Summary: it's an ill wind that blows no good, but a werewind just blows
Alligator Moon 3/3
by jordan
Okay, Scully thought, NOW I'm scared.
The thing snuffling and mumbling at the crack under the door seemed to push its whole weight against the flimsy cabin. They could hear shingles being peeled back overhead from the sheer force of the wind. The latch rattled wildly as it struggled to hold, and above everything else was that persistent, agonized shrieking.
Mulder rolled off the bed onto the floor. He flailed around underneath and came up with one of< the plastic bags. Crawling across the cabin floor, he held one end of the bag in his teeth and used his free hand to peel the bag open. Then he shook the contents out under the crack at the bottom of the door.
Scully could see the powdery substance being sucked through the narrow opening as if a giant vacuum cleaner was on the
other side.
Over the din of the banging door latch and the howling wind she
shouted, "What are you doing?"
"I think it's hungry!" Mulder shouted.
Scully had her hands over her ears, but she
risked taking them away when she realized the wind was dying down.
Mulder stretched his arm out and waggled his fingers at her for more, and she bent
over the edge of the mattress and seized another of the baggies to throw to him.
He pushed his back against the door, legs drawn up in front of him, and
poured the powder out on the floor. Again it was sucked up instantly, but this time as soon as it was gone, the wind was stilled.
Scully gave a groan of relief when the noise stopped. She went to Mulder and crouched down beside him. His hair was sticking up and he looked like he hadn't slept weeks, eyes shadowed, cheeks hollow. He took a long deep breath and let it out in a sigh, grinning up at her. When he smiled there was that old spark in his eye, the Mulder she had known long ago, the one that had won her heart for all time. It was a surprise and a relief to see him again,after all the barriers they'd so carefully constructed between them.
"Mulder," she said, "What the hell WAS that thing?"
"I thought we agreed. It's the Windigo."
"I only said I'd heard of it before. I didn't say--" She stopped,
wrapping her arms around herself. "Okay. Let's look at this logically."
"Great idea."
"Be serious. All I remember about the Windigo is that it was always
cold and always hungry."
An odd look crossed Mulder's face, a flash of pain. "It's that damn Alligator Moon," he muttered.
"What?"
He shook his head and she could feel him pulling away from her as he got to his feet, some kind of thing he did without making any physical gestures, just a withdrawal of attention. She felt a sudden pang of loneliness for the Mulder that had only a moment ago been so tantalizingly near, her old friend, the man she trusted with her very soul. Now the stranger was back, distrustful, wary.
In desperation, she said, "Tell me about the Windigo, Mulder. What is it supposed to be?"
He went to the wooden shelves and began to run his hands along them, feeling for something in the dim light. "There must be a tool around here
somewhere to open those barrels. I'm guessing a tire iron or something. You know, one of those things you stick in a jack to make it go up and down?"
"Mulder..."
"It's the wind, Scully," he said, not looking at her as he continued his He found a broom in the corner, held it out to look at it, started to put
it back, and and then held it out again, scowling. "What's this thing for?"
"It's a broom," Scully said helpfully.
"Does it look to you like Eddie did much cleaning up?"
"Focus, Mulder. The Windigo?"
"The Indians believed that all the frustration drove the Windigo
insane, so it would come around in the form of a little breeze, and whisper in
someone's ear, and drive him mad. That was how they explained insanity." He glanced at
her over his shoulder, only half joking when he added, "Sounds crazy, huh?" "Not so crazy," she said. "Look at El Nino. Look at the Santa Ana in California. They blame that for a ll kinds of eruptions of violence, and I believe some studies show that when the Santa Ana is blowing, there really has been a marked increase in bizarre behavior recorded."
"Well, there you go." Mulder put the broomstick between the lid and
the rim of one of the barrels and pushed forward. The lid popped off neatly.
Scully gave an exclamation of surprised pleasure, and Mulder gave her
a triumphant smile. She got up and went to stand beside him as they both looked in the barrel.
"Well, it's white," she said.
Mulder wet his finger in his mouth and stuck it into the powder, then
pulled it out and held it up to the lambent light of the Coleman lantern. He looked at Scully and she shook her head. "Oh, no. I tasted it last time. It's your turn."
Making a face, he put his finger in his mouth and held it there a
moment.
Then he pulled it out and looked up thoughtfully.
"Hmm."
"Speak to me, Mulder."
He bent over the barrel, frowning down at the contents. "It's sugar, Scully. Pure sugar."
His stomach gave a sudden rumble as if to confirm the fact, and they Mulder was working on the next drum. He pulled the lid off and let it
slide to the floor with a loud clatter. "Well, shit," he said.
Even in the lamplight, Scully could tell it wasn't sugar. It didn't have
the crystalline reflective quality. "Cocaine," she said flatly.
"And a hell of a lot of it," Mulder muttered. He
blew lightly on the surface, and powder flew up. They both drew back, but some of the powder clung to the edge of the rim, and Scully reached inside
her breast pocket and pulled out her glasses. Nearsighted as she was, she was generally a little shy about wearing them around Mulder, though she liked it when he wore his.
Now she looked closely at the powder and said, "Mulder, this isn't cocaine."
"What?"
She licked her finger, picked up some powder, tasted it. "This is baking powder."
"Well...that does make sense."
"It does?"
"If this next drum has cocaine in it, yes, I think it does."
She watched him pry up the lid of the next drum to reveal its contents.
They looked at each other, sighed together, and then both wet theirfingers in their mouths and dipped them in. This time Mulder took as smalla lick at his finger as she took at hers.
Their reactions were immediate. Scully coughed and Mulder turned his head and spat on the floor. "Jeez!" The stuff was bitter enough to bring tears to their eyes. Scully licked her lips and wiped at her mouth. "Tastes pretty damn pure to me," Mulder said.
Already Scully could feel the deadening spot on her tongue, but this
time it was just a mild tingling at the tip.
"I think we hit the motherlode," she said. *************
An hour later, Mulder and Scully sat on the bed again, side by side,
leaning back against the wall as a sort of compromise instead of lying all the
way down. The six drums in the room had all been pried open. Three of them were what seemed to be pure cocaine, two were sugar, one was baking
powder.
Hot as it was in the cabin, neither of them suggested opening the door.
Mulder had taken off his shirt and was just in his tee shirt, and Scully had taken off her suit jacket and was still sweltering in her cotton jaquard blouse.
Daylight was still hours away. Scully thought they were possibly experiencing the longest night in the world. Even the lumpy bed at the
motel they had been staying at seemed like a beckoning paradise compared to this,
and she would have traded her car for a cool shower and a chicken salad sandwich. Worst of all, Mulder had retreated inside himself again. She knew he
needed the distance because here they were again on a bed, side by side, and this kind of silence fell.
"Okay," Mulder said suddenly, and she jerked to attention and gave
him a startled glance. "Here's what I think."
She turned to him, her eyebrow up.
He said, "I think that Eddie figured out how to use the Windigo as sort of a watchdog. He must have been feeding it sugar
to keep it quiet. It worked when he had the sugar circle around the cabin--and The Windigo quit chasing us the minute it got the sugar, right?"
"But why did it kill Eddie?"
"Wait, I'm coming to that." Mulder scootched down on the bed more omfortably and stared up at the ceiling. "Okay. We know the thing likes sugar and when it gets fed it shuts up for awhile. I'm figuring about eight
hours. That's how long it was between the first attack and the second. If
I'm right, it should come again at just about daybreak."
"Something to look forward to," Scully muttered darkly.
> "So what do you want to bet that the drums in the yard are full of "Why sugar? Why not cocaine?"
"Well, in that one drum there's probably a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of the stuff, if you stretch it with baking powder and sell it retail.
I don't see how our Eddie could have gotten much more than that. And I
think the reason these drums are inside is because the coke was the most valuable,
and he wanted it inside and safe."
"At least that's a theory we'll be able to test as soon as it gets light."
Mulder nodded absently. "Anyway, suppose Eddie knew about the Windigo, knew how to appease it with sugar. So he
brings his stash out here in the woods, a little at a time, over the years, and packs in
enough sugar to get the Windigo to hang around, and he protects himself by feeding it on a regular basis. That explains all those sacks of sugar he was packing in. And we know he was using the baking powder to cut the cocaine, or at least that's a safe assumption."
"Okay," Scully said, "But why did it--"
"Kill Eddie? My guess is that it isn't a thinking creature, but just a
spirit, like the Indians thought, capable of only hunger and frustration. It
protected its source, a man at the cabin who fed it. I was at the cabin, so Eddie was then the intruder."
Scully sat up on her elbows abruptly and looked down at him, her eyes wide. "Oh my God, Mulder.
All these bags of sugar and cocaine mixed together-- He wasn't feeding it. He was drugging it! He's been using some of the coke to keep the Windigo
passive so he could keep coming up here and building his stash."
Mulder smiled at her. "Who's a clever squirrel?
That's just what I was thinking. So now we've got something just a tad worse than a Windigo with a sugar jones on our hands."
Scully stared at the door as if the creature stood just outside it. "Oh no."
"We've got a REALLY crazy wind out there," Mulder said. "And what it needs now isn't food, but a fix."
Scully fell back on the bed with a groan. If this was going to go on
much longer the Windigo wouldn't need to whisper in her ear to make her go crazy.
She already had a good head start on it.
***********
On the bed again.
Scully's watch was clearly broken, or else telling time in another dimension where five minutes there equaled an hour here. A spider had begun to crawl across the ceiling in slow motion, and she entertained herself with
thoughts of how fast she could get off the bed should it happen to drop on her face.
Mulder had his hands behind his head, his left elbow about an inch
from her ear. She decided that if he poked her with it one more time, this was
the arm she was going to rip off to kill the spider with.
Their plan--well, actually, Mulder's plan-- was simple. When daylight came and the Windigo returned, they were going to empty all the baggies out
and let it get as high as it wanted, and then if that wasn't enough, just walk
back through the woods, along the path, leaving all the barrels at the cabin
open so it could stay busy while they were escaping and hopefully leave them alone.
Simple.
Unless the theory was wrong. Unless it came again in the night, like the wolf came to the three little pigs, to huff and puff and blow their house down. Unless --
"Can't sleep?" Mulder asked.
"No," she said, in a small voice. He turned to her, propping himself up on his elbow. "So how to you explain it, Scully?" he asked.
Was his voice angry, challenging, hurt? Scully closed her eyes and
said, "How do I explain what?"
"This thing outside. The Windigo. The dust devil. Whatever the hell
it is. How do you fit it in your cosmology? How does your religion account for
it? How are you going to explain it to yourself later when you're writing the report on this?"
Scully opened her eyes to look at him. "How come I always have to write
up the report?"
He wiggled a little to shake the bed. "Answer me."
"I'm just going to say that Edgar Ray Terran fell into a swamp and drowned," she said. Her lower lip came out a little,
like a
child's, in a stubborn pout. "That's all. I don't see mention the drugs."
"Okay, that's the story you're going to give Skinner, but what are you going to tell YOURSELF, Scully?"
She sighed. "I don't know. I can't explain that thing. But--" she met
his eyes resolutely, "That doesn't mean it can't be explained by the laws of doesn't mean they don't
have an explanation, Mulder. I personally can't tell you how a car engine works, but in the absence of a good explanation I don't believe that the
spirit of Henry Ford somehow twirls those rotor things or whatever to make it go.
I trust that there is a physical explanation for it, and I honestly believe that there's a physical explanation for this Windigo thing, too."
"Such as?"
"I don't KNOW!" she snapped. "Maybe there's a slipstream created
by the physical configuration of the forest. Maybe there's -- "
"Oh, bullshit," Mulder said wearily, flopping back onto the mattress.
"You just close your mind and that's that."
"I close MY mind?" The heat and hunger had worn down Scully's
patience. "What the hell are you talking about, Mulder? You...you...search for the most irrational, ridiculous, illogical theory for every event that--"
"And I'm more often right than wrong, aren't I?" Mulder rolled over
again
and put his hand on her arm. "Aren't I?"
As if suddenly aware that he had touched her, he looked at his own
hand guiltily, and tried to withdraw it as unobtrusively but as swiftly as possible.
The gesture was pathetically obvious, and Scully's temper seized the kindling to feed itself with.
"And what the hell is THAT about?" she demanded. "Ever since
Houston, it's like I'm some kind of leper, like I've got some kind of disease you're afraid you'll contract if you even stand too close to me. I am NOT contagious, Mulder."
"I'm sorry," he muttered. But she could feel him flying away from her
at a million miles an hour, disconnecting, going somewhere safe and locking the door behind him.
"Damn you," she said softly. "I wish it had never happened too,
Mulder. I wish we'd never gone to Houston. Believe me, if there was any way I could do it, I 'd un-kiss you and take it all back."
Mulder was silent for a few long moments. She could feel his body,
tense and uncomfortable, breathing beside hers. "I wish you could, too," he said.
She looked at him, unsure how hurt to be by his words. His voice
sounded odd, but not angry.
She said, "You wish what?"
"I wish you could un-kiss me. I wish I could un-kiss you. Then maybe
I could forget about it and get some sleep and think about something else."
More moments passed. The spider paused two thirds of the way across the ceiling as if listening to see what they would say next.
Scully said, "Well, why can't you?"
"Why can't I what?"
"What you said. Un-kiss me."
Mulder's hair made a scratching sound as he turned his head on the sugar sack pillow to look at her. "What?"
It was a little hard to breathe, probably because of the heat in the
tightly enclosed cabin. Oxygen seemed to be running low.
Scully said, "It's what we both want, isn't it?"
Mulder was half sitting up, supporting his weight on one arm. Scully
was
looking at his tee shirt, at the shadowy wall beyond him, at the oil drums.
Anywhere but at his face, at his mouth.
"You know," he said, "That might work."
Her eyes flickered over his, hardly long enough to see them staring at
her. "Think so?" "We can try."
She looked up at him then, briefly, panicky, as he lowered his face to
hers. She closed her eyes just as his lips brushed hers in a gentle kiss. Her
fists clenched on either side of her, but she didn't react in any other way.
Mulder raised his head to look at her. His eyes looked heavy, drowsy. His
mouth glowed as if he had been rubbing it with his hand.
Scully looked down. The blouse over her breasts was moving in a tiny jittering dance in time with her heartbeat.
Mulder said softly, "Well, was it good for you?"
The music to Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart" had begun to play
in Scully's head. Fortunately, she couldn't remember any of the words other
than those in the title. She swallowed and said, "I've had better."
"Maybe it didn't take. You try."
"Mulder..."
"Think of it as science, Scully." Although that made absolutely no sense at all, Scully reached up and
put her hand on the back of his neck, letting her fingers slide up into his hair.
She pulled his head down gently.
Whoever had designed the explosion of matter that would spin itself into
galaxies, whoever had divided the seconds from the centuries and separated the soul out of the ashes, had before the beginning of time drawn the perfect curve of her mouth to fit exactly into the recess of his, waiting for this moment, this exact moment in time, to come.
Something of that sensation of eternity, of fate, of the shifting of things in the universe to lock into place with a satisfying click, passed through them.
As an un-kiss, it was something of a failure. But neither seemed to
notice. Scully slipped her left arm around his waist, and he put his right
arm around her shoulders to draw her against him as tightly as he could, their bodies, sweating through their clothes, finding perfect places to fit against
each other. He rolled on top of her and she opened her legs so they fit together there as well, moving against each other without even being aware they
were doing it. Scully's breath came in a whimper, and his came in a groan, the kiss
lengthening, hardening, going beyond anything either of them even
remotely imagined in dreams or fantasies. The bed shuddered underneath them, the Then they were both sitting up, gasping for breath, pushing away from
each other and falling off opposite sides of the bed as they realized that the Windigo was back. This time the howling went from a whine to a demonic
scream in the space of half a minute, and the cabin vibrated as if they were Bouncing around, Scully found a baggie and tried to rip it open,
though she spilled most of the contents on herself. Mulder had better luck, and he
scrambled across the floor to the door and shoved the open sack underneath.
There was a snarl like someone ripping a sheet in half, and Scully slid
another of the baggies across the plywood floor to him He scattered the powder under the crack of the door with badly shaking hands.
"Get the real stuff!" Mulder shouted. He pointed at the drums.
"Let's give it what it wants!"
Scully managed to hold herself upright by leaning against the wildly
trembling wall as she made her way to the drums. She scooped out handsful of the cocaine, but as soon as she started for the door, they spilled.
Mulder got up and staggered across the room to her. "The whole
thing!" he shouted, over the shrieking. "Help me!"
Scully seized the rim of the drum and tried to shove it over, but it was
too heavy. Mulder gestured for her to get behind it and push. When she did, they managed to tip it at a forty five degree angle and roll it on its lower
edge to the door.
"How are we going to get it out there?" Scully asked.
"We're going to have to open the door."
"Mulder! No!"
But
Scully thought of Terran lying in a bloody streak in the woods. She
grabbed Mulder's hands and stopped him.
They looked at each other. "What if you're wrong?" she asked.
"What if
it doesn't work?"
"You have to trust me," he told her. His hands had stopped under
hers,
and it was clear he wouldn't do it unless she let him.
"Yes or no?" he demanded.
There was no point in answering; they could no longer hear each other above the sound of the wind.
After a long moment of searching his eyes, Scully suddenly stepped back,
spreading her hands in an obvious gesture: she was letting go, putting her
faith in him.
Mulder jerked the latch up out of its cage and kicked the door as hard
as he could. He fell forward as Scully fell back, and the door flew outward
and was
ripped completely from its hinges.
Then the door, the drum, and Mulder were all sucked into the howling dawn sky.
********
The sound of the rising wind woke Scully.
Louder, louder.
She groaned and opened her eyes to blinding daylight. She sat up,
looking around. The sound was the wind, but it was a wind generated by helicopter blades.
She leaped to her feet, stood swaying dizzily for a moment, and then
lurched outside. A blue police helicopter was landing in the clearing, men
jumping out and running in all directions, holding assault rifles.
She saw Mulder's body, sock-footed, crumpled by the oil drums in
front of the cabin. She cried out and ran to him, praying he wasn't dead.
"Mulder!" She pulled the upper half of his body up into her arms. He
felt loose and heavy, which was good; he was still alive. Under any other circumstances Scully would have laughed out loud
when she saw his face. It was so covered with white powder he looked like a
mime.
She brushed at his cheeks, her breath coming in short sobs.
And then, incredibly, Walter Skinner was striding across the clearing
towards them as the police formed a semi-circle around the two agents.
"Scully." He managed to convey a world of relief in the single word.
"Are you all right?" He scowled down at Mulder, whose eyes had slitted open
and were staring, glazed, into space. "What happened to him?"
"It's a long story, sir," she said. "Can you help me get him up?"
Two officers took Mulder's arms and dragged him into a standing position, though Mulder's legs were rubbery and his head hung down as if too heavy for his neck.
"Is he all right?" Skinner asked, taking Scully's arm. "Are you all
right?"
"I'm fine, sir," she said. "But I think we'd better get Mulder to a
hospital as soon as we can."
They made their way back to the helicopter, Skinner holding Scully
upright, staring at her in undisguised concern. Nearby, an oil drum lay on its side, dented in, scoured out. Scully glanced at it and shivered as they
climbed
into the helicopter.
Scully said, "How did you find us, sir?"
Skinner's voice was gruff with repressed emotion. "When no one could
reach you two, we knew you were in some kind of trouble. The officers found your jeep in the woods last night, but we had to wait until morning to
launch a rescue mission."
"But I still don't see how you ever found us in--"
Skinner looked down and she followed his gaze. As they lifted off, she
got a panoramic view of the steaming, primeval swamps, dull green in the
cloudy grey morning. In the distance, she saw treetops bent down as if a
jumbo jet had crashed through them, though the trees weren't burned, just broken. It was like a giant line pointing directly through the woods from where
the jeep had been parked to the cabin. "You want to tell me what happened there?" Skinner asked.
She turned her eyes towards him wearily. "The drums in the cabin are
full of cocaine, sir," she said. "Mulder and I made a drug bust. Enough coke to supply a small country."
Skinner was staring down at Mulder, but all he said was, "Good
work." He gave Scully's shoulder a slight squeeze and said quietly, "Don't worry
about it just now, Agent Scully. I'm sure you can explain it all in your report."
Scully leaned back and closed her eyes, resting her hand on Mulder's
knee and sighing plaintively. "How come I always have to write the report?"
