by Tim Lebbon
Just as real blood soaked and covered the clothing of the two who had been killed.
It did indeed look as if the doll had committed murder.
*****
Hannah Barton needed to get to a hospital; Fox knew it, Hannah knew it, and the EMT who stood by them knew it. But Fox wanted to listen, just as much as Hannah wanted to talk.
“I don’t know why I’m alive,” Hannah repeated. Fox couldn’t begin to count just how many times the girl had said the words. She was a pretty thing with long blond hair and enormous blue eyes, shaking like the wind. It didn’t appear that she’d been really hurt—other than the fact that her wrists were chaffed and she seemed to have acquired a few bangs and bruises. “She started with me—she started with me. I thought Caitlin would kill me!”
He knew she was referring to one of the creepy dolls on display. He had seen where her two co-workers had been hung with their throats ripped out—he’d seen the fabricated hands and nails on the doll and that, indeed, the doll had been used as a murder weapon.
But while he knew the police were not discounting Hannah as a suspect, he wasn’t in the least convinced she could be guilty in any way—there wasn’t a speck of blood on the young woman.
“Take a deep breath one more time,” he said softly. Fox could see that Dana Scully was coming across the room. He lowered his head for a minute, hiding a little smile. After years of skirting around one another, they both knew that come what may, they were partners in far more than seeking the truth. He also knew that Dana would see this as a matter-of-fact event—no matter how bizarre. Murderers—sick, psycho murderers, quite possibly—had determined to kill two young people and destroy a Halloween shop, an Anglican church, and a graveyard.
They didn’t need to look to the skies. There were people on earth demented enough to perform such atrocities.
And yet...
The good thing was that—while she might be skeptical as all hell—Dana betrayed nothing with her expression. She was grave when Fox introduced her as Agent Scully to Hannah Barton. She spoke softly and calmly, telling Hannah she was sorry—she knew she’d already told her story—but did she mind doing so one more time.
Hannah didn’t mind.
“We were trying to find out why one of the dolls had been faulty,” she explained. “I was coming here with Randy and Roberta—”
Hannah paused for a minute, a catch in her voice, tears forming in her eyes once again, “because we volunteered. I wanted to be Miss Johnny on the spot, you know, get a raise, impress Matthew Mayfield and the other bosses, and make my way in the company. So I was ahead, in front. And I came down here... saw the broken window. When I turned, getting out my cell phone...”
Her voice trailed off again.
“You ran right into the Caitlin Corpse doll,” Mulder continued for her, looking over at Dana.
“It had come to life!” Hannah whispered.
“It does move—it’s basically an automated figure, right?” Dana said, looking back at Mulder.
Hannah nodded. “Yes, you see, that was it, that’s why we were here. One was returned; the people said that the doll was broken, that it ‘embraced’ a guest and they had to rip it off of the person. So we were going to test them all, and see that they were working right. But then there was the broken window, and when I backed away...” She stopped speaking again and looked back at the place where the Caitlin Corpse dolls hung with her dead friends and she shuddered and started to sob again. Nearby, the EMT made an irritated noise; he wanted to take the young woman to a hospital. Mulder lifted a hand to him; it would be just a minute more.
“And then?” Dana asked quietly.
“She was holding me—one of the Caitlins—was holding me. She had put her arms around me and the whole place seemed to be alive. The evil clowns and the skeletons, witches—ghosts! They were all chattering and laughing and the Caitlin had... snake eyes. She looked at me with snake eyes and squeezed me and then...”
“And then I thought I was dead,” Hannah said flatly, suddenly deflated, not shivering, not crying, just staring ahead as if all her emotion had been drained from her. “She squeezed me... I thought I was dead. But, I woke up... all entangled, and the creatures were everywhere and I could—I could smell the blood—that tinny, terrible smell of blood. And I dialed 911.”
She looked at Dana, and Dana knew that as far as the girl was concerned, she had the truth, the absolute truth. Whatever had happened in here, Hannah Barton believed beyond all sense that she had been attacked and nearly killed by a doll.
Mulder nodded to the EMT who came over and began speaking to the girl and then guiding her toward the emergency vehicle that waited outside.
“You saw the bodies?” Mulder asked.
“Yes. And you know, of course, that I’m going to do thorough autopsies.”
Something that was almost a smile touched his lips. “I expect no less from you, you know.”
He was talking about a lot more than the autopsies. She was his anchor; he was her imagination. She nodded in acknowledgment. They were good together in many ways.
“You been outside yet?”
“No.”
“Shall we then?” she asked.
He nodded. They made their way carefully through the debris of gruesome “decorative” creatures and around the police markers to the back of the store. Giant double doors led to the back.
Nothing really separated the properties—Mayfield’s Monsters and Mayhem had a thatch of mown lawn directly behind the back receiving doors that ran straight into the overgrown, tree laden, grass tufted graveyard.
The mausoleum and vault doors seemed to be opened throughout the graveyard; massive holes were dug everywhere.
Graves—disturbed to the point it looked as if an army of crazed moles had been at it all night.
Bodies, in various stages of decomposition—from the freshly embalmed to heaps of disconnected bones—were strewn about haphazardly.
“This would have taken all night—dozens of people. Or more!” Dana murmured.
“It had to have happened quickly,” Mulder told her. “The place cleared out of customers at midnight. The bosses were gone within thirty minutes. Hannah Barton and her friends—the dead, Randy and Roberta—were left behind. This all happened in less than an hour.”
Something seemed to be moving beneath a corpse that lay just outside the grated steel door—now hanging on its hinges—that had led to a family mausoleum.
“Mulder,” Dana said, hurrying toward the body.
He was quick to see what she was talking about—and he followed her, reaching the body before her. He hunkered down—as he did so, he was quickly thrown backwards as something leapt from the ground.
It was black—that was all she could really catch. It looked as if it were a nutria or large rodent, or... like a very large, incredibly fat, black snake.
It was gone before either could really see it, burrowing into a bush.
Mulder immediately went after it. Dana ran after him. “Fox, stop! You don’t know what it is, the creature could be rabid!”
He didn’t stop—but neither did he catch the creature. He thrashed through the bushes where it disappeared. He searched beneath and around a number of the corpses strewn about. But there was nothing.
“What the hell was that, Dana?” he demanded.
“An animal, Mulder. There are animals all around. It was—something.”
“Something—what?” he asked her. “Have you ever seen anything like it? The damned thing appeared to be a giant slug!”
“If it was a giant slug, Mulder, it didn’t do this. Forget it. Look around you. A giant slug didn’t do this!”
He stood straight, staring into the distance. She shook her head at him slightly. “Mulder, I always go the distance with you—you know that. But focus. Look around you.”
He started walking. “Mulder!”
“I’m investigating,” he told her, looking back and then pointing across to the
church. There were two men there—one, fifty or so, white-haired, and wearing the collar that denoted him as an Episcopal priest. Another man was next to him, perhaps ten years or so younger, dark-haired and gesturing wildly as he spoke to the priest.
“A good father and our Mr. Mayfield, I believe,” Mulder said.
She nodded and followed along behind him.
As they approached the men Mulder held up his FBI identification. “Mr. Mayfield, Father. I’m Agent Fox Mulder and this is my associate, Agent Dana Scully.”
“Father Timothy,” the priest said, rising. They’d been sitting on a very old tomb. Time had weathered away most of the words, but Dana judged it to be of the Revolutionary War era. It had somehow been ignored in the mass destruction.
The other man rose, too. Dana noted that his fingernails were dirty.
Had the man been digging in the earth? But could one man have done all this?
“Matthew Mayfield,” he said.
“I’m sorry for the loss of your employees, Mr. Mayfield,” Dana said.
He nodded, distracted. Then he looked at her oddly. “I knew they were coming,” he said.
Fox glanced at her. She winced.
“They? Who?” Mulder asked him.
“I don’t know,” Mayfield said. “But—I heard them. Before. They all said that I was crazy—that I’d lived with my creatures too long.”
Dana nodded, trying to appear like Mulder—patient and willing to listen to whatever.
“Please, Mr. Mayfield, go on,” she said.
He took a deep breath. He didn’t answer. Father Timothy stepped in. “Mr. Mayfield is a deacon at the church. He was doing some maintenance duties down in the crypts last week. He heard talking. He found one of the old tombs had been broken into.” He took a breath and shrugged. “I’m afraid the youth of America can be destructive and ridiculous when it comes to the Halloween season. However, they’d tried to steal one of the corpses. We found it—a pile of dust, really—near the broken stone. We put it back.”
Mayfield shook his head. “Father Timothy is afraid they’re going to lock me up. But...”
“Please,” Mulder told him. “We discount nothing. Anything you have to say just might matter—we need your help.”
“A few days before that—I heard a boom. And there was suddenly a burst of light in the graveyard. I called Father Timothy. The next day, we found a huge patch of burned-out grass in the middle of the graveyard.”
“Kids again,” Father Timothy said quietly.
Mayfield stared at him and sucked in his breath, looking at Mulder and Scully. He let out his breath.
“Aliens,” he said.
Father Timothy lowered his head and shook it, as if he were afraid that Mayfield had just signed his name and crossed the T’s in getting himself committed to a mental ward.
“Aliens?” Mulder said. Scully was glad he had spoken—she would have allowed doubt to creep into the word.
“I really would have noticed little green men,” Father Timothy murmured.
Mayfield shook his head vehemently and seemed pained when he looked at Father Timothy. “Why does everyone assume little green men? Why even assume that they have eyes and ears and stand erect? How the hell would we begin to know what an alien—with intelligence—might look like? They could be way smarter than us—but not even have brains that begin to resemble ours.”
“Mr. Mayfield, do you have any known enemies? Perhaps someone who loathes your place as anti-religious, or perhaps, even, someone who wants to be your competition?” Dana asked.
“The only problem we usually have is with the high school and college kids,” Father Timothy said. “Matthew is known for miles around—people come here to shop from as far away as New York City.”
“I’ve had no offers on the store,” Mayfield said. “And God help me, to the best of my knowledge, I have no enemies. I love what I do. It’s fun, it’s creative, I meet movie producers, I travel... I have great people working for me. And now...” He paused, obviously hurt by the loss of Randy and Roberta.
His emotion seemed honest.
“They come at night,” he said suddenly.
“Pardon?” Dana asked.
“I—I didn’t know what I was seeing. But I know this. They come at night.”
“They—who?” Mulder asked carefully.
“The aliens. Or the creatures. I’ve seen them when I’ve been leaving sometimes, late at night. Something—something that scurries in the ground. But sometimes, too, they stop and look at you.”
“You’ve seen them look at you?” Dana asked.
He nodded gravely. “You can tell... they have strange eyes—the kind that glow. It’s in their eyes—they’re like snake eyes.”
Dana closed her eyes and looked down for a minute.
Little green men that weren’t little green men. This man was feeding into Mulder’s theories that they didn’t always really know what they were looking for. Feeding into the bizarre—the X factor of all that they did.
There were two dead young people, and that was the reality.
“I’m going to perform the autopsies, Mulder. Mr. Mayfield, Father, thank you so much.”
She turned and walked across the graveyard, heading back in. She had to sidestep broken and disjointed corpses and shattered stone, marble, and cement.
That was real. The destruction was real.
She hoped that Mulder understood he really had to find who had done this—and who had killed the two young people inside.
*****
Four hours later, with Dr. Forbes, the local medical examiner working in tandem with her, Dana finished the autopsies. Detective Fuller had stood through the entire procedures, quiet, listening, taking notes.
“To summarize, no apparent drug or alcohol use, though it will take some time before all the lab reports are in,” Dr. Forbes said, glancing at Dana. “Unless my colleague here has an objection, we’ll be stating that death was due to exsanguinations from the throats being violently severed. Due to the, er, violence and unusual circumstances of these deaths, lab reports have been rushed, and the blood on the nails of the Caitlin Corpse doll does match with that of the victims. Somehow, the perpetrator used the doll to kill these people.”
“So, you’re saying that the killer got behind the doll, most likely, and then used the hands and the nails to—to nearly behead these young people?” Fuller asked.
“Roberta suffered from juvenile diabetes,” Dana said.
Fuller dismissed that.
“And Randy would have suffered some difficulty in the years to come; his heart was enlarged,” she told him.
“Certainly, none of that matters now,” Fuller told her. “They died because their throats were torn out—and the murder weapon was the nails on the doll.”
“That’s what we’re theorizing, yes,” Dana said. “The nails of the doll were definitely the murder weapon. How, exactly, the murders were committed, we’re still surmising.”
Fuller shook his head. “Some really insane son of a bitch.”
“One?” Dana asked. “Detective, I believe there had to be more than one person involved.”
Fuller gave off a sound like a snort. “A horde of aliens—as Mayfield suggests. Let me tell you—he’s at the top of my suspect list.”
“Has the man ever done anything to suggest that he’s mentally unbalanced—or that he might be capable of such violence?” Dana asked.
“Done anything...” Fuller said thoughtfully. “No. But he lives and breathes those freak things! Costumes, creatures... it’s easy to see where he might have gone bizarre and off the deep end. Yeah, my money is on him.”
Dana didn’t say anything other than, “Well, I do believe that we will continue to investigate.” She didn’t add that she was damned glad that she and Mulder, the FBI, had been given lead in the case. While it might well be that Mayfield was certifiably insane and involved, she didn’t believe in assumptions and convictions without facts.
&n
bsp; She peeled off her gloves and thanked Dr. Forbes and his assistants, who would sew Y incisions on the bodies now that the procedures were complete. As she did so, Fox Mulder arrived at the autopsy room at last.
He was, she noticed, dusty and covered in spider webs.
Real ones.
“Hey, Mulder, you need some good notes, I’ve got them,” Fuller said.
Mulder refused to take offense. He nodded. Dana resisted the temptation to dust off his shoulders; he looked as if he’d been crawling around in the catacombs.
It was Mulder—he probably had been. And he wanted her away from Fuller and anyone else before he discussed what he was doing.
“Detective Fuller, thank you for your dedicated attention,” Scully said, and hurried out with Mulder.
She’d driven her own car to the morgue; he suggested she leave it and drive with him.
“Back to the hotel—where you can shower and change?” she suggested.
He glanced her way and shook his head. “It’s going to be getting dark soon,” he said.
“And?”
“We’re going to wait at the church—and watch.”
She lowered her head and groaned. “I believe they intend to have detectives watching the grounds and the shop tonight. To the best of my knowledge, Miss Hannah Barton remains at the hospital—under sedation. They’ve brought in a number of high school and college boys they’ve had trouble with in the past. Fuller told me that they asked Matthew Mayfield to remain at the station. He’s not under arrest, they’re being very polite to the man, but Fuller is convinced he’s involved.”
Mulder didn’t answer.
“Mulder?”
“He’s innocent of anything but observation,” Mulder said.
“And you know this because?”
He looked over at her quickly as he drove. “Slime.”
She groaned. “Slime, Mulder—really?”
“Just listen to me for a minute, will you? Yes, I know I’m going to sound as crazy as Mayfield, but just listen.”
“All right.”
They had a ways to drive—at least twenty minutes. The morgue for the area was on the outskirts of Boston and while the rush hour traffic was down, they had a little ways to go.