Chapter Text
My darling Davis,
Do you know what I do when you leave me all by myself to go work by the lake? I go to our place in the woods. I think of all the things we do near the trees. We’ve lived our entire lives in these woods, honey, and I know them just as well as I know you. They just don’t love me like you do, is all.
Return home safe.
Love, Tilly
-
Dana Scully ached, from the soles of her feet to her dry, itchy scalp. On the flight from Dulles to ATL, her joints had surrendered. Parachuted off the plane. Left her without a note. Now when she stood, she stood straight as a statue, for it felt as if she were nothing but solid bone. She walked like a skeleton, rattled and clicked like a skeleton. Staring into the mirror, she had to admit she looked the part.
In the rental, Mulder drove and listened to her groan and creak and snap in the passenger seat. The radio played nothing but static so close to Black Rock Mountain, and there was nothing of note for them to talk about at present. It wasn’t his fault if he listened. It didn’t sit right with her, that she didn’t mind the audience. But she was too tired to call it out.
There was a frost between them that refused to melt, not with time, not with the full blast of the heater. Georgia was warmer than D.C., having yet to undergo its first frost. The air was brisk, the leaves on the trees were aging gracefully, and she watched them move from green to red and back to green again. The yellows and oranges gave her a bit of a headache, being as bright as they were.
“You still cold?” Mulder cut into the silence, peering sidelong at her as her teeth chattered and she squirmed under her blanket.
“I’m okay,” she said. He was already sweating in a full suit in the hot car.
She considered feigning sleep, just so he could pretend to stop worrying. It would give them both a much needed break. But the roads were winding further up the hills, growing narrower and narrower the closer they got to town. Soon the car jiggled over dirt and patches of jagged asphalt and she had to breathe in deeply to control the nausea. Thankfully the radio had popped back up, ripe with the smooth, hospitable embrace of Nashville sound. Patsy Cline crooned. Dana Scully coughed.
The town of Bartram was a tenth the size of its neighbor, Clayton, hosting a minuscule population of 217. Its jumble of wooded hilltops kept the residents at a respectful distance from each other while the town center brought them all back together. The whitewashed church with its proud, gleaming steeple sat smack-dab in the middle, surrounded by rolling fields of leaf-littered grass and an immaculately kept graveyard.
There were no gates in town: not at any of the residences, and not at the little wooden church. It belied a certain openness that the acres between homes fought to dispel. Welcome, the town said, after politely showing you the door.
An old Shell gas station, trembling on its last legs, also functioned as a farmer’s market during harvest season. As they drove past it Scully spotted pecans, sweet potatoes, and a few old men talking to each other across tent space. It was a bright spot in the mid-morning mountain fog. A family or two roamed among the produce, feeling for ripeness, feeling for rot, as the children chased each other down the slope of a hill nearby.
“This is where Officer Brighton said he’d meet us,” Mulder said, parking in the dirt lot next to the market.
Scully folded her blanket, tossed it in the backseat, and stretched as much as she could. Holding back a pained groan, she tried to play their game, squeeze a little life into the banter that until now defined their partnership. “How do we know Officer Brighton hasn’t been hexed?” It came out breathy. She couldn’t control the heaving, then. Her heart hurt like she’d been staked, and it pounded harder as she watched his knuckles turn white on the steering wheel.
“He seemed fine this morning on the phone,” is all he replied, cutting the engine and opening his door.
She followed, tall and steady in her heels on the slippery leaves that crunched underneath their feet. That was how they communicated best, anyway: with no words at all, only their synchronized, inquisitive gait as they advanced further and further into the unknown.
Inside the station was an unmanned convenience store, for the attendant was three hands deep into an emotionally taxing game of bridge.
“You goddamn sons of bitches!” Cards hit the floor at whip speed, and the young attendant drew his chair all the way back, shaking his head and cursing under his breath. “Y’all are just lucky.”
“Ain’t no luck in bridge!” A man in uniform—Officer Brighton, Scully guessed—tugged at the attendant’s arm and tried to haul him back into his foldout chair. “It’s about skill. Now sit your ass back down and finish this game, Preston, or we ain’t gonna invite you no more.”
“Well I wanna play poker then. Least I have a chance.”
“Oh boy you ain’t got no chance in hell,” laughed a man on the opposing team, slapping his hand down on the table. “We’ll clean you straight out. Make your mamma hop out her wheelchair just to whoop you.”
“Simmer, simmer,” said the final player, shaking his head and lifting his hands up to tamp down the commotion. He was old and wrinkled, friendly in face and tone. Just like that, the argument dimmed down into a few quietly muttered insults, and in that time the old man looked up to see the agents huddled underneath the doorway, staring. “We got company,” he said, and Officer Brighton snapped his head up and widened his eyes.
“Agent Mulder.” He shot out of his chair, sticking his hand out as he approached them. He shook Mulder’s hand with a firm handshake, and loosened his grip quite a bit with Scully. “And you must be Agent Scully. Thank y’all for comin’ so quickly… on account of nobody being killed and all.”
“Desecration is still a felony,” Mulder said.
“That’s just it. We can’t even call it desecration yet, not when we don’t know where the damn things are.” Brighton scratched his head, then nodded over at the old man. “Davis,” he said, and Davis stood up and pushed his chair in. “Husband of the first one gone missing,” Brighton explained. “He’s been the most help.”
He turned to Preston and narrowed his eyes. “We’re gonna need the backroom now. You got anything back there you don’t want us to see?”
Preston slid behind rows and rows of candy and potato chips, knocking over a rack in his haste to get to the back room. Then he disappeared behind a heavy white door while the three remaining men cackled at the poor boy’s lack of luck.
“And he thinks he’d stand a chance at poker.” The unnamed man, smiley and quite rotund, snapped up his hat from the back of his chair, saluted his friends, and stepped outside.
Mulder caught Scully’s eyes he brought two fingers up to his lips as if holding a joint. She sighed as he sucked air into his mouth and lolled his head back.
“What he’s doin’ ain’t so bad,” Brighton shook his head. “Not compared to the stuff they bring in from the Trail. Preston’s a good kid.”
With a twinkle in his eye, Davis grinned wide. “A fine boy. Dumb as a rock, but a fine young man.” He said it with an inflection of pride.
Preston darted out of the back room and positioned himself behind the front counter, waving them all away from the door. “Go on now. Room’s all set for you,” he said. “You’re blockin’ the main entrance.”
The tone shifted as soon as they crowded into the small office. There were only three chairs around a small, circular table, and Brighton insisted on standing as the agents took the seats across from Davis. Suddenly no one was smiling.
Davis dropped his head into his hands and heaved a sob that held the pain of a thousand years lived. It was a low howl, a tired, empty thing, and it was gut-wrenching to listen to.
“It was so bad, losing her the first time.” He wiped the tears from his cheeks and spoke directly to the table. “And now she’s gone and left me again. It’s like her body was the only thing keeping me on this earth.”
“Now Davis, don’t you go thinkin’ that. You got all of us here in Bartram lovin’ you and needin’ you.”
“Don’t take no offense, Rex, but you ain’t no Tilly,” Davis chuckled. He looked at Mulder, then he looked at Scully, and his eyes were earnest, brown as bark. He looked ten years younger, caught in a memory. “Tell me. You ever love anybody like that?” He asked. “Where life just don’t make no damn sense without them?”
They looked at each other but remained quiet.
“Of course you ain’t,” Davis sighed. “You ain’t never met my Tilly.”
“Can you think of any reason why someone might want to hurt Tilly? Even after death?” Mulder asked, having procured a legal pad and pen from his briefcase. “Or do you think someone might be trying to hurt you?”
“I can answer that,” Officer Brighton said. “Not a damn one. Tilly and Davis are celebrities in this town.”
“Now Rex—”
“Naw Davis, I’m being objective here. Everybody knows Davis and Tilly. Everybody loves Davis and Tilly. When she died, we had the whole damn town show up for the funeral. All two-hundred seventeen people. Even the little babies. Even the dogs showed up when Mrs. Tilly died. That’s why this whole thing has been a bitch to solve. You got everybody pointing fingers cuz everybody wants to get to the bottom of this, but it’s tearing the town apart.”
“Can you walk us through the whole thing?” Scully asked. “From the beginning? When the first body went missing.”
“That was two weeks ago. September third. I get a call from the groundskeeper over at the church around six o’clock in the mornin’, and he tells me there’s been a grave robbing. Now we get a decent amount of crime here in Bartram, I ain’t gonna lie to you and say we’re an innocent lot. But people in Bartram tend to hurt themselves, not others. You gotta be a cold son of a bitch to rob a grave.
“Now, at this point Cody, the groundskeeper—he hasn’t finished telling me the whole story. I’m sittin’ in the Clayton precinct, thinking someone just popped open a casket and took themselves a couple of rings, maybe a watch or a gold chain. Sold it for drugs. But then Cody says ‘No, officer. They done robbed the whole body. I got nothing but an empty lot here’.”
“And that was Tilly,” Mulder said. Brighton and Davis both nodded, and Mulder scribbled away. “I imagine with the turn of the season and the time that’s passed, it’ll be difficult to gather much evidence from the plot. We got the photos you faxed over, but we’ll need the originals. Did you find anything suspicious at the plot?”
“What’s suspicious was the lack of evidence,” Brighton said. “Whoever did it was meticulous. It looked professional. First we had our eye on the groundskeeper, but he’s gettin’ up there in age and he’s so terrible at his job already that we had to cross that off. Then we were looking at the two young gentlemen who do the grave digging over at First Baptist. But their alibis were rock solid.”
“Where were they?” Scully asked.
“In the drunk tank.” The officer sighed. “Like I said. We ain’t innocent, but we tend to hurt ourselves, you know?”
“Can you tell us about Suzanne Cumberland? She was the suspect you mentioned on our phone call.” Mulder said.
Davis finally piped up, after he’d spent nearly thirty minutes in silence, just listening to the conversation around him. “It ain’t Suzanne,” he said, rubbing his face. “What I’d give for them idiots to shut their damn mouths.”
Brighton fidgeted a little and leaned against the wall. “Suzanne’s a little new here.”
“Rex, she’s been here for about five years now. You can’t call that new.”
“She’s uh. She’s young. She’s a troubled young girl, from way up the trail.”
“Ain’t no more troubled than you or I, Rex.”
“The people in town… or a small, vocal subset of it, anyway, took to dislikin’ her. She’s a quiet sort, you know, until you look at her funny and then she’s loud as hell. Can’t count on two hands the amount of fights I’ve broken up involving that lady. Anyway, there’s been reports on her prowlin’ round the church late at night, or goin’ on long walks up the trails. No one else walks those trails when the sun goes down.”
“And you suspect her?” Scully knew, vaguely, what this was all leading up to. Mulder often threw the most ridiculous details of a case at her long after they boarded the plane. Suzanne Cumberland’s story was one that repeated itself again and again throughout history: Odd, Reclusive Woman Stands Out, Must Be Witch. This wasn’t the seventeenth century, however. Witch hunts were impractical. Satanic Panic was to a hoax. Suzanne Cumberland wasn’t a—
“They’re callin’ her a witch, Miss Scully,” Davis said. “A witch.”
“Some folks at the church started noticing things about her, small things that added up.” Brighton said. “She’s got this necklace made of bone.”
“Human bone?” Mulder’s pen stopped moving.
“Toad bone, for chrissake,” Davis laughed. “She’s a weirdo. Who ain’t?”
“That’s actually common in Appalachian folklore,” Mulder pointed out. “It was all apart of becoming a witch. You’d boil away the meat of a small animal and wear the bones around your neck. European witchlore also has a lot to say about toads.”
“See, that’s why I called you here. I know this ain’t exactly a high priority case in the grand scheme of things, but people here are mighty upset. After Tilly, they dug up Sarah May.”
“Tilly’s best friend,” Davis supplied. “Died twelve years ago. Nothing but bone now, I imagine.”
“Then after Sarah May, we lose two more bodies in one night. Raymond and Josephine Graham.”
“Also good friends of ours. Raymond was my business partner for nearly thirty years, doin’ pump installations near Lake Rabun.”
“I’m a little… confused, on why Suzanne Cumberland is at all connected with the case. Besides the fact townspeople dislike her and find her taste in jewelry to be… unsavory.” Scully looked to Officer Brighton, who appeared quite young and squirmy under her scrutiny. “Do you have a motive?”
“She’s an addict. She’s having a rough time of it, is all. The way the folks at church described it to me, they think she’s usin’ the bodies in some kind of ritual that’ll make her well again. Say it’s good ole’ healing mountain magic. But what a doctor might describe as withdrawal symptoms, they’re saying it’s incantations. That she’s talkin’ to the devil when she gets to shivering and muttering to herself.” Davis grew more furious as he kept talking, gnashing his teeth, the wrinkled skin of his hands bunching up as he slammed his fists down on the table. “If Tilly were here, she’d tell them all to stuff it. And they’d listen to her, too. They listen to me, but not like they listened to Tilly.”
“Tomato season was bad this year with the early blight. And healthy, strapping livestock have been falling down dead in their pens. We’re spooked.”
“What do you personally believe, Officer Brighton? Do you think that Suzanne is using witchcraft to curse Bartram residents? For rejecting her?”
If it was possible, the young cop looked even more uncomfortable while formulating his answer to Mulder’s question. “It’s a lot of… strange happenings, all at once. We’ve got such a small force up in Clayton, and while we’re not the busiest cops in the U.S., we’ve hit a wall with this case. People are outraged over the missing bodies, the dead livestock, the ruined crops. That’s their livelihood, y’know? That’s how they make money and feed their families, and now their friends are being dug up out of their graves. People want answers. This year there’s been no peace for anybody alive, and now it’s looking like there ain’t no peace in death, either.”
“Blame the outsider,” Davis smiled ruefully. “That’s real Christian-like.”
“I ain’t sayin’ she did it one way or another. I don’t know that I believe in all this hoodoo crap. We just didn’t know where else to look. And the reason we contacted y’all—well, y’all are the ones who do know where to look. Maybe you got some fancy equipment or somethin’ that’ll tell us more about the soil at the scene or whathaveyou, or maybe there really is something going on here that God don’t approve of. Whatever it is, we’d appreciate your help in whatever form it takes.”
“That’s what we’re here for.” Mulder slid his notes back into his briefcase, and Scully did the same. “We’ll need to sift through the evidence your precinct has collected, and then we’ll take a look at the grave sites.”
“Tomorrow we’ll begin interviewing the citizens,” Scully said. “Does Suzanne work? Do you know when would be a good time to catch her?”
“She works from home now, mostly. She’s got a little business she runs on the dot com. She’ll be available anytime you head on over. Now, before you get to talkin’ with anybody else, come over to my place. I’m in the big white cabin, right before you get in the thick of the woods.” Davis wrote his address on the back of a napkin Preston had left behind. “I’ll tell you a little bit more about the town and take you on a tour. How’s that sound?”
Mulder and Scully thanked the cop and the grieving widower after everybody agreed on what would take place in the morning. After that, they followed Officer Brighton over to the Clayton precinct, where they sorted case notes and evidence boxes that yielded no information pertinent to the case.
It was difficult for Scully to separate herself from her resentment as she worked alongside Mulder. It had dawned on her the moment he sat her down for a slideshow and presented her with a slew of empty graves that this was a message to her—a demand. Slow down. There were no criminals to chase. There were no bodies to cut up. It would be an easy solve, where no one would be collapsing in exhaustion, rushed to the hospital, or feel compelled to hold the other at gun point.
She wanted to be grateful, but she couldn’t.
It only reminded her of how bad things were getting.
The nosebleeds were increasing in frequency and longevity, to the point where she’d be lightheaded and unable to carry a conversation. Her hair grew brittle; she feared applying any heat, and when she brushed it she went very slow. Eating was a chore to her now because she never knew when or how it would pass, whether she would throw it up or have it sit inside her for days, causing sharp pains that made it difficult for her to breathe. Every movement she made echoed with the screaming, hollow wind of death. It was hurtling towards her, and as she became more acquainted with it, preparing herself for it to consume her, Mulder prostrated himself before her as the shield she never asked for.
She’d known he wasn’t coping well with her illness, but it wasn’t until she’d found him in that old summer home in Rhode Island that she’d realized it was even worse than she thought. High on ketamine, brandishing his gun, shouting nonsense over the voices playing tricks on his tortured, drill-scarred mind. It was much, much worse than she thought. Before that night she had hope. Before that night she’s been reaching acceptance. Not anymore.
Then, only one week later, she’d collapsed during an autopsy.
He hadn’t been able to look at her as she sat upright in her hospital bed. She’d wrung the thin cotton blanket in her hands and tried to convince them both that everything would be alright. I just forgot to eat, Mulder. I probably didn’t get enough sleep. I was feeling nauseous—
Because you’re sick, Scully. You’re really, really sick. But how sick are you?
Mulder—
Just answer the question, Scully.
She had.
And now here they were.
Their traipse through the empty graveyard yielded no spectacular results. With rubber gloves they sifted through the soil, but the holes themselves had already been refilled, declared a hazard for anyone visiting a loved one. They studied and discussed the names, dates, and epitaphs on every headstone, their hands stiffening and swelling in the late September chill.
When the sun slid down the mountainside, they declared themselves finished and climbed back in the car. Their original plan had been to stay in Clayton, but Davis assured them there would be lodgings right there in Bertram.
“The trails are a little more complex out here, so we get some hikers in when the weather’s right. For those who want more of a challenge.” He had explained. “I may be old but I can still hike every single one.”
As for Dana Scully, she could barely get out of the car when they arrived at the lodge. Mulder guided her patiently, letting her lean on him as they walked slowly to the front office and booked their rooms. She didn’t enjoy it, how small she was when he burst forth from the ground like the pine trees that towered above the buildings.
But that was the way things would be from now on.