between the trees and fly off towards the stars.

"Paul?"

*******

Memphis Suburbs
14th Precinct Police Station

"Now what?" Sgt. Raul Alzono turned to the rookie who had just come up to him with a message.

"We got a missing kid out in the Briar Grove subdivision."

"Shit. Isn't this their trick or treat night?" Alzono turned to Diana Fowley and said, "Let me send a couple of officers out on this, mam'n. Four year old got loose from his folks out there somewheres."

"Am I missing something?" Spender asked. "Halloween is still a week away, isn't it?"

Alzono gave him a rueful grin. "When you got enough money you can make Halloween any day of the week you want, I guess."

He left the office for a moment, and Fowley turned to Spender, frowning. "I'm not hanging around here any longer. We need to get back to Washington and talk to Skinner."

"He's always been straight with us, though, Diana. Why do you think he's lying now?"

She reached over to the sergeant's desk and picked up the battered portfolio that had the name tag "Dana Scully, M.D." attached by a clip to the handle. "What would this be doing in Thomas Hagen's girlfriend's house, do you think?"

He shook his head. "I have no idea."

"She must have been down here before us, Jeff. Don't you see what this means? "

"Hey, it's an FBI investigation, and she's a doctor. I can see Skinner sending her down here to talk with the CDC about this, to make sure there wasn't some possibility of a public emergency."

"Why her, Jeff? You think the FBI in Memphis doesn't have people that could clear that up?"

He started to speak, stopped, let a sigh out through his nose. "Well..."

"Well, nothing. Skinner sent her down here, and we were never supposed to know about it. Don't you get it? That bitch has been going along all this time investigating our cases on the sly."

"And I used to think Mulder was paranoid," he said. "It must be this damn job."

"Look, Jeff, what if Skinner has been having Scully investigate these cases ahead of us, and basically we've just been playing his damn game for the past three years. That's why everything we get close to manages to slip away from us, why we never seem to get anything tangible we can prosecute on."

"Our solve rate isn't that bad," Spender pointed out. "You know my feelings on this matter anyway. The reason we can't get ‘facts' on these paranormal reports is that there aren't any. When it's a real perp, we put him away, don't we? Remember the Salinger case? The Weiss trial? We've been doing all right, Diana."

"Any idiot could have figured those cases out. Our job is to investigate reports of paranormal events and--"

"And separate the reality from the bullshit of the situation, and work with that," he interrupted. "And that's exactly what we've been doing."

"But Jeff..." her tone was softer; she really wanted to convince him, even after all this time. "What if it isn't all bullshit? What if there really are things out there like what we saw today? I mean, can you doubt the evidence of your own eyes?"

"I keep telling you, Diana--I didn't see it. It was too fast. It knocked me down and by the time I was up again it was gone."

She took a deep, shivering sigh, on the verge of frustrated tears, but still in control of herself. "All right," she said. "I'm the only one who saw it. And these cops are going around looking for Tom Hagen in a Halloween costume a week before Halloween, and no one knows what the slime in the refrigerator is because it evaporated when they left the door open. But I'm telling you there's something loose in this city that isn't human, that's big and dangerous and different from anything anyone has ever seen, and that is posing as big or bigger a threat to the community as any flesh eating bacteria that ever existed."

"Yes," Spender said, in his most infuriating way, "But can you PROVE that?"

********

Annapolis, Maryland
Oct 31st, 11pm

Mulder took the phone from his pocket and stared at it. He looked up at Scully. "Does anyone else have this number?"

She shook her head. "I set it up as unlisted."

He glanced at the kitchen door briefly as if to affirm its reality one more time, then put the phone to his ear and pushed the button.

"Mulder."

He wiggled his finger at Scully and she went to him, pressing her head against his to listen.

Silence. But a clear line; someone was breathing.

"Hello," Mulder said.

A voice from long ago spoke through the earpiece, a voice Mulder hadn't heard in well over three years, and hoped he would never hear again. "I'm glad you're home," the man he knew as "Cancer Man" said, in his friendly Canadian accent. "I've missed you, Fox."

Scully recoiled from the phone. Two ghosts in one night was too much for anyone. Mulder said, "You can go to hell, you son of a bitch."

"Is that gratitude?" It was never easy to tell if he was hurt or doing a mocking parody of hurt. "Here I arrange for you to be freed, and all I get is insults?"

"So you pulled a rabbit out of the hat to get me out," Mulder said. "I suspected as much. But it won't work. I'm not going to play your game."

"Don't be so hasty, Fox. Hear me out first. You owe me that much."

Mulder winced at the sound of his first name coming from the man he hated more than anyone else in the world. Scully, who had returned to listen, squeezed his arm in sympathy. "I don't owe you shit," he said.

"If it makes you feel any better, I never helped them put you away in the first place. But I did arrange your release."

"And you expect me to thank you for that?"

"It was your mother's dying wish, Fox. She asked me to do that one thing for her, and I owed her that much, for reasons you'll never understand. She asked me to find a way to get you free, and to make sure they never get that kind of power over you again."

Mulder was quiet for a minute. He and Scully looked in

For just a moment a touch of real emotion tinged the Cancer Man's voice, like a single drop of blue dye in a bowl of clear water. "I could hardly refuse her a dying request."

Mulder said,"And what gives you that kind of power?"

"Fox, haven't you figured out by now that I'm a power broker? That I know where all the skeletons are buried, so to speak." He chuckled at his own joke. "Speaking of which, has Scully told you about Memphis yet?"

Mulder glanced at her, but she looked away, with a slight shake of her head.

"What's in Memphis?" he asked.

"Proof, Fox. Proof that you and I are working on the same side."

"Never," Mulder said flatly.

"Your partner's very good, you know," Cancer Man went on. "She's gained considerable expertise in the time you were away."

"She's not my partner, I'm not reinstated, and it isn't going to happen," Mulder said. Before Scully could stop him, he clicked off the phone and snapped it shut.

"Son of a bitch," he growled. He shot an angry look at her. "Did you know about this?"

She was speechless. "Did I--?"

"Did he get you to come here? To convince me any way you could to come back to work for them? For him?"

Scully opened and closed her mouth, but nothing came out.

It was Mulder the stranger again, the man she didn't know, someone who had been so altered by his experiences that he would never be truly recognizable to her again. The crack in her heart widened, and she reached up reflexively and touched the cross at her throat.

"Nice try," Mulder said. "And I admit," he made an disgusted, throwaway gesture at the door leading to the corridor, "You almost had me convinced there in the hall. But it won't work, Scully. Even that won't bring me back."

Scully backed away from him, unable to process this switch from Mulder to Dark Mulder in the blink of an eye. Even if there were words to use to defend herself with, she couldn't access them; she knew if she tried to speak she would start crying, and she wouldn't allow that indignity. Anyway, there was nothing left to protect herself with; she was all out of self defense and the only thing left was retreat. She turned and headed blindly for the front door.

Mulder watched her stride into the living room; he followed her slowly as she picked up her briefcase, fumbled with the closet door to get her coat. It seemed as if he was willing to stand there in his mother's house and watch Scully walk out of his life forever.

Scully opened the front door without looking back. Despite all her pride, there was an instant when she hesitated, not turning, just pausing a split second with her eyes closed, one foot over the threshold into the future, one reluctant to leave the past behind.

Then she took the step, and closed the door quietly behind her.

******

Tomorrow: Not Everything Dies