They ran.

If it was alive, it was chasing them; if it was some sort of natural disaster, like a windstorm or an earthquake, it was still only moments from overtaking them. The wolf knows it of the rabbit, the hawk knows it of the dove, the dog knows it of the mailman: whoever chases is predator, and whoever runs is prey. As Scully ducked between trees, her arm out to ward off branches, brushing spiderwebs and Spanish moss out of her way, a blind, unreasoning panic began to seize her.

Before it could take hold, she summoned the last of her courage and reached back to the holster in the small of her back. She tore back the velcro flap, grasped the butt of her weapon and drew it. The motion slowed her, and she let herself come to a full stop, the gun in her hand, to face her pursuer defiantly.

"Scully! No!" Mulder had slid like a first base runner and reversed direction to run back to her. He scooped an arm around her waist and dragged her backwards. For one second she saw the shimmer of something in the air, something she could only comprehend as sheer power, and she felt its malevolent intent like foul breath in her face. Then she was being half carried, half pulled by Mulder into a sudden clearing.

They fell together in a tangle of arms and legs, sharp pointy elbows and knees. Scully struggled to a kneeling position quickly, but Mulder put his hand on her arm and said in a surprisingly calm voice, "No, wait."

She stopped, looking around. The woods were still. For a few minutes she waited, concentrating on slowing her breathing. Mulder stared in fascination as her breasts rose and fell like the heaving bosom of a Harlequin heroine..

Then she gave him a "whadda-you-lookin-at" glare and he quickly averted his eyes.

"Mulder..."

He looked past her into the woods. "It's gone," he said.

Scully's fingers curled up into her palm, making a fist that itched to smack him once. Just once. If only she could give him one good smack and wipe that smirk off his face, make those eyes focus on her instead of wandering off into his own Mulderworld where she was something impersonal, a convenience or an annoyance, a nurse to pass the scalpel to the surgeon, a Watson to cast a shadow in Holmes' brilliance, just ONCE you son of a bitch when I'm not in one of those hospital gowns with no makeup on or bleeding from the nose, LOOK AT ME!

Mulder blinked and turned his head to look at her.

"What the hell was that?" he asked.

She looked back at him for a moment and then sighed. "I'm thinking it was a very large animal."

Logic sounded so pitiful and strange in this primal place, where clearly madness and magic held sway. Still, she had to try. "Maybe something from a zoo?"

"Yeah, a zoo," Mulder said. "Maybe the famous Texas Jurassic Park zoo."

Taking her bearings, Scully saw that they had fallen into the edge of a clearing maybe a quarter of an acre in diameter, in the center of which stood Terran's cabin. It was a pathetic structure, the size of a Sears backyard shed, just some clapboards nailed to a frame with a crudely shingled roof. It looked like something the Unibomber might call home.

In the "yard" around it were dozens of black oil drums with sealed lids.

Mulder got up and offered his hand, and she took it to pull herself up, thinking, Oh, now we're touching again, are we? But as soon as she was up, he drew away again. Scully felt a brief surge of resentment, but she pushed it down; there were more important things to worry about at the moment.

"Okay, I'll ask," she said. "How did you know we'd be safe here?"

"A hunch," Mulder said. "Look."

She followed his pointing finger down; at first all she saw was dirty, fallen leaves, a patch of wild mushrooms growing from a rotting branch. Then she began to discern a pattern, a white marking. Once she saw it, it was obvious. There was a long white stripe of powdery substance, like a line draw between the yard of the cabin and the woods.

"I saw it earlier," he told her. "I think it's some kind of boundary line. It goes all the way around the house, in a perfect circle."

"But what is it?"

"I think it's salt," Mulder said. "I think it's something like a charmed circle, something that wards off evil."

Scully bent again, peering down at the white substance. "It's crystalline," she said thoughtfully, hesitant to touch it. "Salt, you say?"

"Well, it stands to reason. Some people believe salt wards off harm. Like a snake circle."

She turned her face up to his. "A what?"

"Haven't you ever heard that snakes won't cross a circle of salt?"

Scully stood up, dusting her hands. "Mulder, that's...that's ridiculous. A snake crawls over the desert sands, which are full of salt, and they live in salt rock areas of the Southwest. In the Great Salt Flats of Utah snakes are one of the most successful animals to survive under those harsh saline conditions."

Mulder made a sound that meant, I hear you, no comment, and wandered away from her, to the barrels. He pried at the lid of one without much success. "Damn," he muttered. "What do you think he has in these things?"

"Forty thieves?"

Mulder looked at her blankly. It was all right for HIM to try to be funny. Fine. She looked around the yard for some sort of tool to help him pry up the lid. Nothing.

"Have you been inside the cabin?" she asked.

"Yeah. Nothing in there but some more of these barrels, some supplies, and a bed. I didn't look around long, though. You called just after I got here."

Of mutual accord, they both started to walk towards the cabin. Halfway there, they stopped and looked at each other, then turned back to stare into the woods again.

Absolute silence had fallen.

You can smell it, Scully thought, fighting down another rush of panic. Something old, old, old, the way old dogs take on a certain small. That's what makes the animals go quiet. They can smell it coming.

Something suddenly stung Scully's ankle, and she yelped, startling Mulder so badly he jerked his whole body back from her. She swatted at it; her ankle was bare between the cuff of her pants and her low rise boots. She had stepped too close to a fire ant bed, and they were starting to swarm up her foot.

Swearing, she kicked the boot off and hopped backwards awkwardly, trying to brush them off, keep her balance, and watch the woods all at the same time. Mulder grabbed her elbow to keep her upright, and bent to swipe at her pants leg.

The wind was picking up again. It started as a pattering among the treetops, just leaves tapping against each other, almost like raindrops. Then it swelled, swaying the branches lower and lower still, until at ground level saplings began to twitch and shudder violently.

Mulder backed up, and Scully hopped after him, until they came to the wall of the cabin. She supported herself there with one hand, the other still brushing the few remaining ants away. It was like being touched with a lit match each place they bit.

What happened next was too strange for Scully to believe, even though she was looking right at it. It might have been a tornado, or a hurricane, or the biggest dust devil anyone had ever laid eyes on. The wind was circling the house, blasting leaves up in the air like a weedeater, making an increasingly loud whining noise. It moved in a circular motion, following the salt trail around the clearing, faster and faster, creating a vortex so intense that Scully felt the hair lifting from her head.

It swept around and around the house, until there was a solid mass of leaves fluttering wildly in the air. If not for the noise, it would have been a fascinating physical phenomenon. But that shrieking--! It was visceral, connecting directly to the most primitive part of the brain, deeper, something recognized at a cellular level. Scully could feel it shaking in her bones and screaming in her blood. She fell against Mulder, and he put his arms around her.

A few loose shingles from the roof of the cabin actually did fly up into oblivion, but then as abruptly as it had come, it was gone again.

The leaves fell back down, and within the space of a single moment, everything was exactly as it had been before.

Well, almost everything.

"Oh, shit," Mulder said, releasing her to stride forward and drop to his knees. "Look at this, Scully. Look."

She limped after him and saw what he was looking at.

The salt circle was gone.

****************************

The cabin smelled so bad Scully's eyes stung when she first entered it. She stood in the doorway for a moment, putting her boot back on, while Mulder poked around. There was an old Coleman lantern, a filthy pile of crumpled paper plates and old beer cans, a few torn girly magazines.

"All the comforts of home," he murmured.

Scully grunted as she tried to force up the lid of one of the oil barrels. "We need to get a look at what's in these drums," she said.

"Ten to one it's the loot he's been stashing from the mail robberies."

"I don't doubt it, but we can't prove anything until we get some evidence."

Actually, they had enough evidence to convict Edgar Ray Terran several times over. He had been a forger and a thief, sending fake civil service exams scores out so that he could get jobs under false identities at post offices around the country, each time disappearing after a major theft. They estimated that he had stolen almost a million dollars over a period of three years.

The problem was his elusiveness. He seemed to be capable of vanishing into thin air, and he was rumored to have the ability to shapeshift, which was what pulled Mulder into the case originally.

But long hours of careful investigation had shown that he had only been very adept at makeup and altering his facial hair and voice modulation, really amazing tricks, but tricks just the same.

When he had been confronted for questioning, he had managed to get away, fleeing into this remote swampy area between Texas and Louisiana, where he had originally come from, and no one had been able to follow him after that. Local authorities had caught glimpses of him in the tiny towns, buying supplies at rural stores, but he had always managed to evade them. A canine search team had been flown in, but the dogs had disappeared within a couple of hours, their baying simply cut off in mid-howl. After that, a serious manhunt had been mounted, but the isolation of the thousands of square miles of protected wetlands had made it a waste of money and manhours.

It had been at that point that Skinner had allowed Mulder to take the case, but by the time Mulder figured out that Terran was only using local legends and rumors to create his own smokescreen, he and Scully were so deep into the paperwork they couldn't back out. Skinner simply refused to let them quit, pointing out that all they really had to do was arrest their suspect and bring him in.

So it had been one hot steamy trek after another along the state line, with Mulder in his no-touching-though-I-remember-nothing-about-any-kiss funk, and Scully's teeth so on edge she felt like biting him just to relieve the itch, until they finally started getting some solid leads. And then they had begun to spot him, using high powered binoculars, shadowy as Bigfoot slipping through the woods, around the quicksand, over the cottonmouth nests.

Their last bit of patience had been rewarded when Mulder figured out that Eddie was stocking supplies somewhere in the woods, always carrying sacks or full backpacks in and coming out empty handed. Until today, now that Scully thought of it. Today he had been empty handed when she saw him headed for his cabin. That had to mean something, though she couldn't decide what.

Mulder was squatting by the lantern, lighting it. Even in the daylight it was dark in the cabin, and the light helped, if only to illuminate the filth.

"There's enough oil here to last a couple of days," he observed. "And all these supplies he was bringing in."

Scully examined them idly, big empty burlap bags from the stores, unmarked, though they knew the contents because they had every receipt in their possession as part of the investigation. "Mulder, you don't think we're going to be stuck here, do you?"

"No. I'm just happy to see that if we can't get out tonight we won't be stuck in the dark."

Mulder was not fond of total darkness. And being in the woods at night with that thing out there was not a happy thought for either of them.

Scully said, "What are you doing?"

He was on his hands and knees, pulling ziploc bags from under the bed. "God, there must be a hundred of these things under here," he said, his voice muffled. "Eddie was planning to hide out here for a good long while, and then in time, when things had cooled down, to come back for it."

Scully picked up one of the bags and held it up to examine it, frowning. "Drugs?"

"Check it out."

She opened one and studied the contents, pressing it through the plastic between her thumb and forefinger. "I think it's cocaine, Mulder."

She took the baggie to the door and held it up to the light. Actually, it could have been anything.. She put her finger in her mouth to wet it and dipped it in the bag, licked experimentally. There was always a sure way to find out if it was coke. A tiny taste would put her tongue to sleep.

Mulder was watching her with a strange look.

"What is it?"

"I think it's..." She tasted it again. "It's sugar, Mulder."

He looked totally nonplused. "Sugar?"

"Do you think maybe he was using it to cut drugs?"

They looked at each other a moment, then both shook their heads. "You use baking powder to cut cocaine," Mulder pointed out. "Not that he doesn't seem to have plenty of that on the inventory, too."

Scully stared up and to the right for a moment, her eyes glazed over thoughtfully.

"Multhur," she said.

"What?"

She spied a stack of plastic jugs filled with water, went to get one. After peeling off the plastic safety ring, she popped the top and drank from it.

Deeply.

Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, "It ith coke."

"Really?" Mulder took the baggie from her and frowned down at it. "What the hell would he be doing that for? The dumbest street buyer would know by a taste this wasn't straight. What a stupid thing to do."

"Well, thit," Scully said, making faces as she moved her tongue around in her mouth, trying to regain sensation. It would last no more than a few minutes, as delicate a taste as she had taken, but it was a maddening feeling.

"The circle is gone," Mulder pointed out. "I sure wish I knew what it was made of. Could it have been sugar?"

He went back outside and Scully followed him. To her dismay, she realized that they had only an hour or two of daylight left. The grey sky was finally clearing, replaced by high scudding clouds, and already the mosquitoes were increasing.

"What differinth doth it make?" she asked.

"We jutht need to get the hell out of here."

"With that thing out there? We'd never make it."

"But Eddith been out here for almotht a month, and it never got him."

"Until today," Mulder reminded her.

She nodded. "Whath differenth about thith day?" She glared at him. "Thtop lauthing at me."

"I'm sorry," he said. "You sound like Daffy Duck."

She worked her tongue for a few more minutes, making hissing noises as a tingling itch told her sensation was returning. "Focus, Mulder," she said, successfully.