fic: The Ghosts of Thurmere Hall (3/5)
TITLE: The Ghosts of Thurmere Hall
FANDOM: The X-Files
RATING: R
PAIRING: Mulder/Scully established
SETTING/SPOILERS: Set post-Brand X but pre-Requiem. Nothing extremely overt with regards to spoilers but there are references to the following: Squeeze, Tooms, Irresistible, Memento Mori, Redux II, Chinga, Fight the Future, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas, Millennium, Orison, Theef, all things, Brand X, and a slight dig at I Want to Believe.
OVERALL WORD COUNT: 35,603
DISCLAIMER: Everything belongs to Chris Carter, including the loose ends and the there’s-no-way-that-possibly-fits timeline.
SUMMARY: A quiet vacation in England begins with a ghost hunt as Mulder and Scully investigate the paranormal activity at Thurmere Hall.
* * * * *
They returned to the spacious entrance hall to use the computer at the reception desk. Susan and Mulder pored over the screen, occasionally henpecking at keys, and appeared thoroughly engrossed in the activity. Scully leaned against the wall for a few minutes, watching them and becoming lost in her thoughts. This is what it comes down to, she reflected, using well-earned frequent-flier miles to cross the Atlantic in a plane that was too similar to a rickshaw to make anyone feel safe. Indulging a worried woman’s paranoia. Traipsing around a building that lived in the past and made money off history and hearsay.
She sighed. It was a far cry from the career in medicine she had been so enthusiastic about as a teenager but this… this still mattered. She helped people through her work. It was compelling and challenging and certainly different, and most of the time she enjoyed it. It was at times like this, when Mulder found facts in hunches and whims, that she grew tired. He hadn’t changed since they’d started sleeping together. In truth, she hadn’t expected him to, but she couldn’t deny the thought had crossed her mind that he might not stray so far from the nest anymore. That hadn’t panned out - of course it hadn’t - and although she was a tad wistful at ignoring the road most travelled, she was pleased to see that Mulder was still Mulder and she was still Scully (when did she begin to define herself by comparison?). Only she smiled more now, and spent evenings and weekends being loved by the best of men.
If that meant devoting a night to ghostbusting, then so be it. They had the rest of the week to themselves to do with what they pleased, and she was sure they could reach some sort of compromise as to how to spend their time.
Scully wandered away from the desk, looking at other parts of the room. Mulder glanced up at her and offered a tentative half-grin; she smiled back reassuringly. She wasn’t really mad at him. Of all the places he had dragged her to over the years, this was certainly one of the nicest. When he had said ‘haunted house’, she had pictured a ramshackle old building with overgrown weeds and a family cemetery round the back. The reality was much more pleasant, even if it wasn’t the B&B up in the hills. No elderly caretaker, no troubled pet, no overwhelming feeling that all work and no play made Scully a dull girl… just a couple of odd noises, lights, and shadows, all the usual trappings of a magic show. Scully was still convinced Mulder was having the wool pulled over his eyes; she just had to find a way to prove it.
The slight heels of her shoes clacked against the stone flags as she wandered over to the far wall where a table stood, brochures and leaflets neatly stacked on its surface. Scully idly rifled through a couple: a Labour Party councillor trying to persuade people to vote for him at the next local election; deals at the leisure centre for half-price badminton courts and free swimming for the under-sixteens and over-sixties; a book club advertising for new members. When would she ever have the time to make it to a book club - or any kind of club - with consistent attendance when Mulder was prone to spontaneous cross-country (and international) trips? And she dared not let him go alone, not after the arguments, injuries, and subsequent days of uncomfortable silences they’d had upon returning from business undertaken single-handedly. Unless direct orders came from the upper echelons of the Bureau, requesting one to assist with a separate investigation, they went together or not at all.
Scully skirted the perimeter of the room, the walls wainscoted to at least nine feet, and cast her eye over the numerous paintings hanging in dull gold frames. She recognised Sir Francis Drake but had to read the inscriptions on the others: Muhammad the Second; Gabor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania; King Charles surrounded by his family. Two family crests hung over the large fireplace, lions curving around glorious red and golden yellow shields like vicious parentheses. A high-backed wooden chair sat stiffly next to the staircase. Scully picked up the card lying on top and read: ‘Sirloin Chair. James I, King of England, was sitting on this chair when he knighted a loin of beer, pronouncing it ‘Sir Loin’. The chair was donated to Thurmere Hall in 1960.’
She smiled at the tale and tried to imagine what life had been like back then. Had the evening been jocular and the king in high spirits? Had he simply drank too much? There would have been raucous laughter at his proclamation, polite subjects humouring their ruler, and then they would have dug into a hearty meal. Scully fingered the edge of the card, wishing it could tell her more. Thurmere Hall may have contained the objects used all those years ago but it couldn’t speak of the occasions in which they were used. It was sad, really, to be silenced for eternity.
Mulder called her name and she looked up, the spell of her reverie broken. “Did you find something?”
“How sure are you that the music we heard was Piano Concerto Twenty-One?” he asked.
“Almost certain. The wind was blowing pretty hard but it’s a famous piece, quite easily recognisable.”
“Huh,” he muttered, leaning back in the chair and rubbing his jaw. “That’s odd, because Mozart was alive between 1756 and 1791.”
And I’m sure that handy little detail will come in useful when we’re watching Jeopardy! on your couch, Mulder, so thanks for sharing. “… your point being?”
“The woman in the courtyard,” he said slowly, “was described as wearing clothing popular in Elizabethan times. That was a hundred and fifty years before Mozart was even born.”
“Ghosts can’t learn to play new music once they’re dead?” Scully shot back, raising an eyebrow.
“They can’t adapt to changes in fashion, either.” He smiled. “I think maybe the house is running on a loop. That’s why we’re getting the spread of the years: the woman from the 1600s, a Mozart concerto from the 1700s. Thurmere Hall has a memory, or maybe thousands of them, that got sucked into the structure and became a part of it before it could die and be lost forever. Hear me out,” he said as Scully opened her mouth to protest. “It’s called a residual or non-intelligent haunting. The same things happen over and over, like a song on repeat, and don’t respond to the present environment, which would fit with the old clothes and lack of interaction. I don’t know why these particular memories are being revealed to us, if they have some greater meaning or if they’ve been chosen at random, but something has possessed this place to store the data and play it back. I’m not sure what that could be yet.”
Susan’s frown matched Scully’s. “It was only a week or two ago I saw the figure in the courtyard. How could it jump over a century in so short a time? And what about the noises from upstairs? When are they from?”
Mulder gave a helpless little shrug; his partner’s lips quirked upwards in an amused smile. “I don’t know how it could shoot ahead so fast. As for the noises upstairs, they must be somewhere in between our bookend years. We can’t narrow it down much more than that; it was far too indistinct to pinpoint a certain time.”
They all jumped when the front door rattled and banged within its frame, another howling gust of wind shaking the weaker extremities as if in a breezy snow globe. However, Thurmere Hall had proved itself to be sturdy since its conception, having survived two World Wars and numerous floods when the banks of the nearby river overflowed, and rationally such knowledge should have made them feel safer. Should have, but didn’t.
“It’s only the weather,” Susan said nervously. “It’s always the same this time of year.”
“Uh huh,” Mulder muttered absent-mindedly, eyes riveted to the door that had looked so strong and solid when he had first glimpsed it. Now, in the midst of being hammered by the angry gale, it looked only a matter of time before it started to splinter and snap, leaving the Hall wide open for anyone and anything to enter.
“Anyway,” Scully said firmly, “back to your theory, Mulder.” He could hear the air quotes. “What I don’t understand is why a building would store memories, as you put it, and then play them back seemingly at random.”
He tore his eyes away from the door and looked at her, remaining perched on the edge of his seat. “Most ghost hunters believe the majority of residual hauntings are produced by the strong thoughts created by people while living, and that they continue to exist in the atmosphere. They tend to occur in places built over quartz or limestone. It’s more likely to be quartz because certain pressures can release minute electrical charges which could free the memory. It’s a good transmitter, too. On the other hand, limestone’s more organic. If organ tissue or bones somehow became a part of the rock, the memories could be stored that way. Maybe erosion leads to the liberation of the information. Do you happen to know what kind of rock Thurmere Hall’s built upon, Susan?”
She wrung her hands. “No, I’m afraid not. Limestone’s sedimentary though, right? The river’s at the side of the house; could that somehow contain limestone?”
“I forgot about the river,” Mulder confessed. “Research into residual hauntings also suggests the presence of running water nearby serves as a conduit. Most often it’s when something is built on top of the water source but the river’s so close I think it could still work.”
“If that’s the case, how do we stop the hauntings?” Susan asked.
“Wait a second,” Scully interrupted. “I think we’re all forgetting something. You’ve been talking about these residual hauntings, where everything’s on a loop and there’s no interference, correct?” Mulder nodded. “What about Susan’s keys? And the light bulb? We have a corridor full of open doors that were previously locked. That doesn’t sound particularly residual to me.”
She had a point. “Manipulation of the physical environment does imply a poltergeist, as I suggested earlier,” he said markedly. “Both theories are equally possible. A poltergeist would, however, explain everything that’s happened here tonight: the lights, the sounds, the doors. It would also account for your keys going missing, Susan.”
“But that was months ago!”
“It’s still a sign of poltergeist activity,” he argued. “If it was purely residual then it couldn’t touch your keys. Everything else might still happen but it’s the keys that are important, I think. Poltergeist activity centres around psychokinesis, the ability to move things with the mind. Researchers aren’t sure if it comes from the people who live in or visit the building or from a troubled spirit. I’ve seen cases of both. The common theory is that poltergeist hauntings centre around adolescent girls, like in Carrie, and the surge of hormones at puberty provides the spirit with enough energy to move objects and create chaos.”
“Sorry to point out one huge flaw with your theory applying here, Mulder, but none of us are pubescent,” Scully said wryly, “and yet we’ve witnessed some unusual goings-on tonight.”
Mulder bit his bottom lip, momentarily crestfallen. Scully was right, of course, and the tone of her voice implied she had taken great pleasure in revealing the gaping hole in what he thought to be an otherwise-solid conviction. Her intruder hypothesis seemed to have dropped off the map; at least she was going along with his ghost theory now. The cab driver had been right in saying there was something strange about the Hall; Mulder felt it too, the unease as loyal a companion as his shadow, but it wasn’t strong enough to call off the hunt.
He opened his mouth to throw a glib remark back at Scully but something thudded against the door before he could speak. Peripherally, he saw his partner reach for the gun that wasn’t there, fumbling at the space by her hip. Susan was frozen to the spot, eyes wide. He rushed out from his place behind the desk and raced to the door, yanking the handle.
“Dammit!” he cursed. “The keys.” He held out his hand to Susan, who stared blankly at him. “The keys, Susan! I need to unlock the door!”
She snapped into action, unclipping the ring from her belt and rifling through the set of keys with quivering fingers, selecting one and holding it out to Mulder. Her hand was shaking so much the other keys jangled together with tuneful metallic clinks reminiscent of wind chimes. He grabbed it from her and shoved the key in the lock, surprised when it rotated smoothly. He was already turning the handle before he thought to grab something to use as a weapon - who knew what was on the other side? - but it was too late; the door was opening, and there was-
Nothing?
There was nobody standing there. Brow furrowed, Mulder ran outside and scanned the darkness for the culprit. Pulling out the ever-present flashlight from his pocket and flicking it on, he jogged to the front of the tower on his right, beyond which lay the walkway and parking lot. It was too dark to see anything and he couldn’t hear the crunch of stones indicative of another person fleeing the scene. All the same, he hurried to the other side of the front wall just to be sure. The flashlight beam fractured upon hitting the water of the river. There were no footprints along the muddy bank.
When he returned, Susan was smoking a cigarette in the doorway. Scully was crouching a few yards away, looking intently at something on the ground in the poor light. He kneeled beside her and shone the flashlight near her feet. The beam revealed a dead sparrow, its skull crushed and feathers matted with blood. Leaning close together, their breath mingled as they conducted an examination of the bird.
“Looks like it flew right into the door,” Scully murmured, attention still on the corpse. She didn’t want to touch it without gloves so had to settle for observations only. “Probably died on impact.”
“What would cause a bird to hit something instead of fly around it?”
“I’m a pathologist, Mulder, not a vet or a zoologist. This kind of thing just happens sometimes.” She shrugged it off. “Haven’t you ever had a bird fly into your window?”
“I never noticed,” he said, “but don’t you think it’s odd this would happen right here, at Thurmere Hall? You have to admit there’s something weird going on, Scully.”
“When is there not something weird going on around you, Mulder?” she replied with a rueful smile, standing and rubbing the back of her neck with a grimace. He too got to his feet, his hand coming to rest on the small of her back.
“Are you okay?” he asked, concern evident in his voice.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” he said, so quietly she turned to look up at him. He faked a smile but she could see the lack of belief in his eyes. ‘I’m fine’ hadn’t cut it since the days of her cancer, when he could clearly see she was anything but, and his dislike of the phrase had only seemed to grow in strength every time she uttered it. It was a Pavlovian response, his sudden rush of simmering anger upon hearing the words, and she tried to curb their frequency to make him happy. It had just slipped out this time like a recorded message.
She glanced at the doorway to find Susan had gone back inside the Hall after finishing her cigarette and, once satisfied they were alone for now, Scully laid a hand on Mulder’s cheek and forced him to make eye contact.
“It’s only a crick from bending to inspect the bird,” she said firmly. “It’ll go away in a few minutes. There is absolutely nothing else wrong, okay?”
“Are you sure?” Mulder asked softly. “I know you don’t really want to be here. We can leave if you want.”
“And miss out on an opportunity to prove you wrong?” she teased. “I don’t think so.”
He grinned at that and chuffed, and she was pleased to see the familiar twinkle back in his eyes, a comforting constellation. Scully smiled back and didn’t pull away when he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. They were cold but she soon ignored it as he slanted his mouth over hers again and again. Normally they would refrain from such contact when working but it wasn’t an official FBI case, they were thousands of miles away from home, and the only other person in the vicinity was busy elsewhere. Besides, they would hear her heels on the floor if she began to move. It was also cold, dammit, and he was so warm. Throwing caution to the hungry wind, she allowed the kiss to continue for a brief moment, reaffirming her connection to Mulder and his to her, before reluctantly breaking the touch of his lips against her own.
“We should get back inside,” she murmured, pulling the collar of his leather jacket up around his neck to ward off the chill.
He pulled her into his arms instead, enveloping her in his warmth. “In a minute.”
“Mulder, it’s freezing out here!” she protested, yet made no effort to move.
“We’ve been in colder places than this,” he reminded her, “and came out relatively unscathed.” He allowed the relative quiet to reign for a few moments before leaning in to whisper, “Thank you for being here with me.”
She held him tighter and closed her eyes to ward off the onslaught of emotion at his heartfelt statement. It wasn’t fair of him to use her devotion to his advantage; he knew perfectly well she would be at his side in almost any situation, and taking the time to actually thank her for it, although he did mean it, was a ploy to make sure she wasn’t mad at him. As it was, she was as curious about Thurmere Hall as he, even though she didn’t subscribe to his ghost theory. There was a more earthly explanation, she was sure of it, but if he was happy to chase after something that didn’t exist then she would humour him. It was only for one night this time and she didn’t have to work the following day, and there was little harm in a late night in an English Manor House.
Scully pulled back and murmured, “Come on, before you freeze to death.”
He smiled fondly at her before they set off back to the Hall. The wind had died down considerably, taking some of the biting chill away, yet the temperature still hovered just above zero, threatening ice if not snow. The sky was clear but for the odd star; it seemed even clouds dared not tread near Thurmere Hall.
Mere paces away from the door, something whizzed past Mulder’s ear, missing him by millimetres, and crashed into one of the pillars holding up a stone lion.
“What the hell was-”
Another flew past, and then another, and then there were so many noises he couldn’t keep track of them all but at some point Scully grabbed his hand and pulled him inside, slamming the door shut. The harmony of sickening thuds continued, seeming to echo and multiply in the vastness of the room, and Mulder took an involuntary step back from the entrance. Somewhere a window broke and the sound of shattering glass filtered in from another room. The cacophony of destruction was almost unbearable, as loud as a pneumatic drill yet all the more terrifying because it was unpredictable; would the next one knock the door clean off its hinges?
And, just as soon as they started, the noises stopped.
All that remained was heavy breathing from the agitated occupants, who all looked at each other with dazed expressions. “What was that?” Mulder finally croaked.
“It sounded just like before,” Susan whispered, “except a hundred times more powerful.”
Scully agreed with that. The first noise moments ago had been scary enough; this was more like an onslaught, a battle cry. “Better open the door and find out what happened,” she said. “We can’t ignore it.”
Mulder nodded. He took a deep breath and Scully noticed his hand was shaking as he reached for the handle and slowly pulled the door open. The ground was littered with dead birds, feathery carcasses spread like a blanket over the flags and loose stones. The exterior wall was riddled with dark red splotches that at first reminded him of nosebleeds and stained tissues, of a time when worry was his constant companion, but he steered away from those memories and focused instead on the carpet of tiny corpses. “Anybody here a Hitchcock fan?” he questioned nervously.
Scully surveyed the scene before crouching yet again to inspect the birds. “Yeah, but these are all dead, not attacking. Susan,” she asked over her shoulder, “do you have a pair of latex gloves anywhere? The kind you use for washing dishes, anything like that?”
“I think there’s a pair in the breakroom. I’ll have a look for you.” Susan scurried off down the corridor full of unlocked doors. They listened until the rapid tattoo of her heels faded to a faint pulse.
“They’re all dead?” Mulder whispered, his voice harsh in the cavernous entrance hall. “What could cause that?”
“Bear in mind my knowledge of bird physiology is limited, but other than a shift in the magnetic poles I can’t think of anything that would lead to something like this. Most of these birds should have migrated by now.”
“I don’t remember seeing a single one since we arrived at the parking lot,” Mulder commented.
Scully admitted, “Me either.” That in itself wasn’t odd; after all, she had just assumed they had flown south for the winter. But when coupled with an assault like a scene straight out of The Birds it begged several questions, none of which had clear answers. “Where did they come from? Are they nesting in the roof?”
“Would you choose this place to live? I don’t think any breathing creature wants to be near here.”
“Apart from us.”
“Thanks for being inclusive.” He quirked his lips in appreciation. “One bird flying into the building I could understand, but an entire army of them? It doesn’t make sense.”
Scully could agree with that. If it was just the windows that had been hit, it would account for something; birds often fly into glass. But that only happened during the day and it was pitch black outside now, as it should be at past midnight. The moon was out there somewhere but it seemed to have been swallowed up by the night. Could mass hysteria present itself in avian bodies? Were they so consumed by fear of something unknown in the darkness that they lost their ability to navigate? An involuntary chill ran up her spine; didn’t that mean someone was walking over her grave?
Susan’s footsteps were increasing in volume and Scully half-turned to greet her, accepting the gloves proffered without a word. Susan and Mulder hovered over her shoulder like nervous parents as Scully slipped the gloves on and carefully dislodged a bird from its resting place. Its body was limp and still warm in her hands, the beady eye open and boring a hole into the heavens, and she lifted it this way and that in an attempt to notice anything out of the ordinary. It was just a bird, albeit one with its skull crushed. The three others she visually examined were the same and she relayed her findings to the expectant observers.
“So what happened?” Susan asked. “Could it be a disease?”
Scully stood, stripping off the gloves. “Maybe, although I can’t immediately think of one that would have a sudden onset in hundreds of birds like this.”
“I read a report once on birds dropping out of the sky in New Zealand,” Mulder said, “and the investigation concluded that there were extremely high amounts of lead and nickel in the water, over one hundred and thirty times the recommended health levels. Over four thousand birds died of lead poisoning in the course of seven months.”
“The river?” Scully asked.
He nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. Has the water content ever been tested, Susan?”
“I think the council checked it years ago but it isn’t used for drinking or bathing so nobody really cares. We look to make sure people aren’t dumping waste in it but we’re only here eight hours a day and there aren’t any security cameras.”
“Still, Mulder,” Scully said in slight protest of accepting the theory so quickly, “it would have to be ridiculously high for all these birds to die at once. Prolonged exposure would have too many variables for something like this to happen. You said it yourself: four thousand birds over seven months. We must have at least two hundred here and it happened in the space of minutes. It was a bombardment. They didn’t drop; they fired into the wall.”
“Maybe they just missed their target,” Mulder mused.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe they were aiming for us; you saw how close one came to hitting me. What if they weren’t directionless? What if they really were attacking, like in The Birds?”
“Attacking?” Scully asked incredulously, both eyebrows raised.
“Birds are common features in many cultures and belief systems, often associated with life and death.” She felt a lecture coming on. “The Ancient Egyptians built their tombs with narrow shafts so the ba, the soul, could fly out in the form of a bird after death. Most religions believe birds take souls to where they need to be, such as doves in Christianity and Judaism. There’s a restless soul in this building and they’ve come to retrieve it.”
“Why now?”
“I think we disturbed it by poking around tonight,” he said without a hint of jocularity.
Scully held her tongue when he mentioned ‘we’; he had been the one climbing all over antique beds and shoving ancient armoires. It wasn’t worth getting into a fight over. But a spirit released because of a few pokes and prods? Now that she could argue with.
“Mulder, people have been in this house for centuries. Surely something would have manifested itself before now.”
He fixed his gaze, eyes so intensely focused on her she almost forgot Susan was standing only a few feet away, listening. “Who says it hasn’t?”
* * * * *
The old heater next to the wall gurgled and burped as it strained to warm the large room. Mulder seemed unaffected by the temperature and the noise, busy henpecking at the computer keyboard and squinting at the monitor with a furrowed brow. Scully and Susan had been designated the task of looking through the incident books. The most recent lay on the desk; the older ones were stored in a cabinet behind it, and they had dragged them out and stacked them in piles on the floor and the tables Susan had procured from a storage cupboard. Pouring over musty pages covered with scrawling, barely-legible handwriting, Scully rubbed at her eyes to stop the words merging into a swirling vortex again, rereading an entry for the third time because her brain just couldn’t comprehend the meaning behind it. When was the last time she had slept? It felt like days ago, and maybe it was. How many hours behind was D.C., anyway?
With every page turned, she felt more and more certain that she was wasting her time. Not many people got hurt at Thurmere Hall - the entries were sporadic at best, often going weeks without something new - and that in itself should have indicated to Mulder that there was no ghoul intent on causing harm. Having relayed that thought to him twice now and having received the same insistent reply of there being something important in those books, Scully gave up trying to convince him otherwise and left him to churn through the thousands of results Google had coughed up.
But now her eyelids were drooping and she wasn’t processing correctly. She needed a decent night’s sleep - dozing on a plane didn’t count - or a shot of pure caffeine to jolt her nerves into working again. Scully felt certain she had pulled longer hours as a med student and probably even as an FBI agent on the X-Files, but factor in a long flight and the adrenaline wearing off from being scared out of her wits (at least twice) and she was bound to crash sooner or later. Looking at Mulder, she could tell he had lost some of his initial enthusiasm. He was slouching in his seat, head propped up on his hand, and if it wasn’t for the occasional mouse click she would have thought him asleep with his eyes open. Susan was still diligently probing the records, slowly enough for Scully to believe she was carefully reading each one instead of merely scanning it, and it appeared as though nothing would distract her from her task.
Scully stretched and held a hand over her mouth to contain a yawn that yearned to escape. The portraits on the wall at the other side of the room glared at her disapprovingly. No time to sleep, not when Mulder thought there was paranormal activity going on and she had an opportunity to prove him wrong, or at least dissuade him from whatever madcap theory he was currently fixated on. He had mentioned so many, she wasn’t quite sure which was his favourite.
A coat of dead birds apparently meant the creatures were escorts to Heaven or Hell, coming to collect the troubled being that had plagued Thurmere Hall for centuries. Scully had several issues with said theory but the main one was that the Hall had no more accident-prone visitors than any other Manor House. The record books dated back to 1922, when the building was gifted to the public, and Mulder thought there would be a major event within the first few months. Scully had started there, prying open the journal and dutifully paying attention to the faded letters, but it became apparent that nothing more serious than a sprained ankle had been suffered. The last time she checked, ten minutes ago, she was working her way through 1943 - Susan had begun with the most recent and worked backwards - but even the war yielded little.
Her spine felt stiff and when she stretched it creaked like the floorboards upstairs. The heater was still making some rather worrying noises but Mulder’s cheeks were looking a little rosy so it must have been producing some heat. She was sat too far away to feel the direct benefits, the cold wood and stone enveloping her instead, and her coat didn’t feel like it was helping much. Her chair scraped unnecessarily loudly against the floor as she pushed back and headed for the heater next to Mulder.
“You got something?” he asked absently as she approached.
Scully pressed her hands to the heater, pleased when her fingers registered the warmth and the numbness dissipated. She was still tired and a tad cranky but the heat was a step up. “Nothing that would interest you. Or me, for that matter.” When he didn’t respond, she enquired, “Are the wonders of modern technology aiding your investigation?”
“I’m getting ready to throw this damn thing out the window,” he replied, sighing. “The problem with the Internet isn’t a lack of information; there’s just too much of it. And a lot of it’s useless. There are pages full of Thurmere Hall’s history but no mention of illnesses or deaths or fires. It’s all so… clean.”
She turned to face him fully, leaning against the heater to take advantage while she was there. “Why don’t you just accept that nothing untoward has gone on here?”
“Because that would mean the troubled souls the birds were here for are us,” he said blankly, “and I can’t accept that.” Scully wanted to reach out and take him in her arms, reassure him she wasn’t going anywhere, and then chide him for believing something so extraordinary and whimsical. But that was what made him Mulder and she couldn’t stop his insecurities from manifesting in theories about the paranormal because that was what he always did, even before they started sleeping together. She thought back to one Christmas Eve spent in a house not too dissimilar to this and hoped the experience this time around would not involve weapons of any kind.
Mulder coughed and shifted uncomfortably to alleviate the silence, bringing Scully’s focus back to the present. “Besides,” he said easily, “plenty of controversial issues go unreported. Doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.”
She briefly saw red. “So why am I wading through incident reports if what you’re looking for isn’t in there?” she hissed. “Am I completely wasting my time here, Mulder? Are you just keeping me occupied so you can do the actual work?”
He looked startled at her outburst and his mouth opened and closed several times without a noise coming from it. Running a hand through his hair in frustration and nervousness, he saw she was waiting expectantly for an answer, arms crossed and eyes glaring. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he whispered back, aware of Susan nearby and the quietness of the room (which probably meant she could hear them anyway). “If you don’t want to be here-”
“Would you stop! I have told you countless times that I have no problem with us being here, but as long as we are, I need to know I’m doing something productive.”
“Of course you are,” he protested. “Any death or major injury in those books could indicate a presence trying to make itself known. You don’t get far with rearranging furniture.” Mulder had hoped that would make Scully smile but her face remained passive. “I know you don’t believe in ghosts, and I know you’d rather be asleep at that B&B I promised we’d go to, but please, just humour me.” It wasn’t often he said ‘please’ and he knew it would hit her in the right place. He checked his watch and muttered, “Damn thing’s stopped. What time is it, Scully?”
She pulled back the sleeve of her jacket to check. “Ten thirteen, according to my watch.” Mulder held out his wrist: his watch showed the same time, the second hand unmoving. Scully double-checked hers and saw it was in the same condition. “Mine must have stopped too,” she said.
“Huh; the clock on the computer doesn’t work either,” he uttered, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a bit odd, don’t you think? The odds must be a million to one for both our watches to stop at exactly the same time. All right, we’ll give it until dawn and then we go, regardless of anything we might have found. Please,” he added upon seeing the look on her face.
Scully sighed in resignation. She both loved and hated how well he knew her; Mulder saying ‘please’ and appealing to her sense of reason was almost guaranteed to make her do anything for him. He was aware of that. She knew he knew. He knew she knew he knew, and he didn’t care. If she really didn’t want to do something, she would say no and he would back off.
“Just until dawn,” she said firmly, and stalked away from him.
He caught her hand as she slipped past. “I’ll make it up to you,” he murmured in that soft tone she liked, his thumb circling her palm. She nodded curtly at him and moved back to the pile of record books but Mulder caught the faint blush on her cheeks and the acknowledgement in her eyes; the gauntlet had been laid. He fought to keep the grin from his face as he turned back to the computer.
Susan didn’t so much as look up from the page as Scully took her seat again, for which she was grateful. Over the years she had become an expert in fielding questions on her relationship with Mulder, truthfully denying any romantic involvement when others insisted they were more than friends, and now they were lovers she felt uncomfortable lying to anyone about it. She wasn’t embarrassed by him, had grown used to his quirks and accepted them, and where most just found him odd she thought him endearing.
That said, their relationship was private and nobody else needed to know any details; they still didn’t know if their enemies were keeping an ear out or if they even cared anymore. They had both been cautious at first, convinced after that first night everybody would know somehow and they would be immediately separated. When nothing happened after a month, they dropped their guards a little and learned to enjoy their new relationship, until the time came when it was second-nature to spend the night in the other’s bed without fear of repercussions.
A bed sounded really nice, Scully thought wistfully. She’d rub her cold feet against Mulder’s shins in retaliation for the side-trip to Thurmere Hall and he’d have no choice but to take it like a man. Then he’d wrap himself around her, making sure there was no place left on her body that was cold, and they’d both fall into a sleep devoid of big old houses and dead birds. But none of that could happen until dawn and she might as well do something in the meantime, even if she did think it useless.
Susan tossed her book to one side and grabbed another from the large pile. Scully glanced down at the blotted pages in front of her and resigned herself to spidery handwriting and insignificant data. Jane Gribbs grazed both knees when she tripped and fell on the stone floor in April 1947. John Liptrott, gardener, sliced his thumb off when trimming the hedges in November of the same year. Everything had a very logical, albeit unwritten, explanation. She almost wanted something to have occurred just to make the mountainous stack before her seem more interesting.
The rest of the Forties and the entirety of the Fifties flew by in the space of half an hour; the books were exceptionally quiet. Had nobody visited the Hall then or was there just a lull in everyday accidents? Scully mentally filed the data away for future reference and picked up another book from the gradually decreasing stack.
It was the same old story until just over halfway through, when she turned the page and began to read, something catching her eye: a parched scrap against the spine. “There’s a page missing.”
Both Mulder and Susan looked up but it was Mulder who spoke. “Missing?”
“Torn out,” Scully replied. “You can see it.” She slid the book over to Susan, who examined it and nodded in confirmation.
“Nice catch,” Mulder complimented. “Which dates surround it?”
Scully checked the pages. “April and July, both 1963.”
“Want to bet something big happened between then? Susan, was there building work going on at that time?”
“I can’t recall anything outright. The final building, what’s now the tea room, was completed in 1825 and then nothing was touched until the mid-1920s,” Susan explained. “As I understand it, that’s when a couple of the bedrooms upstairs with little historical significance were converted into memorial rooms for the men who died during the First World War. All their names are listed on the walls and there are a couple of display cases containing artefacts, a miniature of Charnley at the time, things like that.”
Converted bedrooms? Mulder’s ears pricked upon hearing those two words. A change as big as that would surely rattle an age-old inhabitant, perhaps one lying dormant for decades like a volcano, the building work serving as a trigger to bring a spirit erupting out of hibernation. Of course, one would expect all kinds of disasters to occur in the weeks following the renovations but Scully had claimed the record books detailed nothing suspicious. And now a page was torn out from twenty years after the work had been completed. Mulder felt certain this was what they had been looking for, the fact that it was missing only serving to reduce his doubt even more. They needed that page.
He started pacing to alleviate the sudden rush of energy. “Something happened in 1963,” he began, “something bigger than the renovations that came before. Whatever it was, the spirit didn’t like it, and since then it’s been roaming the hallways, trying to find peace, maybe, or exact revenge.”
“What were those dates again?” Susan asked suddenly, leaning over even as Scully read them out. “Agent Mulder, Thurmere Hall was inexplicably closed between April and July 1963. It’s always struck me as odd that there’s no public record of what happened at the time. Nobody stays in Charnley very long so I haven’t been able to find anybody who lived nearby then. I’ve asked councillors but nobody seems to know why the Hall was shut.”
“Or they do know but don’t want it made known,” Scully suggested. “Someone from the council must have had an idea, even if they didn’t authorise it. Thurmere Hall belonged to the people of Charnley from 1922 onwards, correct? But it was run by the council?” Susan nodded. “Then someone from the local government had to have given the order. Nobody else could have closed it.”
Mulder smiled ruefully. “Another government conspiracy. Alright, I think we have to assume we’ve found the right time. Now where do we look? The page is missing from the books, there’s no public record, and nobody wants to help us.”
“You could try a different search on the internet,” Scully suggested. “If you include the months and the year alongside the name, maybe we’ll get lucky.”
There were no objections so Mulder returned to the computer and hammered out the information, the bewildered look on his face saying it all as the results came up. He clicked a few links to verify their uselessness before pushing the mouse away and looking over at the two women helplessly.
“The library,” Susan said with dawning realisation. “They have copies of all the local newspapers going back decades. A friend of mine works there and she said they were undertaking a huge project to put all the papers and microfilm onto their website so we could access them for free without going into town. If there was a note in one of the papers, it should be on the site.”
Mulder, fuelled by a new purpose, was on the page before Susan had finished speaking, navigating the maze of links. “I need a library card number to see the articles,” he groaned.
“I have a card in my purse,” Susan said. “Give me two minutes; my bag’s in the breakroom.” She hurried away.
Scully yawned and rested her head in her hands. She could hear Mulder drumming his fingers against the desk and anyone else may have interpreted it as impatience but she knew he just needed to keep busy; where she was content to take a break for a couple of minutes, he couldn’t feel as though he was doing nothing. Scully was surprised he hadn’t started a conversation already instead of staring at the screen. The silence was palpable and the atmosphere heavy with anticipation, yet she welcomed it; it was better than the staleness that had reigned before. At least now they were getting somewhere.
Susan returned with the library card clenched in her fist, proffered like a gift. She read out the numbers as Mulder typed, leaning over his shoulder once the access screen disappeared and directing him to the right area.
“It’s still in the early stages,” she apologised, “so it might make finding it difficult, but everything’s supposed to be online now. It’s only the organisation that needs some work.”
“Thank you, Susan,” Mulder said gratefully. “Here’s 1960… it can’t be much further away.”
Scully looked on with weary interest. Mulder and Susan were watching the monitor with rapt attention, both pairs of eyes scanning the images and text Mulder was scrolling through for the keywords. As the clicking slowed, Scully dragged herself to her feet and joined them behind the desk, arms crossed as her gaze settled on the black and white print of old articles.
“Found April,” Mulder said, tilting his head to look back at Scully, almost like a puppy after a reward.
“Take it back to March,” she suggested. “If Thurmere Hall was closed in April, the notification, if there was one, should have been in the March news.”
He did as told and the trio unconsciously leaned closer to the screen as if pulled by invisible string. They read through the first week, the second, and as they neared the end of the third, Scully was beginning to feel they had made a mistake until Susan pointed excitedly at the screen with a cry: “That’s it!”
And indeed it was. They gazed at the small column of text as if it the Holy Grail itself was laid out before them. All that is gold does not glisten: the print was a little rough and faded in places but still legible. They devoured it hungrily; after knowing very little all night, this was a lifeboat to cling to, if not a perfect answer then at least a clue to propel them forwards. Scully for one was tired of being in stasis.
“An archaeological dig!” Mulder wanted to rub his hands together in glee. “This is fantastic!”
She had to smile at the exhilaration in his eyes as he looked up at her, awaiting her reaction. He suddenly looked ten years younger. “It’s certainly something,” she responded in agreement. “But how could something as big as an excavation be kept quiet for so long? Even Susan didn’t know about it.”
“I only knew the Hall was closed for a couple of months; I didn’t know why,” Susan reiterated, “and nobody else was willing to discuss it with me.”
Mulder tugged at his lower lip. “Put shadowy archaeology together with a page torn out of a record book marking accidents and incidents: what do you get?”
He lapsed into silence and Scully wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical or not; she thought about mentioning Indiana Jones just to see his reaction. “Something happened during the excavation,” she hedged instead, “and someone, maybe an employee here, made a note of it. It disgruntled the powers that be or the members of the archaeological team and the page was torn out of the book.”
Susan was nodding but Mulder’s lips were pursed. “So what happened that would be important enough or controversial enough for someone to prevent others knowing about? Could someone have died here?”
Before either woman could reply, a deafening noise like cannon fire exploded from upstairs, just the once, but it was loud enough and unexpected enough to cause three hearts to dent ribcages and Mulder to leap from his seat. There was no echo to be heard, as though a bowling ball had been dropped opposed to a basketball, and the resulting quiet made one doubt it had happened at all. But although there was no ringing in her ears, Scully knew what she had heard was real, and after risking glances at both Mulder and Susan she knew they knew, too.
She began marching to the stairs, not waiting to see if they would follow her. No sooner had she reached the curve halfway up did she hear Mulder’s thunderous steps behind her, drowning out Susan’s more delicate touch. They hurried to keep up with her as she paced like a drill sergeant past Spinola and Columbus, the portraits still hanging as before, eyes staring straight ahead yet following, following.
Scully headed for the room at the end of the corridor as surely as there was a target painted on it and neon signs pointing to the door. It was fitting that all roads led to Rome; the strangest of things seemed to go on in this room - Houdini’s room, if earlier events were to be believed - and even though the entire estate radiated and pulsed with an extraordinary tension, it was here the curiosity could not be contained and the pull was strongest, like some unseen magnet was tugging at the iron in their blood and the fillings in their teeth, the implant at the back of her neck. Perhaps it was a shared hysteria - but Mulder and Susan hadn’t caught up with her when the baby started crying.
They weren’t the meek sounds accompanying a few tears; this was a full-blown wail, the middle of a temper tantrum, and it sent a chill racing down Scully’s spine. Humans are biologically predisposed to respond to an infant’s cries but this was so ear splitting they would have done anything to make it go away. Mulder broke into a jog and pulled ahead of Scully as they neared the door with a sense of urgency like no other. One easy push and the door swung open. The cries grew louder.
The trio piled inside and Mulder immediately climbed over the rope barrier, searching for the source of the noise. There was no actual baby in the room, of that he was certain, but something had to be making such a racket and he was going to find it this time. The bedcovers were thrown back, the armoire doors yanked open so suddenly they nearly fell off their hinges, and the crib was empty save for that doll with plastic lips sealed shut in secrecy. He picked it up and held it to his ear in case it had a mechanism built in but it wasn’t the source of the screeching. Susan shouted to him but he could barely hear her over the incessant cries of a troubled infant.
“What?” he yelled back, taking a step closer to the rope where she remained with Scully. Neither expressed much desire to get closer to the noise.
“The cot!” she screamed. Her next few words were unintelligible.
At his confused look, Scully elaborated. “There’s an audio player taped to the underside of the crib!” she bellowed. “It’s on a timer during the day to add to the authenticity of the experience for visitors; turn it off!”
Mulder turned back to the crib and got down on his hands and knees, peering underneath the wooden frame and setting eyes on the black box. He tugged at it until it came away from the body, a few splinters peppering the floor, and he quickly scanned it for the ‘stop’ button to turn off the offending din.
“One problem!” he shouted, getting to his feet. “The tape isn’t playing!”
* * * * *
Continue to part four.
FANDOM: The X-Files
RATING: R
PAIRING: Mulder/Scully established
SETTING/SPOILERS: Set post-Brand X but pre-Requiem. Nothing extremely overt with regards to spoilers but there are references to the following: Squeeze, Tooms, Irresistible, Memento Mori, Redux II, Chinga, Fight the Future, How the Ghosts Stole Christmas, Millennium, Orison, Theef, all things, Brand X, and a slight dig at I Want to Believe.
OVERALL WORD COUNT: 35,603
DISCLAIMER: Everything belongs to Chris Carter, including the loose ends and the there’s-no-way-that-possibly-fits timeline.
SUMMARY: A quiet vacation in England begins with a ghost hunt as Mulder and Scully investigate the paranormal activity at Thurmere Hall.
* * * * *
They returned to the spacious entrance hall to use the computer at the reception desk. Susan and Mulder pored over the screen, occasionally henpecking at keys, and appeared thoroughly engrossed in the activity. Scully leaned against the wall for a few minutes, watching them and becoming lost in her thoughts. This is what it comes down to, she reflected, using well-earned frequent-flier miles to cross the Atlantic in a plane that was too similar to a rickshaw to make anyone feel safe. Indulging a worried woman’s paranoia. Traipsing around a building that lived in the past and made money off history and hearsay.
She sighed. It was a far cry from the career in medicine she had been so enthusiastic about as a teenager but this… this still mattered. She helped people through her work. It was compelling and challenging and certainly different, and most of the time she enjoyed it. It was at times like this, when Mulder found facts in hunches and whims, that she grew tired. He hadn’t changed since they’d started sleeping together. In truth, she hadn’t expected him to, but she couldn’t deny the thought had crossed her mind that he might not stray so far from the nest anymore. That hadn’t panned out - of course it hadn’t - and although she was a tad wistful at ignoring the road most travelled, she was pleased to see that Mulder was still Mulder and she was still Scully (when did she begin to define herself by comparison?). Only she smiled more now, and spent evenings and weekends being loved by the best of men.
If that meant devoting a night to ghostbusting, then so be it. They had the rest of the week to themselves to do with what they pleased, and she was sure they could reach some sort of compromise as to how to spend their time.
Scully wandered away from the desk, looking at other parts of the room. Mulder glanced up at her and offered a tentative half-grin; she smiled back reassuringly. She wasn’t really mad at him. Of all the places he had dragged her to over the years, this was certainly one of the nicest. When he had said ‘haunted house’, she had pictured a ramshackle old building with overgrown weeds and a family cemetery round the back. The reality was much more pleasant, even if it wasn’t the B&B up in the hills. No elderly caretaker, no troubled pet, no overwhelming feeling that all work and no play made Scully a dull girl… just a couple of odd noises, lights, and shadows, all the usual trappings of a magic show. Scully was still convinced Mulder was having the wool pulled over his eyes; she just had to find a way to prove it.
The slight heels of her shoes clacked against the stone flags as she wandered over to the far wall where a table stood, brochures and leaflets neatly stacked on its surface. Scully idly rifled through a couple: a Labour Party councillor trying to persuade people to vote for him at the next local election; deals at the leisure centre for half-price badminton courts and free swimming for the under-sixteens and over-sixties; a book club advertising for new members. When would she ever have the time to make it to a book club - or any kind of club - with consistent attendance when Mulder was prone to spontaneous cross-country (and international) trips? And she dared not let him go alone, not after the arguments, injuries, and subsequent days of uncomfortable silences they’d had upon returning from business undertaken single-handedly. Unless direct orders came from the upper echelons of the Bureau, requesting one to assist with a separate investigation, they went together or not at all.
Scully skirted the perimeter of the room, the walls wainscoted to at least nine feet, and cast her eye over the numerous paintings hanging in dull gold frames. She recognised Sir Francis Drake but had to read the inscriptions on the others: Muhammad the Second; Gabor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania; King Charles surrounded by his family. Two family crests hung over the large fireplace, lions curving around glorious red and golden yellow shields like vicious parentheses. A high-backed wooden chair sat stiffly next to the staircase. Scully picked up the card lying on top and read: ‘Sirloin Chair. James I, King of England, was sitting on this chair when he knighted a loin of beer, pronouncing it ‘Sir Loin’. The chair was donated to Thurmere Hall in 1960.’
She smiled at the tale and tried to imagine what life had been like back then. Had the evening been jocular and the king in high spirits? Had he simply drank too much? There would have been raucous laughter at his proclamation, polite subjects humouring their ruler, and then they would have dug into a hearty meal. Scully fingered the edge of the card, wishing it could tell her more. Thurmere Hall may have contained the objects used all those years ago but it couldn’t speak of the occasions in which they were used. It was sad, really, to be silenced for eternity.
Mulder called her name and she looked up, the spell of her reverie broken. “Did you find something?”
“How sure are you that the music we heard was Piano Concerto Twenty-One?” he asked.
“Almost certain. The wind was blowing pretty hard but it’s a famous piece, quite easily recognisable.”
“Huh,” he muttered, leaning back in the chair and rubbing his jaw. “That’s odd, because Mozart was alive between 1756 and 1791.”
And I’m sure that handy little detail will come in useful when we’re watching Jeopardy! on your couch, Mulder, so thanks for sharing. “… your point being?”
“The woman in the courtyard,” he said slowly, “was described as wearing clothing popular in Elizabethan times. That was a hundred and fifty years before Mozart was even born.”
“Ghosts can’t learn to play new music once they’re dead?” Scully shot back, raising an eyebrow.
“They can’t adapt to changes in fashion, either.” He smiled. “I think maybe the house is running on a loop. That’s why we’re getting the spread of the years: the woman from the 1600s, a Mozart concerto from the 1700s. Thurmere Hall has a memory, or maybe thousands of them, that got sucked into the structure and became a part of it before it could die and be lost forever. Hear me out,” he said as Scully opened her mouth to protest. “It’s called a residual or non-intelligent haunting. The same things happen over and over, like a song on repeat, and don’t respond to the present environment, which would fit with the old clothes and lack of interaction. I don’t know why these particular memories are being revealed to us, if they have some greater meaning or if they’ve been chosen at random, but something has possessed this place to store the data and play it back. I’m not sure what that could be yet.”
Susan’s frown matched Scully’s. “It was only a week or two ago I saw the figure in the courtyard. How could it jump over a century in so short a time? And what about the noises from upstairs? When are they from?”
Mulder gave a helpless little shrug; his partner’s lips quirked upwards in an amused smile. “I don’t know how it could shoot ahead so fast. As for the noises upstairs, they must be somewhere in between our bookend years. We can’t narrow it down much more than that; it was far too indistinct to pinpoint a certain time.”
They all jumped when the front door rattled and banged within its frame, another howling gust of wind shaking the weaker extremities as if in a breezy snow globe. However, Thurmere Hall had proved itself to be sturdy since its conception, having survived two World Wars and numerous floods when the banks of the nearby river overflowed, and rationally such knowledge should have made them feel safer. Should have, but didn’t.
“It’s only the weather,” Susan said nervously. “It’s always the same this time of year.”
“Uh huh,” Mulder muttered absent-mindedly, eyes riveted to the door that had looked so strong and solid when he had first glimpsed it. Now, in the midst of being hammered by the angry gale, it looked only a matter of time before it started to splinter and snap, leaving the Hall wide open for anyone and anything to enter.
“Anyway,” Scully said firmly, “back to your theory, Mulder.” He could hear the air quotes. “What I don’t understand is why a building would store memories, as you put it, and then play them back seemingly at random.”
He tore his eyes away from the door and looked at her, remaining perched on the edge of his seat. “Most ghost hunters believe the majority of residual hauntings are produced by the strong thoughts created by people while living, and that they continue to exist in the atmosphere. They tend to occur in places built over quartz or limestone. It’s more likely to be quartz because certain pressures can release minute electrical charges which could free the memory. It’s a good transmitter, too. On the other hand, limestone’s more organic. If organ tissue or bones somehow became a part of the rock, the memories could be stored that way. Maybe erosion leads to the liberation of the information. Do you happen to know what kind of rock Thurmere Hall’s built upon, Susan?”
She wrung her hands. “No, I’m afraid not. Limestone’s sedimentary though, right? The river’s at the side of the house; could that somehow contain limestone?”
“I forgot about the river,” Mulder confessed. “Research into residual hauntings also suggests the presence of running water nearby serves as a conduit. Most often it’s when something is built on top of the water source but the river’s so close I think it could still work.”
“If that’s the case, how do we stop the hauntings?” Susan asked.
“Wait a second,” Scully interrupted. “I think we’re all forgetting something. You’ve been talking about these residual hauntings, where everything’s on a loop and there’s no interference, correct?” Mulder nodded. “What about Susan’s keys? And the light bulb? We have a corridor full of open doors that were previously locked. That doesn’t sound particularly residual to me.”
She had a point. “Manipulation of the physical environment does imply a poltergeist, as I suggested earlier,” he said markedly. “Both theories are equally possible. A poltergeist would, however, explain everything that’s happened here tonight: the lights, the sounds, the doors. It would also account for your keys going missing, Susan.”
“But that was months ago!”
“It’s still a sign of poltergeist activity,” he argued. “If it was purely residual then it couldn’t touch your keys. Everything else might still happen but it’s the keys that are important, I think. Poltergeist activity centres around psychokinesis, the ability to move things with the mind. Researchers aren’t sure if it comes from the people who live in or visit the building or from a troubled spirit. I’ve seen cases of both. The common theory is that poltergeist hauntings centre around adolescent girls, like in Carrie, and the surge of hormones at puberty provides the spirit with enough energy to move objects and create chaos.”
“Sorry to point out one huge flaw with your theory applying here, Mulder, but none of us are pubescent,” Scully said wryly, “and yet we’ve witnessed some unusual goings-on tonight.”
Mulder bit his bottom lip, momentarily crestfallen. Scully was right, of course, and the tone of her voice implied she had taken great pleasure in revealing the gaping hole in what he thought to be an otherwise-solid conviction. Her intruder hypothesis seemed to have dropped off the map; at least she was going along with his ghost theory now. The cab driver had been right in saying there was something strange about the Hall; Mulder felt it too, the unease as loyal a companion as his shadow, but it wasn’t strong enough to call off the hunt.
He opened his mouth to throw a glib remark back at Scully but something thudded against the door before he could speak. Peripherally, he saw his partner reach for the gun that wasn’t there, fumbling at the space by her hip. Susan was frozen to the spot, eyes wide. He rushed out from his place behind the desk and raced to the door, yanking the handle.
“Dammit!” he cursed. “The keys.” He held out his hand to Susan, who stared blankly at him. “The keys, Susan! I need to unlock the door!”
She snapped into action, unclipping the ring from her belt and rifling through the set of keys with quivering fingers, selecting one and holding it out to Mulder. Her hand was shaking so much the other keys jangled together with tuneful metallic clinks reminiscent of wind chimes. He grabbed it from her and shoved the key in the lock, surprised when it rotated smoothly. He was already turning the handle before he thought to grab something to use as a weapon - who knew what was on the other side? - but it was too late; the door was opening, and there was-
Nothing?
There was nobody standing there. Brow furrowed, Mulder ran outside and scanned the darkness for the culprit. Pulling out the ever-present flashlight from his pocket and flicking it on, he jogged to the front of the tower on his right, beyond which lay the walkway and parking lot. It was too dark to see anything and he couldn’t hear the crunch of stones indicative of another person fleeing the scene. All the same, he hurried to the other side of the front wall just to be sure. The flashlight beam fractured upon hitting the water of the river. There were no footprints along the muddy bank.
When he returned, Susan was smoking a cigarette in the doorway. Scully was crouching a few yards away, looking intently at something on the ground in the poor light. He kneeled beside her and shone the flashlight near her feet. The beam revealed a dead sparrow, its skull crushed and feathers matted with blood. Leaning close together, their breath mingled as they conducted an examination of the bird.
“Looks like it flew right into the door,” Scully murmured, attention still on the corpse. She didn’t want to touch it without gloves so had to settle for observations only. “Probably died on impact.”
“What would cause a bird to hit something instead of fly around it?”
“I’m a pathologist, Mulder, not a vet or a zoologist. This kind of thing just happens sometimes.” She shrugged it off. “Haven’t you ever had a bird fly into your window?”
“I never noticed,” he said, “but don’t you think it’s odd this would happen right here, at Thurmere Hall? You have to admit there’s something weird going on, Scully.”
“When is there not something weird going on around you, Mulder?” she replied with a rueful smile, standing and rubbing the back of her neck with a grimace. He too got to his feet, his hand coming to rest on the small of her back.
“Are you okay?” he asked, concern evident in his voice.
“I’m fine.”
“Okay,” he said, so quietly she turned to look up at him. He faked a smile but she could see the lack of belief in his eyes. ‘I’m fine’ hadn’t cut it since the days of her cancer, when he could clearly see she was anything but, and his dislike of the phrase had only seemed to grow in strength every time she uttered it. It was a Pavlovian response, his sudden rush of simmering anger upon hearing the words, and she tried to curb their frequency to make him happy. It had just slipped out this time like a recorded message.
She glanced at the doorway to find Susan had gone back inside the Hall after finishing her cigarette and, once satisfied they were alone for now, Scully laid a hand on Mulder’s cheek and forced him to make eye contact.
“It’s only a crick from bending to inspect the bird,” she said firmly. “It’ll go away in a few minutes. There is absolutely nothing else wrong, okay?”
“Are you sure?” Mulder asked softly. “I know you don’t really want to be here. We can leave if you want.”
“And miss out on an opportunity to prove you wrong?” she teased. “I don’t think so.”
He grinned at that and chuffed, and she was pleased to see the familiar twinkle back in his eyes, a comforting constellation. Scully smiled back and didn’t pull away when he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. They were cold but she soon ignored it as he slanted his mouth over hers again and again. Normally they would refrain from such contact when working but it wasn’t an official FBI case, they were thousands of miles away from home, and the only other person in the vicinity was busy elsewhere. Besides, they would hear her heels on the floor if she began to move. It was also cold, dammit, and he was so warm. Throwing caution to the hungry wind, she allowed the kiss to continue for a brief moment, reaffirming her connection to Mulder and his to her, before reluctantly breaking the touch of his lips against her own.
“We should get back inside,” she murmured, pulling the collar of his leather jacket up around his neck to ward off the chill.
He pulled her into his arms instead, enveloping her in his warmth. “In a minute.”
“Mulder, it’s freezing out here!” she protested, yet made no effort to move.
“We’ve been in colder places than this,” he reminded her, “and came out relatively unscathed.” He allowed the relative quiet to reign for a few moments before leaning in to whisper, “Thank you for being here with me.”
She held him tighter and closed her eyes to ward off the onslaught of emotion at his heartfelt statement. It wasn’t fair of him to use her devotion to his advantage; he knew perfectly well she would be at his side in almost any situation, and taking the time to actually thank her for it, although he did mean it, was a ploy to make sure she wasn’t mad at him. As it was, she was as curious about Thurmere Hall as he, even though she didn’t subscribe to his ghost theory. There was a more earthly explanation, she was sure of it, but if he was happy to chase after something that didn’t exist then she would humour him. It was only for one night this time and she didn’t have to work the following day, and there was little harm in a late night in an English Manor House.
Scully pulled back and murmured, “Come on, before you freeze to death.”
He smiled fondly at her before they set off back to the Hall. The wind had died down considerably, taking some of the biting chill away, yet the temperature still hovered just above zero, threatening ice if not snow. The sky was clear but for the odd star; it seemed even clouds dared not tread near Thurmere Hall.
Mere paces away from the door, something whizzed past Mulder’s ear, missing him by millimetres, and crashed into one of the pillars holding up a stone lion.
“What the hell was-”
Another flew past, and then another, and then there were so many noises he couldn’t keep track of them all but at some point Scully grabbed his hand and pulled him inside, slamming the door shut. The harmony of sickening thuds continued, seeming to echo and multiply in the vastness of the room, and Mulder took an involuntary step back from the entrance. Somewhere a window broke and the sound of shattering glass filtered in from another room. The cacophony of destruction was almost unbearable, as loud as a pneumatic drill yet all the more terrifying because it was unpredictable; would the next one knock the door clean off its hinges?
And, just as soon as they started, the noises stopped.
All that remained was heavy breathing from the agitated occupants, who all looked at each other with dazed expressions. “What was that?” Mulder finally croaked.
“It sounded just like before,” Susan whispered, “except a hundred times more powerful.”
Scully agreed with that. The first noise moments ago had been scary enough; this was more like an onslaught, a battle cry. “Better open the door and find out what happened,” she said. “We can’t ignore it.”
Mulder nodded. He took a deep breath and Scully noticed his hand was shaking as he reached for the handle and slowly pulled the door open. The ground was littered with dead birds, feathery carcasses spread like a blanket over the flags and loose stones. The exterior wall was riddled with dark red splotches that at first reminded him of nosebleeds and stained tissues, of a time when worry was his constant companion, but he steered away from those memories and focused instead on the carpet of tiny corpses. “Anybody here a Hitchcock fan?” he questioned nervously.
Scully surveyed the scene before crouching yet again to inspect the birds. “Yeah, but these are all dead, not attacking. Susan,” she asked over her shoulder, “do you have a pair of latex gloves anywhere? The kind you use for washing dishes, anything like that?”
“I think there’s a pair in the breakroom. I’ll have a look for you.” Susan scurried off down the corridor full of unlocked doors. They listened until the rapid tattoo of her heels faded to a faint pulse.
“They’re all dead?” Mulder whispered, his voice harsh in the cavernous entrance hall. “What could cause that?”
“Bear in mind my knowledge of bird physiology is limited, but other than a shift in the magnetic poles I can’t think of anything that would lead to something like this. Most of these birds should have migrated by now.”
“I don’t remember seeing a single one since we arrived at the parking lot,” Mulder commented.
Scully admitted, “Me either.” That in itself wasn’t odd; after all, she had just assumed they had flown south for the winter. But when coupled with an assault like a scene straight out of The Birds it begged several questions, none of which had clear answers. “Where did they come from? Are they nesting in the roof?”
“Would you choose this place to live? I don’t think any breathing creature wants to be near here.”
“Apart from us.”
“Thanks for being inclusive.” He quirked his lips in appreciation. “One bird flying into the building I could understand, but an entire army of them? It doesn’t make sense.”
Scully could agree with that. If it was just the windows that had been hit, it would account for something; birds often fly into glass. But that only happened during the day and it was pitch black outside now, as it should be at past midnight. The moon was out there somewhere but it seemed to have been swallowed up by the night. Could mass hysteria present itself in avian bodies? Were they so consumed by fear of something unknown in the darkness that they lost their ability to navigate? An involuntary chill ran up her spine; didn’t that mean someone was walking over her grave?
Susan’s footsteps were increasing in volume and Scully half-turned to greet her, accepting the gloves proffered without a word. Susan and Mulder hovered over her shoulder like nervous parents as Scully slipped the gloves on and carefully dislodged a bird from its resting place. Its body was limp and still warm in her hands, the beady eye open and boring a hole into the heavens, and she lifted it this way and that in an attempt to notice anything out of the ordinary. It was just a bird, albeit one with its skull crushed. The three others she visually examined were the same and she relayed her findings to the expectant observers.
“So what happened?” Susan asked. “Could it be a disease?”
Scully stood, stripping off the gloves. “Maybe, although I can’t immediately think of one that would have a sudden onset in hundreds of birds like this.”
“I read a report once on birds dropping out of the sky in New Zealand,” Mulder said, “and the investigation concluded that there were extremely high amounts of lead and nickel in the water, over one hundred and thirty times the recommended health levels. Over four thousand birds died of lead poisoning in the course of seven months.”
“The river?” Scully asked.
He nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. Has the water content ever been tested, Susan?”
“I think the council checked it years ago but it isn’t used for drinking or bathing so nobody really cares. We look to make sure people aren’t dumping waste in it but we’re only here eight hours a day and there aren’t any security cameras.”
“Still, Mulder,” Scully said in slight protest of accepting the theory so quickly, “it would have to be ridiculously high for all these birds to die at once. Prolonged exposure would have too many variables for something like this to happen. You said it yourself: four thousand birds over seven months. We must have at least two hundred here and it happened in the space of minutes. It was a bombardment. They didn’t drop; they fired into the wall.”
“Maybe they just missed their target,” Mulder mused.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe they were aiming for us; you saw how close one came to hitting me. What if they weren’t directionless? What if they really were attacking, like in The Birds?”
“Attacking?” Scully asked incredulously, both eyebrows raised.
“Birds are common features in many cultures and belief systems, often associated with life and death.” She felt a lecture coming on. “The Ancient Egyptians built their tombs with narrow shafts so the ba, the soul, could fly out in the form of a bird after death. Most religions believe birds take souls to where they need to be, such as doves in Christianity and Judaism. There’s a restless soul in this building and they’ve come to retrieve it.”
“Why now?”
“I think we disturbed it by poking around tonight,” he said without a hint of jocularity.
Scully held her tongue when he mentioned ‘we’; he had been the one climbing all over antique beds and shoving ancient armoires. It wasn’t worth getting into a fight over. But a spirit released because of a few pokes and prods? Now that she could argue with.
“Mulder, people have been in this house for centuries. Surely something would have manifested itself before now.”
He fixed his gaze, eyes so intensely focused on her she almost forgot Susan was standing only a few feet away, listening. “Who says it hasn’t?”
* * * * *
The old heater next to the wall gurgled and burped as it strained to warm the large room. Mulder seemed unaffected by the temperature and the noise, busy henpecking at the computer keyboard and squinting at the monitor with a furrowed brow. Scully and Susan had been designated the task of looking through the incident books. The most recent lay on the desk; the older ones were stored in a cabinet behind it, and they had dragged them out and stacked them in piles on the floor and the tables Susan had procured from a storage cupboard. Pouring over musty pages covered with scrawling, barely-legible handwriting, Scully rubbed at her eyes to stop the words merging into a swirling vortex again, rereading an entry for the third time because her brain just couldn’t comprehend the meaning behind it. When was the last time she had slept? It felt like days ago, and maybe it was. How many hours behind was D.C., anyway?
With every page turned, she felt more and more certain that she was wasting her time. Not many people got hurt at Thurmere Hall - the entries were sporadic at best, often going weeks without something new - and that in itself should have indicated to Mulder that there was no ghoul intent on causing harm. Having relayed that thought to him twice now and having received the same insistent reply of there being something important in those books, Scully gave up trying to convince him otherwise and left him to churn through the thousands of results Google had coughed up.
But now her eyelids were drooping and she wasn’t processing correctly. She needed a decent night’s sleep - dozing on a plane didn’t count - or a shot of pure caffeine to jolt her nerves into working again. Scully felt certain she had pulled longer hours as a med student and probably even as an FBI agent on the X-Files, but factor in a long flight and the adrenaline wearing off from being scared out of her wits (at least twice) and she was bound to crash sooner or later. Looking at Mulder, she could tell he had lost some of his initial enthusiasm. He was slouching in his seat, head propped up on his hand, and if it wasn’t for the occasional mouse click she would have thought him asleep with his eyes open. Susan was still diligently probing the records, slowly enough for Scully to believe she was carefully reading each one instead of merely scanning it, and it appeared as though nothing would distract her from her task.
Scully stretched and held a hand over her mouth to contain a yawn that yearned to escape. The portraits on the wall at the other side of the room glared at her disapprovingly. No time to sleep, not when Mulder thought there was paranormal activity going on and she had an opportunity to prove him wrong, or at least dissuade him from whatever madcap theory he was currently fixated on. He had mentioned so many, she wasn’t quite sure which was his favourite.
A coat of dead birds apparently meant the creatures were escorts to Heaven or Hell, coming to collect the troubled being that had plagued Thurmere Hall for centuries. Scully had several issues with said theory but the main one was that the Hall had no more accident-prone visitors than any other Manor House. The record books dated back to 1922, when the building was gifted to the public, and Mulder thought there would be a major event within the first few months. Scully had started there, prying open the journal and dutifully paying attention to the faded letters, but it became apparent that nothing more serious than a sprained ankle had been suffered. The last time she checked, ten minutes ago, she was working her way through 1943 - Susan had begun with the most recent and worked backwards - but even the war yielded little.
Her spine felt stiff and when she stretched it creaked like the floorboards upstairs. The heater was still making some rather worrying noises but Mulder’s cheeks were looking a little rosy so it must have been producing some heat. She was sat too far away to feel the direct benefits, the cold wood and stone enveloping her instead, and her coat didn’t feel like it was helping much. Her chair scraped unnecessarily loudly against the floor as she pushed back and headed for the heater next to Mulder.
“You got something?” he asked absently as she approached.
Scully pressed her hands to the heater, pleased when her fingers registered the warmth and the numbness dissipated. She was still tired and a tad cranky but the heat was a step up. “Nothing that would interest you. Or me, for that matter.” When he didn’t respond, she enquired, “Are the wonders of modern technology aiding your investigation?”
“I’m getting ready to throw this damn thing out the window,” he replied, sighing. “The problem with the Internet isn’t a lack of information; there’s just too much of it. And a lot of it’s useless. There are pages full of Thurmere Hall’s history but no mention of illnesses or deaths or fires. It’s all so… clean.”
She turned to face him fully, leaning against the heater to take advantage while she was there. “Why don’t you just accept that nothing untoward has gone on here?”
“Because that would mean the troubled souls the birds were here for are us,” he said blankly, “and I can’t accept that.” Scully wanted to reach out and take him in her arms, reassure him she wasn’t going anywhere, and then chide him for believing something so extraordinary and whimsical. But that was what made him Mulder and she couldn’t stop his insecurities from manifesting in theories about the paranormal because that was what he always did, even before they started sleeping together. She thought back to one Christmas Eve spent in a house not too dissimilar to this and hoped the experience this time around would not involve weapons of any kind.
Mulder coughed and shifted uncomfortably to alleviate the silence, bringing Scully’s focus back to the present. “Besides,” he said easily, “plenty of controversial issues go unreported. Doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.”
She briefly saw red. “So why am I wading through incident reports if what you’re looking for isn’t in there?” she hissed. “Am I completely wasting my time here, Mulder? Are you just keeping me occupied so you can do the actual work?”
He looked startled at her outburst and his mouth opened and closed several times without a noise coming from it. Running a hand through his hair in frustration and nervousness, he saw she was waiting expectantly for an answer, arms crossed and eyes glaring. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he whispered back, aware of Susan nearby and the quietness of the room (which probably meant she could hear them anyway). “If you don’t want to be here-”
“Would you stop! I have told you countless times that I have no problem with us being here, but as long as we are, I need to know I’m doing something productive.”
“Of course you are,” he protested. “Any death or major injury in those books could indicate a presence trying to make itself known. You don’t get far with rearranging furniture.” Mulder had hoped that would make Scully smile but her face remained passive. “I know you don’t believe in ghosts, and I know you’d rather be asleep at that B&B I promised we’d go to, but please, just humour me.” It wasn’t often he said ‘please’ and he knew it would hit her in the right place. He checked his watch and muttered, “Damn thing’s stopped. What time is it, Scully?”
She pulled back the sleeve of her jacket to check. “Ten thirteen, according to my watch.” Mulder held out his wrist: his watch showed the same time, the second hand unmoving. Scully double-checked hers and saw it was in the same condition. “Mine must have stopped too,” she said.
“Huh; the clock on the computer doesn’t work either,” he uttered, raising an eyebrow. “That’s a bit odd, don’t you think? The odds must be a million to one for both our watches to stop at exactly the same time. All right, we’ll give it until dawn and then we go, regardless of anything we might have found. Please,” he added upon seeing the look on her face.
Scully sighed in resignation. She both loved and hated how well he knew her; Mulder saying ‘please’ and appealing to her sense of reason was almost guaranteed to make her do anything for him. He was aware of that. She knew he knew. He knew she knew he knew, and he didn’t care. If she really didn’t want to do something, she would say no and he would back off.
“Just until dawn,” she said firmly, and stalked away from him.
He caught her hand as she slipped past. “I’ll make it up to you,” he murmured in that soft tone she liked, his thumb circling her palm. She nodded curtly at him and moved back to the pile of record books but Mulder caught the faint blush on her cheeks and the acknowledgement in her eyes; the gauntlet had been laid. He fought to keep the grin from his face as he turned back to the computer.
Susan didn’t so much as look up from the page as Scully took her seat again, for which she was grateful. Over the years she had become an expert in fielding questions on her relationship with Mulder, truthfully denying any romantic involvement when others insisted they were more than friends, and now they were lovers she felt uncomfortable lying to anyone about it. She wasn’t embarrassed by him, had grown used to his quirks and accepted them, and where most just found him odd she thought him endearing.
That said, their relationship was private and nobody else needed to know any details; they still didn’t know if their enemies were keeping an ear out or if they even cared anymore. They had both been cautious at first, convinced after that first night everybody would know somehow and they would be immediately separated. When nothing happened after a month, they dropped their guards a little and learned to enjoy their new relationship, until the time came when it was second-nature to spend the night in the other’s bed without fear of repercussions.
A bed sounded really nice, Scully thought wistfully. She’d rub her cold feet against Mulder’s shins in retaliation for the side-trip to Thurmere Hall and he’d have no choice but to take it like a man. Then he’d wrap himself around her, making sure there was no place left on her body that was cold, and they’d both fall into a sleep devoid of big old houses and dead birds. But none of that could happen until dawn and she might as well do something in the meantime, even if she did think it useless.
Susan tossed her book to one side and grabbed another from the large pile. Scully glanced down at the blotted pages in front of her and resigned herself to spidery handwriting and insignificant data. Jane Gribbs grazed both knees when she tripped and fell on the stone floor in April 1947. John Liptrott, gardener, sliced his thumb off when trimming the hedges in November of the same year. Everything had a very logical, albeit unwritten, explanation. She almost wanted something to have occurred just to make the mountainous stack before her seem more interesting.
The rest of the Forties and the entirety of the Fifties flew by in the space of half an hour; the books were exceptionally quiet. Had nobody visited the Hall then or was there just a lull in everyday accidents? Scully mentally filed the data away for future reference and picked up another book from the gradually decreasing stack.
It was the same old story until just over halfway through, when she turned the page and began to read, something catching her eye: a parched scrap against the spine. “There’s a page missing.”
Both Mulder and Susan looked up but it was Mulder who spoke. “Missing?”
“Torn out,” Scully replied. “You can see it.” She slid the book over to Susan, who examined it and nodded in confirmation.
“Nice catch,” Mulder complimented. “Which dates surround it?”
Scully checked the pages. “April and July, both 1963.”
“Want to bet something big happened between then? Susan, was there building work going on at that time?”
“I can’t recall anything outright. The final building, what’s now the tea room, was completed in 1825 and then nothing was touched until the mid-1920s,” Susan explained. “As I understand it, that’s when a couple of the bedrooms upstairs with little historical significance were converted into memorial rooms for the men who died during the First World War. All their names are listed on the walls and there are a couple of display cases containing artefacts, a miniature of Charnley at the time, things like that.”
Converted bedrooms? Mulder’s ears pricked upon hearing those two words. A change as big as that would surely rattle an age-old inhabitant, perhaps one lying dormant for decades like a volcano, the building work serving as a trigger to bring a spirit erupting out of hibernation. Of course, one would expect all kinds of disasters to occur in the weeks following the renovations but Scully had claimed the record books detailed nothing suspicious. And now a page was torn out from twenty years after the work had been completed. Mulder felt certain this was what they had been looking for, the fact that it was missing only serving to reduce his doubt even more. They needed that page.
He started pacing to alleviate the sudden rush of energy. “Something happened in 1963,” he began, “something bigger than the renovations that came before. Whatever it was, the spirit didn’t like it, and since then it’s been roaming the hallways, trying to find peace, maybe, or exact revenge.”
“What were those dates again?” Susan asked suddenly, leaning over even as Scully read them out. “Agent Mulder, Thurmere Hall was inexplicably closed between April and July 1963. It’s always struck me as odd that there’s no public record of what happened at the time. Nobody stays in Charnley very long so I haven’t been able to find anybody who lived nearby then. I’ve asked councillors but nobody seems to know why the Hall was shut.”
“Or they do know but don’t want it made known,” Scully suggested. “Someone from the council must have had an idea, even if they didn’t authorise it. Thurmere Hall belonged to the people of Charnley from 1922 onwards, correct? But it was run by the council?” Susan nodded. “Then someone from the local government had to have given the order. Nobody else could have closed it.”
Mulder smiled ruefully. “Another government conspiracy. Alright, I think we have to assume we’ve found the right time. Now where do we look? The page is missing from the books, there’s no public record, and nobody wants to help us.”
“You could try a different search on the internet,” Scully suggested. “If you include the months and the year alongside the name, maybe we’ll get lucky.”
There were no objections so Mulder returned to the computer and hammered out the information, the bewildered look on his face saying it all as the results came up. He clicked a few links to verify their uselessness before pushing the mouse away and looking over at the two women helplessly.
“The library,” Susan said with dawning realisation. “They have copies of all the local newspapers going back decades. A friend of mine works there and she said they were undertaking a huge project to put all the papers and microfilm onto their website so we could access them for free without going into town. If there was a note in one of the papers, it should be on the site.”
Mulder, fuelled by a new purpose, was on the page before Susan had finished speaking, navigating the maze of links. “I need a library card number to see the articles,” he groaned.
“I have a card in my purse,” Susan said. “Give me two minutes; my bag’s in the breakroom.” She hurried away.
Scully yawned and rested her head in her hands. She could hear Mulder drumming his fingers against the desk and anyone else may have interpreted it as impatience but she knew he just needed to keep busy; where she was content to take a break for a couple of minutes, he couldn’t feel as though he was doing nothing. Scully was surprised he hadn’t started a conversation already instead of staring at the screen. The silence was palpable and the atmosphere heavy with anticipation, yet she welcomed it; it was better than the staleness that had reigned before. At least now they were getting somewhere.
Susan returned with the library card clenched in her fist, proffered like a gift. She read out the numbers as Mulder typed, leaning over his shoulder once the access screen disappeared and directing him to the right area.
“It’s still in the early stages,” she apologised, “so it might make finding it difficult, but everything’s supposed to be online now. It’s only the organisation that needs some work.”
“Thank you, Susan,” Mulder said gratefully. “Here’s 1960… it can’t be much further away.”
Scully looked on with weary interest. Mulder and Susan were watching the monitor with rapt attention, both pairs of eyes scanning the images and text Mulder was scrolling through for the keywords. As the clicking slowed, Scully dragged herself to her feet and joined them behind the desk, arms crossed as her gaze settled on the black and white print of old articles.
“Found April,” Mulder said, tilting his head to look back at Scully, almost like a puppy after a reward.
“Take it back to March,” she suggested. “If Thurmere Hall was closed in April, the notification, if there was one, should have been in the March news.”
He did as told and the trio unconsciously leaned closer to the screen as if pulled by invisible string. They read through the first week, the second, and as they neared the end of the third, Scully was beginning to feel they had made a mistake until Susan pointed excitedly at the screen with a cry: “That’s it!”
And indeed it was. They gazed at the small column of text as if it the Holy Grail itself was laid out before them. All that is gold does not glisten: the print was a little rough and faded in places but still legible. They devoured it hungrily; after knowing very little all night, this was a lifeboat to cling to, if not a perfect answer then at least a clue to propel them forwards. Scully for one was tired of being in stasis.
“An archaeological dig!” Mulder wanted to rub his hands together in glee. “This is fantastic!”
She had to smile at the exhilaration in his eyes as he looked up at her, awaiting her reaction. He suddenly looked ten years younger. “It’s certainly something,” she responded in agreement. “But how could something as big as an excavation be kept quiet for so long? Even Susan didn’t know about it.”
“I only knew the Hall was closed for a couple of months; I didn’t know why,” Susan reiterated, “and nobody else was willing to discuss it with me.”
Mulder tugged at his lower lip. “Put shadowy archaeology together with a page torn out of a record book marking accidents and incidents: what do you get?”
He lapsed into silence and Scully wasn’t sure if the question was rhetorical or not; she thought about mentioning Indiana Jones just to see his reaction. “Something happened during the excavation,” she hedged instead, “and someone, maybe an employee here, made a note of it. It disgruntled the powers that be or the members of the archaeological team and the page was torn out of the book.”
Susan was nodding but Mulder’s lips were pursed. “So what happened that would be important enough or controversial enough for someone to prevent others knowing about? Could someone have died here?”
Before either woman could reply, a deafening noise like cannon fire exploded from upstairs, just the once, but it was loud enough and unexpected enough to cause three hearts to dent ribcages and Mulder to leap from his seat. There was no echo to be heard, as though a bowling ball had been dropped opposed to a basketball, and the resulting quiet made one doubt it had happened at all. But although there was no ringing in her ears, Scully knew what she had heard was real, and after risking glances at both Mulder and Susan she knew they knew, too.
She began marching to the stairs, not waiting to see if they would follow her. No sooner had she reached the curve halfway up did she hear Mulder’s thunderous steps behind her, drowning out Susan’s more delicate touch. They hurried to keep up with her as she paced like a drill sergeant past Spinola and Columbus, the portraits still hanging as before, eyes staring straight ahead yet following, following.
Scully headed for the room at the end of the corridor as surely as there was a target painted on it and neon signs pointing to the door. It was fitting that all roads led to Rome; the strangest of things seemed to go on in this room - Houdini’s room, if earlier events were to be believed - and even though the entire estate radiated and pulsed with an extraordinary tension, it was here the curiosity could not be contained and the pull was strongest, like some unseen magnet was tugging at the iron in their blood and the fillings in their teeth, the implant at the back of her neck. Perhaps it was a shared hysteria - but Mulder and Susan hadn’t caught up with her when the baby started crying.
They weren’t the meek sounds accompanying a few tears; this was a full-blown wail, the middle of a temper tantrum, and it sent a chill racing down Scully’s spine. Humans are biologically predisposed to respond to an infant’s cries but this was so ear splitting they would have done anything to make it go away. Mulder broke into a jog and pulled ahead of Scully as they neared the door with a sense of urgency like no other. One easy push and the door swung open. The cries grew louder.
The trio piled inside and Mulder immediately climbed over the rope barrier, searching for the source of the noise. There was no actual baby in the room, of that he was certain, but something had to be making such a racket and he was going to find it this time. The bedcovers were thrown back, the armoire doors yanked open so suddenly they nearly fell off their hinges, and the crib was empty save for that doll with plastic lips sealed shut in secrecy. He picked it up and held it to his ear in case it had a mechanism built in but it wasn’t the source of the screeching. Susan shouted to him but he could barely hear her over the incessant cries of a troubled infant.
“What?” he yelled back, taking a step closer to the rope where she remained with Scully. Neither expressed much desire to get closer to the noise.
“The cot!” she screamed. Her next few words were unintelligible.
At his confused look, Scully elaborated. “There’s an audio player taped to the underside of the crib!” she bellowed. “It’s on a timer during the day to add to the authenticity of the experience for visitors; turn it off!”
Mulder turned back to the crib and got down on his hands and knees, peering underneath the wooden frame and setting eyes on the black box. He tugged at it until it came away from the body, a few splinters peppering the floor, and he quickly scanned it for the ‘stop’ button to turn off the offending din.
“One problem!” he shouted, getting to his feet. “The tape isn’t playing!”
* * * * *
Continue to part four.