Fringe: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Happy Halloween, motherfuckers. Enjoy.
Title: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Fandom: Fringe
Rating: PG
Warnings: Creepiness and Lovecraftian-style horror
Wordcount: 3400
Notes: Tis the season, so I wanted to write something creepy. D talked me into combining Fringe with Lovecraft. I tossed in some other things, too, for flavour. General spoilers for Fringe but nothing on the current season.
Summary: Idyllic settings were getting in the habit of making Olivia's skin crawl.
Dean's Corners was a sleepy little town in Essex County, MA. The cheerfully painted welcome sign that told you you were entering Dean's Corners--from there you could nearly see the back of the sign that announced the boundary on the other end of the highway--congratulated their high school football team on winning the state finals five years ago. It didn't look like the kind of place where anything weird happened, but Olivia had been sent there, like she'd been sent to so many other small towns, because looks could be deceiving. Idyllic settings were getting in the habit of making her skin crawl.
There was a diner with a gas bar just off the exit from the road; the fluourescent light spilling from the windows looked inviting in a settling twilight that had been playing tricks on her eyes for the last ten miles, creating twitches of phantom deer on the sides of the road. She pulled up beside a dirty white pickup and strolled inside, straightening her shoulders as a bell over the door rang out her entrance.
"Kind of a bite out there tonight, huh?" said the waitress closest to the door.
"It's damp," Olivia agreed, peeling off her coat and heading for a table in the corner with a line of sight on the door.
"Want a menu?" The waitress--her nametag said Cindy--had followed her to the table with the coffee urn, holding it up in silent question before flipping over a mug on the table and pouring.
"Sure. I had a long drive."
"Boston?" Cindy asked, wandering over to the bussing station to grab a red-edged menu.
"Yeah. Is it that obvious?" She kept her grin as open as she could; Olivia had trouble being warm and friendly when left to her own devices but playing the role that got people to open up for the FBI, that was easy.
"Call it a gift. What brings you to town?" Cindy asked, leaning on the chair across the table.
Waitresses knew things, and it never hurt to have one in your corner when an investigation stalled. Olivia pulled out her badge. "I'm here on official business."
Cindy gave the badge a wide-eyed stare and then she looked strangely relieved. "Are you here about the kidnappings?"
Kidnappings? Olivia schooled her expression; Walter had asked her to come here to investigate some news story about singing rocks; he'd said the area around Dean's Corners was known for strangely high electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere and he wanted readings. But singing rocks were a long way from kidnappings. "Yes," she said, trying to sound confident and reassuring. She could always call in reinforcements if there was something else to be looked into here.
"All those kids," Cindy gasped. "I'm sorry, I haven't heard much, but it was fishy as hell."
Shit. "When did they start, that you heard of?" Olivia asked, picking up her coffee.
"The first one, that Dunnes girl, that was maybe five weeks ago. Damn near one a week since then. I hope you catch whatever psycho's doing this. Try the pie, I'll give you a piece on the house."
"I could go for some pie," Olivia conceded.
***
The town itself started a little further back from the highway, where trees suddenly gave way to paved roads and Colonial architecture rife with red brick and columns and flagpoles. There were no chain hotels in town, so Olivia drove slowly down the main street, looking for the motel Cindy had recommended. Full dark had set in and the streetlights cast the town in orange, but shadows still twitched in the corners of her vision on the empty streets. She was probably just tired.
The motel had plenty of vacancy and comfortable beds. She'd feel less odd in the morning. She texted Peter before going to bed: Arrived safely. No rocks singing yet but I did hear about a string of missing persons.
Peter's reply was swift. Let us know if you need help. Walter's still concerned about the rocks, he says he's sure you can multitask. Man has his priorities, what can I say.
Olivia shook her head and put the phone carefully on the nightstand before turning out the light.
***
The next morning hadn't eased her twitchiness but did bring with it a sense of purpose. She was supposed to meet with a local fringe science enthusiast and fan of Walter's who might have been able to help her locate the singing rocks. Instead, Olivia went to the sheriff's station and managed to catch the man himself in his office.
"Special Agent Dunham, FBI," she said, showing her badge. "I understand you've had a string of disappearances."
"Who told you about those?" said the sheriff.
There was an awkward moment of silence. "Kidnapping is a felony," she reminded him.
"Nobody said they were kidnapped. Nobody said anything."
"Are you denying that there's been a pattern of disappearing children?"
"I wouldn't call it a pattern," said the sheriff, frowning thoughtfully. "Anyway, we think they ran away."
"Five kids?"
"Yep."
"Ran away."
"Our investigations indicated they may have had some kind of pact. They all knew each other."
The Welcome to Dean's Corners sign had indicated proudly that 1,346 people lived there, so it was not unlikely that almost every kid in town knew every other kid. Olivia took a steadying breath. "I want to see your case files, please. This is officially an open federal investigation."
The sheriff stared at her for a long moment before going to a file cabinet and pulling out a folder. It contained ten pieces of paper. Five of them were victim profiles, the other five were statements from their parents. "Is this all you have?" she asked, flicking through the pages twice.
"They ran away," repeated the sheriff. "They'll come back, maybe. Or they've gone to Salem or something. We submitted BOLOs to the county office but we haven't had word," he said simply. "There's not much else we can do."
"I'm taking this with me," said Olivia, holding up the file folder and leaving the sheriff's office before he could respond. The skin was crawling at the back of her neck.
***
The parents of the missing kids were uniformly upset, but had nothing to say that wasn't already in their statements. Most of the kids were under the age of ten but the first girl who'd disappeared, Sarah Dunnes, was fourteen, an age where kids (Olivia was told) had best friends forever who they shared their secrets with. Sarah Dunnes' best friend was Taylor Hall, also fourteen and sporting braces with pink bands. The Halls consented to let Olivia interview their daughter at their dining room table but she had nothing much to say. Sarah had just vanished, hadn't said anything, Taylor swore up and down without even any nervous glances at her parents that she had no idea what happened.
"Did she run away?" Olivia asked carefully.
"Dunno why she would," said Taylor, tugging at the end of her ponytail nervously.
After a day of legwork, Olivia was starting to draw looks and whispers on the street and had no answers that weren't in the sheriff's pathetic file. She decided to go track down the fringe scientist.
His name was Andrew Simon and he lived in one of the only houses in town that didn't look immaculate; his property backed onto the edge of the woods. "I heard you were in town, I've been expecting you," he said, his thumb chipping absently at the peeling paint of his front door before he let Olivia in. "You're just in time," he said over his shoulder, leading the way through a maze of file boxes to the kitchen. "I can't believe the readings lately."
He showed her reams of paper that meant nothing, then grabbed two things off of the water-stained sideboard and led her out the back door, letting it shriek and bang behind them as they trudged down the steps and through overlong grass to the tree line.
"They start just at the back of my property, some great specimens," he said over his shoulder, trudging through the trees. Olivia picked her way past ferns and rotting logs to keep up, her feet noiseless in the bed of dead pine needles. There was a large hunk of possibly granite lurching out of the ground behind a phalanx of oak trees; Andrew held up a compass for her to see how it pointed north, and then moved it closer to the rocks. The needle spun and spun and then came to a shuddering stop pointing right at the rock, which was east.
"What does that?" she asked, tilting her head at the compass.
"Iron deposits. Aliens. Dark forces." Andrew grinned quickly and then held up his other device. It was an EMF meter, like the one Walter had given her that sat in a box in the back of her SUV. He pointed the antenna toward the rock and gave Olivia the digital meter. "Look," he said, and she watched the numbers jump from zero to 500 to max out at 999.99 and back down to 750; the reading changed constantly, spiking to nearly max out several times but mostly hovering in the 600-700 range.
"The measurement is in gauss," said Andrew, watching her watch the meter. "The baseline reading off this rock alone is over a hundred times what it should be. And this one's fairly weak. There are stronger ones further into the woods." He shut the meter off, gesturing for her to follow again. "They all max out the meter further into the woods," he said as they walked. "It's useless."
"Has the magnetic field generated by these rocks always been so high?" Olivia asked, stepping over a fallen birch tree.
"Like I said in the house, it's really spiked in the last month. It's always been high, though."
They came upon a cluster of rocks much like the one near Andrew's house. "Here we are," he said, and all of the hair stood up on Olivia's arms before she fell to her knees suddenly, clutching at a pressure behind her forehead.
"What the hell?" she hissed between her teeth.
"Are you okay?" he sounded alarmed.
"My head," she gasped. She planted her hands in the damp carpet of pine needles, taking deep breaths through her nose until the pain subsided enough to think again. That was when she noticed the high-pitched wail. It sounded like someone running their finger around the rim of a glass the size of someone's head.
"Can you hear that?" Andrew asked, hushed. "It's the rocks."
Olivia staggered back to her feet, leaning on a tree, and listened. The noise was eerie; it made her heart thump in her chest. The hair on her arms was still standing up, but maybe that was electromagnetic interference. She could believe that this clearing could break an EMF meter; in fact, she didn't want to linger.
***
Olivia was just getting out of her SUV at the motel when a woman in jeans came charging up to her.
"You're looking for those kids," said the woman, stony-faced. Olivia relaxed the hand that had started going for her sidearm.
"I am."
"They ran away," the woman hissed.
"That's unconfirmed, ma'am," said Olivia.
"You need to stop meddling."
"Meddling in what?" Olivia asked, but the woman was stalking away again, down the sidewalk. It didn't seem like the best possible idea to go running after her.
***
When Taylor Hall vanished too, a shaky quiet settled over Dean's Corners. The Halls' statement for Olivia and the sheriff was perfunctory and given through soaked and crumpled tissues; she just hadn't been in her bed when it was time to get up for school. She wasn't at school. She wasn't anywhere. Maybe she'd run away too? Maybe she'd known where Sarah had taken off to and had followed her.
Olivia slowly became aware of a constant pressure behind her right eye. Something itched at the edge of her hearing.
She couldn't find the bottom of this case. There were too many unknown variables; she hated letting a case go cold, though. Every cold case on her docket felt like a personal offence. And her headache wouldn't go away. Maybe it was the combined force of the stares of every resident of Dean's Corners. Olivia went into the woods.
At first it was just for a walk, to clear her head maybe, but her eye throbbed and she found herself following a strange whisper of a sound, until it resolved into a high, prolonged note that made all the hair stand up on her arms and she was at the cluster of singing rocks again. Bile rose in her throat. She kept going, staggering around them and pushing deeper into the woods. The noise died but her headache intensified until she felt like her skull was going to crack under the force of it. Her vision was blurring at intervals, but she took a deep breath and carried on. Why was no one else affected by this? Were they used to it? Or was it a Cortexiphan thing?
She almost walked right into the side of the mausoleum, she was so distracted by pain. She had no idea how far into the woods she was, but it stood alone in a clearing, hulking dark stone. There was a beaten path through the trees, going off in another direction than the one she'd come from.
The mausoleum was old, which probably explained why it was standing alone instead of in a cemetery; it might have been a private family estate tomb at one point. Olivia looked up at it, squinting at the lintel for any sign of a family name carved in it, any indicator of why it was there. A star was engraved there but no name; the star was old, too. The structure itself hurt to look at; it pulled at the eye in a way that a building shouldn't. Like it was square but not really square. Olivia shook her head, which didn't clear it, and turned away, to find herself standing in front of the sheriff.
"If you listen," he said calmly, "that singing isn't coming from the rocks. It's coming from the earth. And it's got nothing to do with magnetic fields."
She tried to wrap her mind around that but then the sheriff raised his arm and everything went black.
***
She woke up in cool darkness, lying on her side on something hard; her hip and shoulder were in agony from the pressure, and she didn't dare try to sit up right away. From what she could actually see, she was in some kind of natural cave; there were torches on brackets along the walls, half of them lit and casting dancing shadows up to the ceiling. She became aware of chanting and rolled over carefully, hissing at the pain in her hip, and nearly fell off the smooth rock slab she was lying on: there were a dozen people in the cave, all wearing black robes, and they were standing in a cluster chanting. One of them had hands raised to the ceiling, and when she caught a glimpse of his face she saw that it was the sheriff.
She was lying on something that looked an awful lot like an altar from a horror movie. And her sidearm had been taken. Olivia cased the rest of the room from her vantage point while the chanting kept going; there was a pool in the floor, dark and reflecting like obsidian in the torchlight. A black, hulking mass stood along the wall to her left; it sang faintly under the chanting and she realized it was made of the same rock as the ones she'd been sent here to investigate in the first place. There were stairs curving along the far wall, leading into a square of grey light. She was probably concealed under the mausoleum she'd found. The sheriff hadn't followed her into the woods, he'd been standing on the path she'd seen; she'd taken him by surprise. He'd been on his way to the mausoleum and took her down to the cave with him.
She realized that the chanting had stopped. The sheriff approached her, his hood down and his face looking gaunt over the black robes.
"Are you doing actual satanic rituals down here?" Olivia blurted before she could think about it.
He smiled a little. "Something like that."
She held eye contact. "Those children are all dead."
"It was for a noble cause."
"And what cause is so noble that you think you should sacrifice innocent children to it?" she demanded, sitting up now. The other hooded figures were facing her, now; she saw the woman who'd accosted her in the motel parking lot, and Sarah Dunnes' parents, among others.
"The singing," he said, "I never told you what it was, did I?"
"You were too busy abducting a federal agent at the time," she agreed.
"It's the deep ones. That is their voice. You can hear it better than any of us."
"It gives me a migraine," said Olivia. "Do you think you could tell them to keep it down a little?" It had probably gotten stronger with every child they'd sacrificed. Olivia wanted to climb out of her own skin.
"You don't tell the Devil he's being too loud," said the sheriff, hauling her upright by the arm and dragging her across the cave as the chanting started up again. "But you'll see him soon, I encourage you to see how that goes for you." They were heading for the black shape on the edge of the room, and he shoved Olivia up a set of stairs they'd erected along its side. When she reached the tiny platform at the top of the stairs, she found herself looking down at water. It didn't have the oily reflection of the pool in the floor, not quite. It was, she realized, a six-foot-tall granite tank full of water.
It was an isolation tank.
"You want me to go in there?" she asked, looking down at it.
"You can go willingly," the sheriff agreed from behind her.
Olivia looked at the assembled crowd of devil-worshipping child-killers, and then she looked down at the tank. She wondered if they sacrificed everybody this way, and when the panic started to rise, she jumped into the tank.
***
"Walter, look at her vitals--"
"--Need to leave her to it, son--"
"Look, she hasn't gone anywhere, she's still in the tank, let's get--"
"--Dreaming. We have to let her work through--"
"--Not dreaming, she's hallucinating, because you shot her full of acid--"
***
When Olivia opened her eyes, she was hoping to be anywhere else besides a tank in a cave in the woods outside Dean's Corners, MA. She didn't seem to be in the tank, because she was standing instead of floating, but she didn't know where she was. It was black all around her, the kind of darkness that seems to have a texture. Then a man appeared in front of her.
He was wearing a suit and reminded her of the Observers, but his face was in shadows under his hat. His hands were folded in front of him and he had far too many fingers; Olivia felt sick and woozy looking at them.
"Olivia Dunham," said the man, in a voice like shrieking metal made to form words.
"Who are you? Are you responsible for those people?"
"They are responsible for themselves. That is the beauty of it. As for my name, it is forgotten."
"What are you trying to do?" she demanded. Her head was hurting again.
The man's two dozen fingers wiggled. "What I have always done. And will continue to do. Incite man to acts of evil so ferocious that one day I and my brethren will have the power to rise again."
"What do you mean, 'again'?" The pain was trying to drive Olivia to her knees.
"Don't worry about it," said the man, laying one many-fingered hand on her shoulder. "Just breathe in."
She reached up as fast as she could move and broke one of his fingers, watching him jerk his arm away and howl like a wind full of nails before she started to choke.
She opened her eyes again and she was underwater and she couldn't breathe and someone was shouting her name but she could hardly hear it over the singing.
THE END
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/62960.html. (
comments)
Title: Till Human Voices Wake Us
Fandom: Fringe
Rating: PG
Warnings: Creepiness and Lovecraftian-style horror
Wordcount: 3400
Notes: Tis the season, so I wanted to write something creepy. D talked me into combining Fringe with Lovecraft. I tossed in some other things, too, for flavour. General spoilers for Fringe but nothing on the current season.
Summary: Idyllic settings were getting in the habit of making Olivia's skin crawl.
Dean's Corners was a sleepy little town in Essex County, MA. The cheerfully painted welcome sign that told you you were entering Dean's Corners--from there you could nearly see the back of the sign that announced the boundary on the other end of the highway--congratulated their high school football team on winning the state finals five years ago. It didn't look like the kind of place where anything weird happened, but Olivia had been sent there, like she'd been sent to so many other small towns, because looks could be deceiving. Idyllic settings were getting in the habit of making her skin crawl.
There was a diner with a gas bar just off the exit from the road; the fluourescent light spilling from the windows looked inviting in a settling twilight that had been playing tricks on her eyes for the last ten miles, creating twitches of phantom deer on the sides of the road. She pulled up beside a dirty white pickup and strolled inside, straightening her shoulders as a bell over the door rang out her entrance.
"Kind of a bite out there tonight, huh?" said the waitress closest to the door.
"It's damp," Olivia agreed, peeling off her coat and heading for a table in the corner with a line of sight on the door.
"Want a menu?" The waitress--her nametag said Cindy--had followed her to the table with the coffee urn, holding it up in silent question before flipping over a mug on the table and pouring.
"Sure. I had a long drive."
"Boston?" Cindy asked, wandering over to the bussing station to grab a red-edged menu.
"Yeah. Is it that obvious?" She kept her grin as open as she could; Olivia had trouble being warm and friendly when left to her own devices but playing the role that got people to open up for the FBI, that was easy.
"Call it a gift. What brings you to town?" Cindy asked, leaning on the chair across the table.
Waitresses knew things, and it never hurt to have one in your corner when an investigation stalled. Olivia pulled out her badge. "I'm here on official business."
Cindy gave the badge a wide-eyed stare and then she looked strangely relieved. "Are you here about the kidnappings?"
Kidnappings? Olivia schooled her expression; Walter had asked her to come here to investigate some news story about singing rocks; he'd said the area around Dean's Corners was known for strangely high electromagnetic activity in the atmosphere and he wanted readings. But singing rocks were a long way from kidnappings. "Yes," she said, trying to sound confident and reassuring. She could always call in reinforcements if there was something else to be looked into here.
"All those kids," Cindy gasped. "I'm sorry, I haven't heard much, but it was fishy as hell."
Shit. "When did they start, that you heard of?" Olivia asked, picking up her coffee.
"The first one, that Dunnes girl, that was maybe five weeks ago. Damn near one a week since then. I hope you catch whatever psycho's doing this. Try the pie, I'll give you a piece on the house."
"I could go for some pie," Olivia conceded.
***
The town itself started a little further back from the highway, where trees suddenly gave way to paved roads and Colonial architecture rife with red brick and columns and flagpoles. There were no chain hotels in town, so Olivia drove slowly down the main street, looking for the motel Cindy had recommended. Full dark had set in and the streetlights cast the town in orange, but shadows still twitched in the corners of her vision on the empty streets. She was probably just tired.
The motel had plenty of vacancy and comfortable beds. She'd feel less odd in the morning. She texted Peter before going to bed: Arrived safely. No rocks singing yet but I did hear about a string of missing persons.
Peter's reply was swift. Let us know if you need help. Walter's still concerned about the rocks, he says he's sure you can multitask. Man has his priorities, what can I say.
Olivia shook her head and put the phone carefully on the nightstand before turning out the light.
***
The next morning hadn't eased her twitchiness but did bring with it a sense of purpose. She was supposed to meet with a local fringe science enthusiast and fan of Walter's who might have been able to help her locate the singing rocks. Instead, Olivia went to the sheriff's station and managed to catch the man himself in his office.
"Special Agent Dunham, FBI," she said, showing her badge. "I understand you've had a string of disappearances."
"Who told you about those?" said the sheriff.
There was an awkward moment of silence. "Kidnapping is a felony," she reminded him.
"Nobody said they were kidnapped. Nobody said anything."
"Are you denying that there's been a pattern of disappearing children?"
"I wouldn't call it a pattern," said the sheriff, frowning thoughtfully. "Anyway, we think they ran away."
"Five kids?"
"Yep."
"Ran away."
"Our investigations indicated they may have had some kind of pact. They all knew each other."
The Welcome to Dean's Corners sign had indicated proudly that 1,346 people lived there, so it was not unlikely that almost every kid in town knew every other kid. Olivia took a steadying breath. "I want to see your case files, please. This is officially an open federal investigation."
The sheriff stared at her for a long moment before going to a file cabinet and pulling out a folder. It contained ten pieces of paper. Five of them were victim profiles, the other five were statements from their parents. "Is this all you have?" she asked, flicking through the pages twice.
"They ran away," repeated the sheriff. "They'll come back, maybe. Or they've gone to Salem or something. We submitted BOLOs to the county office but we haven't had word," he said simply. "There's not much else we can do."
"I'm taking this with me," said Olivia, holding up the file folder and leaving the sheriff's office before he could respond. The skin was crawling at the back of her neck.
***
The parents of the missing kids were uniformly upset, but had nothing to say that wasn't already in their statements. Most of the kids were under the age of ten but the first girl who'd disappeared, Sarah Dunnes, was fourteen, an age where kids (Olivia was told) had best friends forever who they shared their secrets with. Sarah Dunnes' best friend was Taylor Hall, also fourteen and sporting braces with pink bands. The Halls consented to let Olivia interview their daughter at their dining room table but she had nothing much to say. Sarah had just vanished, hadn't said anything, Taylor swore up and down without even any nervous glances at her parents that she had no idea what happened.
"Did she run away?" Olivia asked carefully.
"Dunno why she would," said Taylor, tugging at the end of her ponytail nervously.
After a day of legwork, Olivia was starting to draw looks and whispers on the street and had no answers that weren't in the sheriff's pathetic file. She decided to go track down the fringe scientist.
His name was Andrew Simon and he lived in one of the only houses in town that didn't look immaculate; his property backed onto the edge of the woods. "I heard you were in town, I've been expecting you," he said, his thumb chipping absently at the peeling paint of his front door before he let Olivia in. "You're just in time," he said over his shoulder, leading the way through a maze of file boxes to the kitchen. "I can't believe the readings lately."
He showed her reams of paper that meant nothing, then grabbed two things off of the water-stained sideboard and led her out the back door, letting it shriek and bang behind them as they trudged down the steps and through overlong grass to the tree line.
"They start just at the back of my property, some great specimens," he said over his shoulder, trudging through the trees. Olivia picked her way past ferns and rotting logs to keep up, her feet noiseless in the bed of dead pine needles. There was a large hunk of possibly granite lurching out of the ground behind a phalanx of oak trees; Andrew held up a compass for her to see how it pointed north, and then moved it closer to the rocks. The needle spun and spun and then came to a shuddering stop pointing right at the rock, which was east.
"What does that?" she asked, tilting her head at the compass.
"Iron deposits. Aliens. Dark forces." Andrew grinned quickly and then held up his other device. It was an EMF meter, like the one Walter had given her that sat in a box in the back of her SUV. He pointed the antenna toward the rock and gave Olivia the digital meter. "Look," he said, and she watched the numbers jump from zero to 500 to max out at 999.99 and back down to 750; the reading changed constantly, spiking to nearly max out several times but mostly hovering in the 600-700 range.
"The measurement is in gauss," said Andrew, watching her watch the meter. "The baseline reading off this rock alone is over a hundred times what it should be. And this one's fairly weak. There are stronger ones further into the woods." He shut the meter off, gesturing for her to follow again. "They all max out the meter further into the woods," he said as they walked. "It's useless."
"Has the magnetic field generated by these rocks always been so high?" Olivia asked, stepping over a fallen birch tree.
"Like I said in the house, it's really spiked in the last month. It's always been high, though."
They came upon a cluster of rocks much like the one near Andrew's house. "Here we are," he said, and all of the hair stood up on Olivia's arms before she fell to her knees suddenly, clutching at a pressure behind her forehead.
"What the hell?" she hissed between her teeth.
"Are you okay?" he sounded alarmed.
"My head," she gasped. She planted her hands in the damp carpet of pine needles, taking deep breaths through her nose until the pain subsided enough to think again. That was when she noticed the high-pitched wail. It sounded like someone running their finger around the rim of a glass the size of someone's head.
"Can you hear that?" Andrew asked, hushed. "It's the rocks."
Olivia staggered back to her feet, leaning on a tree, and listened. The noise was eerie; it made her heart thump in her chest. The hair on her arms was still standing up, but maybe that was electromagnetic interference. She could believe that this clearing could break an EMF meter; in fact, she didn't want to linger.
***
Olivia was just getting out of her SUV at the motel when a woman in jeans came charging up to her.
"You're looking for those kids," said the woman, stony-faced. Olivia relaxed the hand that had started going for her sidearm.
"I am."
"They ran away," the woman hissed.
"That's unconfirmed, ma'am," said Olivia.
"You need to stop meddling."
"Meddling in what?" Olivia asked, but the woman was stalking away again, down the sidewalk. It didn't seem like the best possible idea to go running after her.
***
When Taylor Hall vanished too, a shaky quiet settled over Dean's Corners. The Halls' statement for Olivia and the sheriff was perfunctory and given through soaked and crumpled tissues; she just hadn't been in her bed when it was time to get up for school. She wasn't at school. She wasn't anywhere. Maybe she'd run away too? Maybe she'd known where Sarah had taken off to and had followed her.
Olivia slowly became aware of a constant pressure behind her right eye. Something itched at the edge of her hearing.
She couldn't find the bottom of this case. There were too many unknown variables; she hated letting a case go cold, though. Every cold case on her docket felt like a personal offence. And her headache wouldn't go away. Maybe it was the combined force of the stares of every resident of Dean's Corners. Olivia went into the woods.
At first it was just for a walk, to clear her head maybe, but her eye throbbed and she found herself following a strange whisper of a sound, until it resolved into a high, prolonged note that made all the hair stand up on her arms and she was at the cluster of singing rocks again. Bile rose in her throat. She kept going, staggering around them and pushing deeper into the woods. The noise died but her headache intensified until she felt like her skull was going to crack under the force of it. Her vision was blurring at intervals, but she took a deep breath and carried on. Why was no one else affected by this? Were they used to it? Or was it a Cortexiphan thing?
She almost walked right into the side of the mausoleum, she was so distracted by pain. She had no idea how far into the woods she was, but it stood alone in a clearing, hulking dark stone. There was a beaten path through the trees, going off in another direction than the one she'd come from.
The mausoleum was old, which probably explained why it was standing alone instead of in a cemetery; it might have been a private family estate tomb at one point. Olivia looked up at it, squinting at the lintel for any sign of a family name carved in it, any indicator of why it was there. A star was engraved there but no name; the star was old, too. The structure itself hurt to look at; it pulled at the eye in a way that a building shouldn't. Like it was square but not really square. Olivia shook her head, which didn't clear it, and turned away, to find herself standing in front of the sheriff.
"If you listen," he said calmly, "that singing isn't coming from the rocks. It's coming from the earth. And it's got nothing to do with magnetic fields."
She tried to wrap her mind around that but then the sheriff raised his arm and everything went black.
***
She woke up in cool darkness, lying on her side on something hard; her hip and shoulder were in agony from the pressure, and she didn't dare try to sit up right away. From what she could actually see, she was in some kind of natural cave; there were torches on brackets along the walls, half of them lit and casting dancing shadows up to the ceiling. She became aware of chanting and rolled over carefully, hissing at the pain in her hip, and nearly fell off the smooth rock slab she was lying on: there were a dozen people in the cave, all wearing black robes, and they were standing in a cluster chanting. One of them had hands raised to the ceiling, and when she caught a glimpse of his face she saw that it was the sheriff.
She was lying on something that looked an awful lot like an altar from a horror movie. And her sidearm had been taken. Olivia cased the rest of the room from her vantage point while the chanting kept going; there was a pool in the floor, dark and reflecting like obsidian in the torchlight. A black, hulking mass stood along the wall to her left; it sang faintly under the chanting and she realized it was made of the same rock as the ones she'd been sent here to investigate in the first place. There were stairs curving along the far wall, leading into a square of grey light. She was probably concealed under the mausoleum she'd found. The sheriff hadn't followed her into the woods, he'd been standing on the path she'd seen; she'd taken him by surprise. He'd been on his way to the mausoleum and took her down to the cave with him.
She realized that the chanting had stopped. The sheriff approached her, his hood down and his face looking gaunt over the black robes.
"Are you doing actual satanic rituals down here?" Olivia blurted before she could think about it.
He smiled a little. "Something like that."
She held eye contact. "Those children are all dead."
"It was for a noble cause."
"And what cause is so noble that you think you should sacrifice innocent children to it?" she demanded, sitting up now. The other hooded figures were facing her, now; she saw the woman who'd accosted her in the motel parking lot, and Sarah Dunnes' parents, among others.
"The singing," he said, "I never told you what it was, did I?"
"You were too busy abducting a federal agent at the time," she agreed.
"It's the deep ones. That is their voice. You can hear it better than any of us."
"It gives me a migraine," said Olivia. "Do you think you could tell them to keep it down a little?" It had probably gotten stronger with every child they'd sacrificed. Olivia wanted to climb out of her own skin.
"You don't tell the Devil he's being too loud," said the sheriff, hauling her upright by the arm and dragging her across the cave as the chanting started up again. "But you'll see him soon, I encourage you to see how that goes for you." They were heading for the black shape on the edge of the room, and he shoved Olivia up a set of stairs they'd erected along its side. When she reached the tiny platform at the top of the stairs, she found herself looking down at water. It didn't have the oily reflection of the pool in the floor, not quite. It was, she realized, a six-foot-tall granite tank full of water.
It was an isolation tank.
"You want me to go in there?" she asked, looking down at it.
"You can go willingly," the sheriff agreed from behind her.
Olivia looked at the assembled crowd of devil-worshipping child-killers, and then she looked down at the tank. She wondered if they sacrificed everybody this way, and when the panic started to rise, she jumped into the tank.
***
"Walter, look at her vitals--"
"--Need to leave her to it, son--"
"Look, she hasn't gone anywhere, she's still in the tank, let's get--"
"--Dreaming. We have to let her work through--"
"--Not dreaming, she's hallucinating, because you shot her full of acid--"
***
When Olivia opened her eyes, she was hoping to be anywhere else besides a tank in a cave in the woods outside Dean's Corners, MA. She didn't seem to be in the tank, because she was standing instead of floating, but she didn't know where she was. It was black all around her, the kind of darkness that seems to have a texture. Then a man appeared in front of her.
He was wearing a suit and reminded her of the Observers, but his face was in shadows under his hat. His hands were folded in front of him and he had far too many fingers; Olivia felt sick and woozy looking at them.
"Olivia Dunham," said the man, in a voice like shrieking metal made to form words.
"Who are you? Are you responsible for those people?"
"They are responsible for themselves. That is the beauty of it. As for my name, it is forgotten."
"What are you trying to do?" she demanded. Her head was hurting again.
The man's two dozen fingers wiggled. "What I have always done. And will continue to do. Incite man to acts of evil so ferocious that one day I and my brethren will have the power to rise again."
"What do you mean, 'again'?" The pain was trying to drive Olivia to her knees.
"Don't worry about it," said the man, laying one many-fingered hand on her shoulder. "Just breathe in."
She reached up as fast as she could move and broke one of his fingers, watching him jerk his arm away and howl like a wind full of nails before she started to choke.
She opened her eyes again and she was underwater and she couldn't breathe and someone was shouting her name but she could hardly hear it over the singing.
THE END
This entry was originally posted at http://waketosleep.dreamwidth.org/62960.html. (
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