by Tim Lebbon
“We should be calling this in,” Scully said.
“You see a phone booth anywhere close?”
“But we left them on the road, that boy and girl.”
“Krycek’s with them.”
“Is he?”
He knew what she meant. His suspicions about Krycek were hers as well, and neither really knew where his true loyalties lay.
“Something’s using them, Scully. Whatever drew them out here and put them to sleep, it has some sort of a hold on them. Did you see their faces?”
“Blank.”
“Empty. While they’re like that they’re not eating, or drinking, and they’re wasting away.”
“And killing,” she said. “Let’s not forget that.”
“Right. So we help them best by breaking the hold.”
“So what is this, Mulder? Military? Some sort of experiment?”
He didn’t answer because he did not know, and flashes of memory were making him nauseous. The sound of those voices. The joy their song promised, and their harmonious hum of despair.
“What did you come here expecting to find?” Scully asked.
“I don’t know. That’s what draws me.”
The going was getting harder, road surface broken and crumbled by successive years of heat and frost and negligible maintenance. Weeds sprouted between the cracks. Whatever was out here, not many people bothered paying it a visit.
“Looks like we’re going the right way,” he said, slowing the car and pointing at a painted wooden angel shape nailed to a fir tree’s trunk.
“Seems it used to be a popular place,” Scully said.
Mulder drove on. And he was so intent on what lay ahead that he didn’t see what came from behind until it was too late.
At the last instant he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the bright bulge of headlights on full, then the car struck. Scully cried out and braced herself against the dashboard, and Mulder gripped the wheel as it jumped in his hand, trying to hold on as the car slewed to the left. He slammed on the brakes and heard the straining engine of the vehicle behind them, shoving them towards the ditch on the left and using their momentum to drive them over. The car lurched, hard, knocking the wind from them, and the tree loomed large before them.
Mulder had a chance to lean across and meet Scully where she leaned towards him, and they hugged as the impact smashed through the car.
Seat belts tugged tight, cutting into his stomach and the side of his neck. Glass smashed and shattered. A weight drove back against his legs, the steering wheel crumpled and crushed against his side. The stink of heat and spilled petrol filled his nose as he gasped in the next breath. Scully’s hair tickled his face and nose, and her hands gripped the back of his jacket, holding him tight.
The car rocked back on broken axles and settled, creaking and clicking. And dripping.
Mulder breathed in deeper and held his breath.
“Scully?”
“Yeah.” She pulled back and tugged the gun from its holster on her belt.
“Gas is leaking.”
She nodded, and they both kept hunkered down, looking past the back seat towards the other car. But the rear window had smashed and remained in place, misting opaque. A few areas fell away, affording them a limited view of the ditch and road behind them. Just enough to see tires spinning, dust rising, and to hear the other vehicle speeding away back towards town.
“Let’s get outta here,” Mulder said. He noticed blood on Scully’s face, but that would have to wait.
They scrambled from the car, falling into scratching and prickling bushes.
“Into the trees!” Scully said. Mulder knew she was right—the attacker might easily have left someone behind with a rifle. Crouching, both now clasping their guns, they pushed past the wrecked car and sought the shelter of deeper woodland.
Moving felt good. Moving away from the wreck felt better. The car was a write-off, but Mulder knew that they were close. Nephilim Woods called, silent but just as powerful as that strange song. Someone didn’t want them out here, and that was more reason than any to continue. He was shaken from the crash, but the adrenalin rush had sharpened his senses. He scanned the forest ahead of them for movement, and every few steps he glanced back towards the car and road. Already the vehicle was a vague shape behind trees and undergrowth, steam hissing from the ruptured radiator and clouding the scene. Beyond, the road was nothing but an open space. There was no sign of anyone watching them, and no evidence of pursuit.
Whoever had run them from the road had not stayed behind to finish the job.
For a few minutes they moved quickly, silently, heading slightly downhill and crossing several old, overgrown paths. Poison ivy brushed subtly against the backs of their hands and brambles pricked their skin. Then Scully said, “Mulder, here.” She had paused ahead next to a large fallen tree, leaning on the downed trunk and holding her gun by her side. She was breathing hard, but he sensed the same excitement in her. The scent of a mystery. She wasn’t so open about the allure of the unknown as him, but he knew she felt it.
He joined her by the tree and looked into the clearing beyond.
“Just an old quarry,” he said.
“Maybe.”
“What do you mean?” But Scully didn’t answer. She was looking, frowning, and Mulder did the same.
The clearing was maybe fifty meters across, totally denuded of trees and stripped of all grasses and undergrowth. A few errant shrubs and weeds grew here and there, but they were lackluster, colors muted by layers of dust. The far edge of the clearing dropped away into a much wider open area—the quarry. In the clearing stood several items of old equipment, probably used for excavation or above-ground movement of materials. Mulder saw a broken conveyor belt tangled with rusted framing, several huge wheels piled together bearing deflated tires, a small vehicle of some kind with decayed cabin and smashed windows.
“There,” Scully said, pointing. “And there.”
And Mulder saw. Not every piece of equipment was old and decayed. The newer items of machinery looked different. Their style was wrong, the shapes too fluid, no right angles or sharp edges. The dropping sun glowed from slick surfaces, shimmering, wet. They seemed to flex, almost as if alive, but Mulder thought it might have been his heartbeat pulsing behind his eyes.
“Hiding in plain sight,” he said.
“But what’s hiding?”
“Let’s go and see, Scully.” She glanced at him, unsettled. “Hey, we’re here now.” He smiled and climbed over the fallen tree, and the song sang in again.
Mulder screamed. He felt the scream in his throat and skull, but he didn’t hear it, because the dreadful song was too loud. As he slipped from the tree, still gripping his gun, he saw Scully drop to her knees, then roll onto her side. She fumbled in her pocket for the spare bullets, but he didn’t think it would do any good. They were too close to the source, the strange sound pounding through the ground and air. It penetrated their skulls. His eyes throbbed, his teeth ached, his ears felt as if a wasp had crawled into each one and was now buzzing its wings and stabbing its sting as it tried to get back out.
Mulder rested his arms on the trunk, leveled his gun, and tried to fire at one of the objects. His fingers didn’t work. He had no strength. As he tried to summon the will to shoot, the world began to recede.
The strange mechanical items began to glow, a heavy blue light that thickened the air. It hurt to look at it, but Mulder could not look away. He reached down for Scully and caught her beneath the arms, lifting her so that she could see too.
She saw. Then she fell against Mulder, pressing her arms across his face and tripping him back so that they both fell behind the tumbled tree. She held his face and started at him, trying to say something. He hugged her tight.
As they buried their faces against each other’s neck, an almighty thud pounded through the ground and knocked the breath from them.
When Mulder finally gasped in his next breath, silence had falle
n.
****
They sat for a while on the fallen tree, trying to gather themselves and wondering what had happened. What they had seen. And more importantly, what they had not.
The several items of strange machinery had vanished, leaving only scorched soil behind. The scent of burning hung in the air, gradually being dispersed by the gentle evening breeze. The clearing looked strangely empty, even though the rusted, decaying mining machinery was still there. Something was missing, and Scully’s heart almost ached.
“What happened, Mulder?”
“I don’t know. But whatever it was, we scared it away.”
“It?”
He shrugged, gesturing out across the clearing.
“Ball lightning,” she said. “That’s what we saw. I’ve seen evidence of it before, it leaves behind burn marks like those. We got here just as it was forming. Several instances of it. That’s what we saw.”
“Believe that if you want, Scully.”
She did not reply, but neither did she believe it.
“We should get back to town,” Mulder said after a few silent minutes.
“Long walk in the dark,” Scully said.
“You’d rather wait here til dawn?”
Scully thought of that song reverberating in her skull and through her body, how strange and intimate it had been, how alluring and suggestive.
“Hell, no,” she said.
They held hands as they walked back through the woods. When they finally reached their ruined car the moon was out, and it lit the road all the way back to Lynott Sound.
****
They went the wrong way a couple of times, and by the time they saw the lights of the town in the distance, it was almost 4 a.m. Mulder was surprised to see so much illumination, not only streetlights but inside houses, and he also saw the shifting glares of several hidden vehicles moving around the town. By the time they reached the first building the vehicles had gone, but lights remained on behind many curtained windows.
“More murders?” Scully wondered.
“Hope not. Maybe something different. I think we shook things up.”
“So we should go to Laura Connolly’s place.”
“You’re a mind reader, Scully.”
“There’s no such thing.”
Tired now, muddy and scratched, aching from the car crash and with ears still throbbing from the intensity of that eldritch song, they walked across the town square. Mulder felt no eyes on them. They were alone, and whatever this town had been through, it was coming to terms with it behind closed doors.
“Well, I suppose I should have guessed,” Scully said. She nodded across the square. Close to the war memorial was the car they’d seen Krycek arrive in. Its front fender was missing, bonnet crumpled, offside wheel arch torn and ragged. Of Krycek, there was no sign.
“Thanks, partner,” Mulder muttered.
“You know he’s not your partner, right?” Scully said. “You know he’s something more than that?”
Mulder nodded but said nothing.
As they approached Laura Connolly’s house they saw her mother on a chair on the front deck. She was motionless, sitting in shadows, the only sign of life a haze of steam from the coffee cup in her hands. Street lights caught the steam as it drifted from beneath the canopy, soon lost to the night.
“They took her,” she said as Mulder and Scully approached.
“Who took her?” Scully asked.
“Men and women in uniforms. Army, or something. In trucks. Her and the other three sleepers. There were doctors and nurses too, and they said it was for the best. She’ll be treated and brought back home.” Mulder caught the glimmer of tears. “But they never said when.” Laura’s mother’s voice broke, and Scully went to comfort her. The woman—previously unwelcoming and evasive—stood to embrace the agent.
“Can I see her room one more time?” Mulder asked. He saw no nod, heard no agreement, but neither did he hear a no. So he went inside.
****
They were waiting for a hire car to arrive. The Bureau would have to be told about the wrecked car out in the woods. But Scully had a feeling they already knew.
She’d been hoping that the old man Patton would be there, but they were alone in Marshall’s Diner. The coffee was really good.
Mulder was uncharacteristically quiet.
After Scully had finished her second mug, and the caffeine was battling the exhaustion that threatened to drag her down, she asked him, “Well?”
He looked up, startled. He’d been somewhere else.
“Neither of the Connolly parents smoked?”
“Don’t think so,” Scully said. She frowned, concentrated, recalled the interior of their house. “No ashtrays, no smoke stains on the ceilings. House smelled nice.”
“It doesn’t anymore,” Mulder said. “It stank of cigarettes. So did the curtains of Laura’s room.”
Scully’s blood ran cold. She remembered him—a wrinkled, weathered face, drawing deeply on a cigarette, hidden by veils of smoke and shadow.
“I’ll bet it’s a brand we both know,” she said. They sat in silence until the Marshall woman brought their breakfast, because right then there was little more to say.
Twenty minutes later a car pulled up outside. A young man got out and stood by the driver’s door, waiting with the hire contract in his hand.
Mulder sighed. “Let’s get back to work.”
THE END
The Beast of Little Hill
By Peter Clines
LITTLE HILL, MISSOURI
14th APRIL, 1995, 2:08 a.m.
Scully looked out the window as the blue sedan rolled through the center of town. The town, she noticed, didn’t seem to be much more than a few blocks of one- and two-story buildings. Most of them were brick, but a few wooden ones stood out. On a guess, the newest one had been built sometime in the ’50s. The streets were gray concrete marked with a few thin lines of green weeds.
“So, Mulder,” she asked the driver, “what’s so amazing here that we had to drive four hours out from Kansas City?”
He looked at her, and his lips made the curved line she’d come to recognize as his smile. “Isn’t it enough that they have the best cheeseburger in the state and the best apple pie in the world?” he asked, gesturing at the signs in the diner window.
“I don’t think Skinner will think so.”
“You know, I’ve wanted to come here for almost ten years and never had a chance. There was always something more pressing, from the bureau or my own investigations.”
She waited.
“We’re in Hill County,” said Mulder. “The town’s called Little Hill.”
“Is there a Big Hill?”
“I don’t believe so, no.”
“And you’ve brought us here because...?”
“Back in 1969 there was an incident here. A hundred and eight people called state and local authorities to report a UFO crash in the woods outside of town.”
“That’d be, what,” Scully said with a straight face, “right over there?”
“Before authorities could even get on the scene, though,” he continued, ignoring her, “the craft and all wreckage vanished. Several large military trucks were reported in the area at the time. The popular theory is that the craft was actually shot down and retrieval teams were already standing by to collect it.”
“Isn’t it possible that it was just a plane crash? The Air Force always has some prototype or another. It would explain the retrieval teams, too.”
“It’s been discussed,” said Mulder. “There are no records of any military or private sector trials that week within six hundred miles of here.”
“Six hundred miles isn’t that far for a jet.”
“Try not to laugh,” he said, “but the closest test was a weather balloon system.”
She smiled.
He gestured to the north. “Even more interesting is that there were seven more UFO sightings in the months afterwards that were also neve
r explained. The last one was in February of 1970. They were some of the first cases MUFON ever investigated, which is ironic because the crash itself was one of the final ten cases examined by Project Blue Book before that study was terminated.”
“Well,” said Scully, “that’s not surprising. It’s a perfect example of collective hysteria. People under stress all coming to share the same delusion, regardless of actual evidence.”
Mulder nodded. “That’s what everyone concluded about Little Hill,” he said. “A few people even theorized that it might have been influenced by the name, connecting the events here to the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill seven and a half years earlier in New Hampshire.”
“Seven and a half years is a long time for that level of hysteria.”
“I agree,” said Mulder, “and so do a few other people. Still, interest in this location has dwindled over the years and it’s dropping off most lists. The last serious investigation was back in 1987, although there have been a few amateurs who come by to suggest new theories.”
“So you’ve been here before?”
He shook his head. “Never. But we were more or less in the area and I heard that rates have gone down on a lot of the exhibits.”
Scully looked around the town. “Exhibits?”
****
COPE FARM
2:54 p.m.
The barn, Scully had to admit, was cleaner than most of the ones she’d seen in her career with the FBI. It was swept and spacious, more of a showroom than a storage area. The corners were free of the usual clutter of old straw, dirt, and rat traps.
Granted, the near-overpowering smell of cat urine probably explained the lack of rat traps.
Abraham Cope didn’t seem to notice the smell. She wasn’t sure if he was used to it or just too deep into his spiel to notice. He stood before them in his tucked-in plaid shirt, gesturing with all the force and conviction of a Sunday sermon. By her practiced estimate, he was in his late forties to early fifties. He had white hair and leathery skin from years in the sun. He was clean-shaven, despite what looked like severe arthritis in his dominant right hand.