Through the Fire 11/13
Chapter Eleven:Troll
by jordan
Annapolis, Maryland
Oct 31, 11:15 pm
Mulder in the doorway of his mother's house. He turns the latch, pushes the door open, steps outside into the cool night air. Everything seems very hard, like he's moving through soft thick snow. He's done that before. Would do it again, to save her. The ice that formed around his heart after the Arctic adventure so long ago is falling away in glacial sheets. He must make himself move forward, step by step, as if through suffocating layers of cotton. He
must
stop
Scully.
He has been imprisoned, unable to wander the world as a free man, a feeling that for three years and four months was exactly the same to him as if he had been perpetually trapped in an elevator. He has felt the grip of otherworldly hands on his ankles, something no human has probably ever felt before and lived to speak of. Only a little while ago, he saw a ghost, heard its voice from a place even more remote than the distant reaches of the galaxy. But nothing has prepared him for this. Nothing could ever have foretold the fear he feels now as he battles his way forward through whatever pride or madness stands between him and Scully.
She is in the car, one hand clenching the steering wheel, the other jostling frantically through her purse for the keys. In her eyes is a blind look; he can see her even in the dark, even inside the car, he can feel what she feels, what he's made her feel, and shame makes resistance greater as he closes the distance between them.
She looks up suddenly, pure shock, as he leans down towards her door. He is the last person she expected to see. She jabs the key at the ignition, frantic and clumsy.
Mulder reaches in and takes the ring of keys from her. She is too surprised to stop him, too caught-off-guard to tighten her fingers as he pulls it from her and drops it jangling into the grass. He pushes in the button of her door handle, wrenches the door open. She has no idea what he is doing so she can prepare no defense against it. What he is doing is pulling her from the car, dragging her out forcibly, so that she almost loses her balance and falls, but he has a death grip on her arm and he drags her against him, and the fire that was there before still burns so hot that everything else, humiliation, anger, apology, excuses, all logic and reason are only fuel to be burned away in its blaze.
He brings his mouth down on hers, and she tightens her whole body to push him away, but when her hands are flat against his chest the fingers curl and grasp his shirt, and he holds her against the car to kiss her until they both begin combustion in the red burst each sees behind their closed eyelids.
Resistance is futile.
*********
Memphis, Tennessee
Hatter's Mill Road/16th St. Bridge
Oct. 26, 9 pm
In a large cardboard box under a bridge, the thing that had been Thomas Hagen picked idly at the tatters of clothing still on its body. Night was easier; the cold came, and the dizziness subsided a little. It felt less fear now; the fearful part had been in the man. The thing it had become knew that there was no real end, no matter what happened; they were all One and the One did not die. Strangely enough, Thomas Hagen had harbored some strikingly similar knowledge somewhere in the base of his brain. He had called it God, but the connection was too faded, too uncertain, to draw power from.
If the woman had not held its hand under the running water and diluted the furious multiplication of cells at that moment, it might have been stronger now, too powerful to cower in this box under this bridge like a hunted thing. On the other hand, it would have only hunted very briefly, because the heat of this place was unspeakable. Every inhalation burned its lungs and fogged its breath.
Worst of all was the disorienting mixture of real time and past time, when it seemed to slip back and forth into and out of the village of its origin. There were times when it choked on the rope strangling it, only to leap up and claw the empty air of the present moment. Times when it poked and sorted though the bones of the last resident of the box, remembering the dusky flavors and squealing noises, the last satisfying crunch, and oh, the wetness of it.
The village. It had been so cool in the village, when it had run barefoot in the snow, and satisfied its simple human hungers with potatoes and greens. It had known about the thing in the cave, so weak against heat and light that the merest spark of flint would send it shrieking back to the cold rock. But it didn't matter. It was its own kind then, as now. And would be, until one of the Changes found its way to power, and then that Change would be the One.
Somewhere even now, in the pipes underground, perhaps in this river, wherever those drops had fallen, swam abortive Changes, fish with legs, worms with teeth, insects that could walk like a man. Creatures to seep into Mexican folktales and creep about the wallboards like cockroaches. Creatures that would bear their strange immortal seed to dilution and eventual dissipation, a kind of death that was really only suspension in a universe of finite matter and infinite time. When the many became the One, they would grow strong again.
It could wait.
********
Sometime later (when? No reckoning of time.) It gradually became aware of someone tripping over the bridge above it. Footsteps, some light, some heavy. Long swords of lights slicing the darkness and voices calling to each other.
And one voice that made it suddenly altogether in the here and now, suddenly raised up on elbows and backward knees, the long ridge of cartilage down its back vibrating with eagerness.
HER voice. The voice of the woman, no more than ten feet above him. The woman who had never completely left his consciousness since he first saw her.
Dana Scully.
What had been lips curled back over the double row of teeth. If the thing that had been Thomas Hagen had been physically capable of doing so, it would have smiled.
************
Tomorrow: On Halloween Night
