Disclaimer:  Characters created by Chris Carter
and owned by 1013 Productions and Fox.
Category:  MSR /MOTW/adventure
Spoilers:  assume them all
Summary:  big monster in swamp attacks FBI agents

thanks again to the many critics who helped make this smoother,
and the only places it isn't changed per critique is where two
authors disagreed and I had to make a decision

Alligator Moon (1/3)

by jordan and committee

                Special Agent Dana Scully, FBI woman, steadied her
wrist on the cypress stump and sighted down the barrel of her Sig at
the man on the other side of the water.  The gun was heavy and cold
in her hand.  A mosquito was biting the back of her left thigh and
she didn't dare swat at it because she might give away her
position.  The smell of the swamp was like something that had died
of a terrible disease.

                Scully was tired and hot and hungry, and she wanted
desperately to shoot this man.

               Three months of investigation.  Three long months of
leads, interviews, and paperwork, while they compiled a
painstakingly thorough case against Edgar Ray Terran.  Three long
miserable months of talking to coughing old men and smarmy lotharios
who stared at her breasts while they talked and women who somehow
managed to include the details of each of their last childbirths as
part of their replies to simple questions like, "And did you observe
Mr. Terran enter the building at that time?"  It had all the comic
tragedy of a teenager they had once arrested who used a heart to dot
the "i" in the word "kill" in her confession.

            Disk after disk of reports, until her laptop hard drive
was full, and Mulder pissed off all the time once he decided it
wasn't an X-file after all, but Skinner adamant that they finish the
case they had begun.

  She was so damn sick of this.  Pull out a gun, Eddie, fire at
will, let me end this waste of taxpayer's money once and for all,
please God .

             But of course he only looked around long and cautiously
before turning and slipping back into the woods.

 She waited, eyes on her watch because she didn't trust her own
sense of time, for ten minutes.  Long enough for him to get back to
the cabin he  thought was so well concealed in the heart of the
wetlands of south Texas.

             Fucking Texas.

             She straightened and slapped at the mosquito,
connected, made a dime-sized splat of blood on her dark green pants.
Then she put the safety back on the Sig, dipped it into her holster,
and called Mulder on her cell phone.  "He's on his way."

           Squelching through the mud, Scully followed the edge of
the water around a curve and then went into the woods, cutting off
the escape route in case Terran somehow got away from her partner
and tried to double back.

    Mulder was the worst part of this case, she thought bitterly,
waving away a small crowd of curious gnats.  Since the whole Houston
case, when he had kissed her in some half-drugged stupor which he
pretended not to remember, he had not touched her.  Not once.  It
was a small thing made large by its absence; no more casual touching
of her arm or the small of her back or even taking her elbow the way
he used to do.  The atmosphere between them had reached the last
level of  tension before it had to erupt in violence.  Or in getting
the hell away from each other.

 They each dealt with it in their own way, of course. She slept a
lot.  He didn't.  But while Mulder prowled around the motel rooms
and the late night diners and the fluorescent lit malls, Scully's
sleep was filled with dreams.  She dreamed of him crashing into her
bedroom and wrestling her to the bed and overcoming her anger at him
through violent sex.  She dreamed of shooting him and then trying to
hide his body from Skinner.  She dreamed strange dark sick things
that woke her in the night feeling like she needed a shower.  Or at
least a showered.

    Please, God, let this be the end of it.  Let this be the day we
bring Eddie in.  We need a rest, Mulder and I;  we need some time
apart.  We need--

    In the distance, the sound of a muted gunshot.

    Every noise she had not been aware of, the buzzing of insects,
the peeping of frogs, the twittering of birds, suddenly came to a
stop, filling the woods with ominous silence.  A heron flapped
overhead, wings making a sound like a flag whipping in the wind.

    Scully froze, her hand on the butt of her gun.

    Five more shots in rapid succession, popcorn soft in the dead
air.  A scream.  A terrible, high pitched scream that suddenly
dropped to a wrenching guttural sob.

     Scully began to run.  She knew the path;  she and Mulder had
found the cabin a week ago, and had staked it out each day waiting
for Terran to return.  Still, she had to duck under low branches and
jump over unexpected logs, light and quick as a deer in her
motions, but sick and heavy at heart.  Mulder, God, please don't let
it be Mulder.

    Something blew by her, like the vortex of a truck barreling by
on a freeway, and she lost her concentration and slipped on a wet
patch.  She cried out despite herself, and went down, trying to tuck
her shoulder and roll but only falling instead on her arm, and
twisting it painfully as she tumbled over some broken branches.

    Cursing under her breath, she got to her feet and stood shaking
from the adrenaline.  Her clothes were soaked from her fall.

    Footsteps crashed through the leaves and Scully wavered a little
dizzily, bringing her gun up at the sound.

     Mulder burst through the foliage, his face white, eyes wide
with terror.  When he saw her she could see the same thing in his
face that must be reflected on hers:  thank God you're all right.

     "You okay?"  he asked.  Then his face turned even paler, sick
looking.  "Oh, Scully,"  he said brokenly, like a child about to
cry.

    "What?  What is it, Mulder?"

    He was staring at her clothes and she looked down to realize for
the first time that she was drenched in blood, dripping blood from
her hands, streaked and mottled in bright arterial red.

    "No, no, no,"  she said hurriedly;  "I'm fine.  I just slipped.
It must be--"

    He covered the distance between them in two long strides and
grabbed her arm, the sore one, making her gasp in pain as he turned
her around.  He looked her up and down until he was sure the blood
was not hers, and then turned her back and jerked her hard against
him, his face hidden in her hair as he took a long shuddering
breath. His arms held her in a rough, desperate embrace.   And then
just as quickly he thrust her away from him.

    Dazed, she could only stand looking down at the long patch of
blood she had slid in, slowly comprehending the scene.

    "Oh, my God,"  she said.  "Mulder.  Look."

     He was looking.  Then he was walking away into the woods,
bending over, and she heard him cough a couple of times and then the
husky bubbling rasp of his vomit.

    Edgar Ray Terran was dead.  The wet parts of him seemed to have
ended up on Scully, or splattered among the leaves, or in a long
furrow filled with blackish blood and gore.  There were patches of
skin and hair on the tree trunks on the path, and fragments of
clothing torn in pieces on the ground.  The scene looked like the
aftermath of an airplane crash with only one passenger and no plane.


 Mulder lurched back to her, wiping his mouth with the back of his
hand.  Between the smell of his vomit and the smell of blood like
old pennies in the heavy air, Scully had to swallow back the acid
taste in her own throat.

  Then almost without any thought at all, she had the Sig in her
hands and Mulder was holding his automatic in a two handed grip and
they were facing away from each other, turning in a slow circle.
Whoever or whatever had done this was still out there.  Scully felt
her back come up warm and solid against his.  They stopped for a
moment, their breathing exactly in synch.

 A loon called, sad and haunted, somewhere in the distance, and a
squirrel  chattered back, and then the woods came back to life again
in sound, deafening after the silence.

 Slowly, the agents let their arms drop, though neither holstered
their gun.

 "I guess that's the end of it," Scully said, looking down at the
trench of blood that had been Terran.

 Mulder said, "What, are you crazy?  We came up here originally to
find a shapeshifter, didn't we?"

 She pursed her lips and stared into the middle distance, waiting
for Mulder to slam dunk another theory through her hoop of logic.

 "Well, that's what YOU came up here for, Mulder," she pointed out,
"But I don't think even the elusive Eddie Terran can shift his shape
much more than he already has."

 "Scully, what the hell just happened to him?"

 She shrugged.  "Frankly, Mulder, I don't care.  He's dead, and it's
over.  Let's just get back to the jeep and get the hell out of
here."

 "Scully,"  His voice was softer, concerned, not joking for once.
"Something just--EXPLODED this man.  Aren't you the least bit
curious or concerned about what it was?"

 Scanning the woods slowly, her head tracking right to left, Scully
said, "Maybe I will be later, but at this exact moment, no, I am
not.  I just want to get out of here."

 "If we go now, we won't be coming back.  Once we report Eddie dead,
the case really will be over."

 "Don't you want it to end?"  She asked.  "I know you're as sick of
it as I am, Mulder.  So what's your point?"

 "My point is, the reason we got into this thing in the first place
is because people reported Eddie Terran as  being protected by some
sort of shapeshifting thing, and Skinner thought we'd be able to
track it down and --"

 "And prove it was bullshit.  I was there at the meeting, remember?
I know what he said."

 Mulder shrugged.  "Look, Scully, if you want to go back now, be my
guest.  I just want to look around a little more, okay?"

 There was a long, long sigh through the trees, almost as if a storm
was coming.  All day the sky had been a heavy wool grey, holding
heat down on top of them like a blanket, but there had been no sign
of rain.  And this was not a freshening wind, though it seemed to
grow stronger as it swept through the branches.  Scully lifted her
head, eyes narrowed.

 The wind--well, it had to be the wind, didn't it?--was making a
sound, a high, keening sound like banshees, like demons.  It focused
into a single cry, deep, clear,
sharp as surgery, and as full of unmistakable intent as the growl of
a dog.  Impossible to define, because it was like nothing either of
them had ever heard before.

 For some reason, Scully flashed back to a film she had seen midway
through medical school. A mouse, a bowl, an alarm clock.  The
experimenter put a mouse in a shiny aluminum bowl, steep enough so
the mouse couldn't climb or jump out.  An old fashioned alarm clock,
the kind with clappers that rang like a 1950's telephone,  was set
to go off at eleven at night, a time when the mouse would normally
be foraging.  When the alarm went off, making a hellish din against
the aluminum bowl, the mouse had scurried around and around in
terrified laps, for x amount of time, until it settled down again
and crouched trembling, looking up at the camera with  wet black
eyes.

 And that's me now, Scully thought, as the cry reached a crescendo
and then ribboned out into a fading undulation of notes, almost
flutelike, to blend again with the sigh of the wind.  The next
scream you hear is going to be mine.

 She turned to Mulder.  He was looking into the shadows, his eyes
searching the path behind them carefully.  In a white tee shirt and
faded jeans, his tan Doc Martens crusted with mud and leaves, he
looked like a teenaged boy, arms and legs a little out of proportion
to his height, as if the result of a recent growth spurt. It was
that unfinished look that made him so irresistible to women, those
big sweet eyes, the vaguely goofy smile.  Even Scully had to remind
herself from time to time that under that everywhichway hair was an
exquisitely brilliant mind, a genius she might not understand but
had to ultimately trust.  She was trying to trust it now, trying to
believe he would not deliberately put them both in the path of
unnecessary danger.

 "Where did that come from?"  he asked.

 She shook her head.  Everywhere.  Nowhere.   "From the water?"

 "I think it came from behind us, over there."  He pointed down the
path she had come down when she had been following Terran.

 Mulder came to stand close beside her, and she made no effort to
move away.

 "Listen,"  he said, "Did you ever hear of the legend of the
Windigo?"

 In West Virginia, in a town called Dunbar, when she was a girl
scout on an overnight hike, they had told stories around the
campfire, and she still remembered that one quite clearly.  "Some
kind of Indian legend about a monster that lives in the woods,"  she
said.  "I think Steven King wrote about it in 'Pet Semetary.'"

 "Well, I think we just heard it, Scully."

 Scully's gaze fastened on his for a second, and then she said,
"Well, whatever it was, it wasn't the wind."

 "And I think we are in very deep shit here."

 From somewhere behind them, in the direction Mulder had pointed in,
came a creaking groan, the sound of a tree slowly coming down.  It
crashed through the woods, and above the roof of the forest there
was a whoof of debris, like smoke billowing up from a small
explosion.  Whatever knocked it down was definitely moving in their
direction; something was thrashing the bushes, and birds burst up in
a squawking covey.  Except for the noise of an engine, it sounded
for all the world as if a bulldozer was coming through the woods
towards them.

 Mulder grabbed Scully's hand and yanked her behind him as he began
to run.  "The cabin!"  he shouted.  "We have to try to get to the
cabin!"

 "Why?"

 "You'll see when we get there.  Come on!"

 With a fresh burst of energy, Scully matched his pace, and would
have passed him if she'd known where they were going.  As it was,
she was as hot on his heels as whatever it was coming down the path
seemed to be on theirs;  they could actually look over their
shoulders and see the saplings coming down in the distance as
something bullied its way through the thick woods, gaining on them
by the second.

 *******************

Alligator Moon 2/3

by jordan

        They ran.

        If it was alive, it was chasing them;  if it was some sort
of natural disaster, like a windstorm or an earthquake, it was still
only moments from overtaking them.  The wolf knows it of the rabbit,
the hawk knows it of the dove,  the dog knows it of the  mailman:
whoever chases is predator, and whoever runs is prey.  As Scully
ducked between trees, her arms out to ward off  branches, brushing
spiderwebs and Spanish moss out of her way, a blind, unreasoning
panic began to seize her.

 Before it could take hold, she summoned the last of her courage and
reached back to the holster in the small of her back.  She tore back
the velcro flap, grasped the butt of her weapon and drew it.  The
motion slowed her, and she let herself come to a full stop, the gun
in her hand, to face her pursuer defiantly.

 "Scully!  No!"  Mulder had slid in the leaves like a first base
runner and reversed direction to run back to her.  He scooped an arm
around her waist and dragged her backwards.  For one second she saw
the shimmer of something in the air, something she could only
comprehend as sheer power, and she felt its malevolent intent like
foul breath in her face.  Then she was being half carried, half
pulled  by Mulder into a sudden clearing.

 They fell together in a tangle of arms and legs, sharp pointy
elbows and knees.  Scully struggled to a kneeling position quickly,
but Mulder put his hand on her arm and said in a surprisingly calm
voice, "No, wait."

 She stopped, looking around.  The woods were still.  For a few
minutes she waited, concentrating on slowing her breathing.  Mulder
stared in fascination as her breasts rose and fell like the heaving
bosom of a Harlequin heroine.

 Then she gave him a "whadda-you-lookin-at" glare and he quickly
averted his eyes.

 "Mulder..."

 He looked past her into the woods.  "It's gone," he said.

 Scully's fingers curled up into her palm, making a fist that itched
to smack him once.  Just once.  If only she could give him one good
smack  and wipe that smirk off his face, make those eyes focus on
her instead of wandering off into his own Mulderworld where she was
something impersonal, a convenience or an annoyance, a nurse to pass
the scalpel to the surgeon, a Watson to cast a shadow in Holmes'
brilliance, just ONCE you son of a bitch when I'm not in one of
those hospital gowns with no makeup on or bleeding from the nose,
LOOK AT ME!

 Mulder blinked and turned his head to look at her.

 "What the hell was that?"  he asked.

  She looked back at him for a moment and then sighed. "I'm thinking
it was a very large animal."

 Logic sounded so pitiful and strange in this primal place, where
clearly madness and magic held sway.  Still, she had to try.  "Maybe
something from a zoo?"

 "Yeah, a zoo," Mulder said.  "Maybe the famous Texas Jurassic Park
zoo."

 Taking her bearings, Scully saw that they had fallen into the edge
of a clearing maybe a quarter of an acre in diameter, in the center
of which stood Terran's cabin.  It was a pathetic structure, the
size of a Sears backyard shed, just some clapboards nailed to a
frame with a crudely shingled roof.  It looked like something the
Unibomber might call home.

 In the "yard" around it were dozens of black oil drums with sealed
lids.

 Mulder got up and offered his hand, and she took it to pull herself
up, thinking, Oh, now we're touching again, are we?  But as soon as
she was up, he drew away again.  Scully felt a brief surge of
resentment, but she pushed it down; there were more important things
to worry about at the moment.

 "Okay, I'll ask," she said.  "How did you know we'd be safe here?"

 "A hunch," Mulder said.  "Look."

 She followed his pointing finger down; at first all she saw was
dirty, fallen leaves, a patch of wild mushrooms growing from a
rotting branch.  Then she began to discern a pattern, a white
marking.  Once she saw it, it was obvious.  There was a long white
stripe of powdery substance, like a line draw between the yard of
the cabin and the woods.

 "I saw it earlier," he told her.  "I think it's some kind of
boundary line.  It goes all the way around the house, in a perfect
circle."

 "But what is it?"

 "I think it's salt," Mulder said.  "I think it's something like a
charmed circle, something that wards off evil."

 Scully bent again, peering down at the white substance.  "It's
crystalline," she said thoughtfully, hesitant to touch it.  "Salt,
you say?"

 "Well, it stands to reason.  Some people believe salt wards off
harm.  Like a snake circle."

 She turned her face up to his.  "A what?"

 "Haven't you ever heard that snakes won't cross a circle of salt?"

 Scully stood up, dusting her hands.  "Mulder, that's...that's
ridiculous.  A snake crawls over the desert sands, which are full of
salt, and they live in salt rock areas of the Southwest.  In the
Great Salt Flats of Utah snakes are one of the most successful
animals to survive under those harsh saline conditions."

   Mulder made a sound that meant, I hear you, no comment, and
wandered away from her, to the barrels.  He pried at the lid of one
without much success.  "Damn," he muttered.  "What do you think he
has in these things?"

 "Forty thieves?"

 Mulder looked at her blankly.  It was all right for HIM to try to
be funny.  Fine.  She looked around the yard for some sort of tool
to help him pry up the lid.  Nothing.

 "Have you been inside the cabin?"  she asked.

 "Yeah.  Nothing in there but some more of these barrels, some
supplies,  and a bed.  I didn't look around long, though.  You
called just after I got here."

 Of mutual accord, they both started to walk towards the cabin.
Halfway there, they stopped and looked at each other, then turned
back to stare into the woods again.

 Absolute silence had fallen.

 You can smell it, Scully thought, fighting down another rush of
panic.  Something old, old, old, the way old dogs take on a certain
small.  That's what makes the animals go quiet.  They can smell it
coming.

 Something suddenly stung Scully's ankle, and she yelped, startling
Mulder so badly he jerked his whole body back from her.  She swatted
at it; her ankle was bare between the cuff of her pants and her low
rise boots.  She had stepped too close to a fire ant bed, and they
were starting to swarm up her foot.

 Swearing, she kicked the boot off and hopped backwards awkwardly,
trying to brush them off, keep her balance, and watch the woods all
at the same time.  Mulder grabbed her elbow to keep her upright, and
bent to swipe at her pants leg.

 The wind was picking up again.  It started as a pattering among the
treetops, just leaves tapping against each other, almost like
raindrops.  Then it swelled, swaying the branches lower and lower
still, until at ground level saplings began to twitch and shudder
violently.

 Mulder backed up, and Scully hopped after him, until they came to
the wall of the cabin.  She supported herself there with one hand,
the other still brushing the few remaining ants away.  It was like
being touched with a lit  match each place they bit.

 What happened next was too strange for Scully to believe, even
though she was looking right at it.  It might have been a tornado,
or a hurricane, or the biggest dust devil anyone had ever laid eyes
on.  The wind was circling the house, blasting leaves up in the air
like a weedeater, making an increasingly loud whining noise.  It
moved in a circular motion, following the salt trail around the
clearing, faster and faster, creating a vortex so intense that
Scully felt the hair lifting from her head.

 It swept around and around the house, until there was a solid mass
of leaves fluttering wildly in the air.  If not for the noise, it
would have been a fascinating physical phenomenon.  But that
shrieking--!   It was visceral, connecting directly to the most
primitive part of the brain, deeper,  something recognized at a
cellular level.  Scully could feel it shaking in her bones and
screaming in her blood.  She fell against Mulder, and he put his
arms around her.

 A few loose shingles from the roof of the cabin actually did fly up
into oblivion, but then as abruptly as it had come, it was gone
again.

 The leaves fell back down, and within the space of a single moment,
everything was exactly as it had been before.

 Well, almost everything.

 "Oh, shit," Mulder said, releasing her to stride forward and drop
to his knees.  "Look at this, Scully.  Look."

 She limped after him and saw what he was looking at.

 The salt circle was gone.

****************************

 The cabin smelled so bad Scully's eyes stung when she first entered
it.  She stood in the doorway for a moment, putting her boot back
on, while Mulder poked around.  There was an old Coleman lantern, a
filthy pile of crumpled paper plates and old beer cans, a few torn
girly magazines.

 "All the comforts of home," he murmured.

 Scully grunted as she tried to force up the lid of one of the oil
barrels.  "We need to get a look at what's in these drums," she
said.

 "Ten to one it's the loot he's been stashing from the mail
robberies."

 "I don't doubt it, but we can't prove anything until we get some
evidence."

 Actually, they had enough evidence to convict Edgar Ray Terran
several times over.  He had been a forger and a thief, sending fake
civil service exams scores out so that he could get jobs under false
identities at post offices around the country, each time
disappearing after a major theft.  They estimated that he had stolen
almost a million dollars over a period of three years.

 The problem was his elusiveness.  He seemed to be capable of
vanishing into thin air, and he was rumored to have the ability to
shapeshift, which was what pulled Mulder into the case originally.

 But long hours of careful investigation had shown that he had only
been very adept at makeup and altering his facial hair and voice
modulation, really amazing tricks, but tricks just the same..

 When he had been confronted for questioning, he had managed to get
away, fleeing into this remote swampy area between Texas and
Louisiana, where he had originally come from, and no one had been
able to follow him after that.  Local authorities had caught
glimpses of him in the tiny towns, buying supplies at rural stores,
but he had always managed to evade them.  A canine search team had
been flown in, but the dogs had disappeared within a couple of
hours, their baying simply cut off in mid-howl.  After that, a
serious manhunt had been mounted, but the isolation of the thousands
of acres of protected wetlands had made it a waste of money and
manhours.

 It had been at that point that Skinner had allowed Mulder to take
the case, but by the time Mulder figured out that Terran was only
using local legends and rumors to create his own smokescreen, he and
Scully were so deep into the paperwork they couldn't back out.
Skinner simply refused to let them quit, pointing out that all they
really had to do was arrest their suspect and bring him in.

 So it had been one hot steamy trek after another along the state
line, with Mulder in his no-
touching-though-I-remember-nothing-about-any- kiss funk, and
Scully's teeth so on edge she felt like biting him just to relieve
the itch, until they finally started getting some solid leads.  And
then they had begun to spot Eddie, using high powered binoculars,
shadowy as Bigfoot slipping through the woods, around the quicksand,
over the cottonmouth nests.

 Their last bit of patience had been rewarded when Mulder figured
out that Eddie was stocking supplies somewhere in the woods, always
carrying sacks or full backpacks in and coming out empty handed.
Until today, now that Scully thought of it.  Today he had been empty
handed when she saw him headed for his cabin.

 That had to mean something, though she couldn't decide what.

 Mulder was squatting by the lantern, lighting it.  Even in the
daylight it was dark in the cabin, and the light helped, if only to
illuminate the filth.

 "There's enough oil here to last a couple of days," he observed.
"And all these supplies he was bringing in could last a month."

 Scully examined them idly, big empty burlap bags from the stores,
unmarked, though they knew the contents because they had every
receipt in their possession as part of the investigation. "Mulder,
you don't think we're going to be stuck here, do you?"

 "No.  I'm just happy to see that if we can't get out tonight we
won't be stuck in the dark."

 Mulder was not fond of total darkness.  And being in the woods at
night with that thing out there was not a happy thought for either
of them.

  Scully said, "What are you doing?"

 He was on his hands and knees, pulling ziploc bags from under the
bed.  "God, there must be a hundred of these things under here," he
said, his voice muffled.  "Eddie must have been planning to hide out
here for a good long while, and then in time, when things had cooled
down, to slip out of the country with the money."

 Scully picked up one of the bags and held it up to examine it,
frowning.  "Drugs?"

 "Check it out."

 She opened it and studied the contents, pressing it through the
plastic between her thumb and forefinger.  "I think it's cocaine,
Mulder."

 She took the baggie to the door and held it up to the light.
Actually, it could have been anything..  She put her finger in her
mouth to wet it and dipped it in the bag, licked experimentally.
There was always a sure way to find out if it was coke.  A tiny
taste would put her tongue to sleep.

 Mulder was watching her with a strange look.

 "What is it?"

 "I think it's..."  She tasted it again.  "It's sugar, Mulder."

 He looked totally nonplused.  "Sugar?"

 "Do you think maybe he was using it to cut drugs?"

 They looked at each other a moment, then both shook their heads.
"You use baking powder to cut cocaine," Mulder pointed out.  "Not
that he doesn't seem to have plenty of that on the inventory, too."

 Scully stared up and to the right for a moment, her eyes glazed
over thoughtfully. "Multhur," she said.

 "What?"

 She spied a stack of plastic jugs filled with
water, went to get one.  After peeling off the plastic safety ring,
she popped the top and drank from it.
Deeply.

 Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, "It
ith coke."

 "Really?"  Mulder took the baggie from her and frowned down at it.
"What the hell would he be doing that for?  The dumbest street buyer
would know by a taste this wasn't straight.   What a stupid thing to
do."

 "Well, thit," Scully said, making faces as she
moved her tongue around in her mouth, trying to regain sensation.
It would last no more than half an hour or so, as delicate a taste
as she had taken, but it was a maddening feeling.

 "The circle is gone," Mulder pointed out.  "I sure wish I knew what
it was made of.  Could it have been sugar?"

 He went back outside and Scully followed him.  To her dismay, she
realized that they had only an hour or two of daylight left.  The
grey sky was finally clearing, replaced by high scudding clouds, and
already the mosquitoes were increasing.

 "What differinth doth it make?"  she asked. "We jutht need to get
the hell out of here."

 "With that thing out there?  We'd never make it."

 "But Eddith been out here for almotht a month, and it never got
him."

 "Until today," Mulder reminded her.

 She nodded.  "Whath differenth about thith day?"  She glared at
him.  "Thtop lauthing at me."

 "I'm sorry," he said, trying not to smile.  "You sound like Daffy
Duck."

 She worked her tongue for a few more minutes, making hissing noises
as a tingling itch told her sensation was returning.  "Focus,
Mulder," she said, successfully.

 "Okay, but you're not going to like it."  He glanced up at the
sky.  "Isn't this the night of a full moon?"

 Scully searched the skies.  "I don't know.  Is it?"  Then she
looked back at him, and for the first time in a long time, laughed
out loud.  "Oh, Mulder.  You don't think that thing is a - a
WEREwind, do you?"

 He looked injured.  "Let's hear YOUR  theory,"  he said.

 Scully shook her head.  "I won't even try to explain it."

   "Well, will you try to help me get one of these
barrels open?"

 She went through her pockets and found her Swiss Army Knife.  As a
child, her older brother had always insisted she carry one, and if
he asked her for it and she didn't have it somewhere on her, he
would punch her in the arm.  Hard.

 "Try thith," she said, handing it over. She worked her tongue again
and said, "I mean, this."

 Mulder's eyebrows shot up.  "Scully, you've been holding out on
me."

 Truer words were never spoken, she thought, watching him work the
blades until he found the broad flat head of the can opener.

 "Ah," he said happily.

 It broke the blade, but Mulder did manage to pry up a corner of the
lid far enough to get his fingers under it.  From there it was just
a matter of working it off.

 The drum was filled to its uppermost capacity with sugar.  Pure
white crystal sugar.

 Scully hung her head.  "Well, now it all makes sense," she said.
"NOT."

 Mulder was pushing the barrel onto its side, spilling the
contents.  She watched as he put both hands on the side and pushed
it.

 "Wanna give me a hand here?"

 She went to stand beside him.  "What are we doing?"

 "I want to make another circle around the cabin."

 "Why?"

 "It seemed to work last time.  And why else would he have a whole
drum of the stuff out here?"

 No point in arguing with him.  Scully put her hands beside his and
shoved.  The drum was incredibly heavy, and only rolled easily when
they had about half the contents emptied.  Mulder scooped handfuls
of sugar from the pile and carried them about ten feet away from the
cabin, trying to lay a strip around their perimeter to resemble the
one they had found earlier around the clearing.

 "Even if this could keep us safe for now," Scully said, "How are we
going to get out of here?"

 "I don't know.  But this might buy us some time."

 Despite her incredulity, Scully helped him, and for the next half
hour they concentrated on making a ring of sugar in the grass.

 When they were finished, Mulder inspected it,  adding a little here
and there until he was satisfied.

 "Do you really think that's going to keep us safe?"  Scully asked.

   He shrugged.  "All we can do is hope."

*********************

 The red evening sky faded to purple, and a slow hot moon swung up
over the trees and hung on the horizon, sizzling with light.

 Scully and Mulder stayed outside as long as they could, but
eventually the mosquitoes threatened to exsanguinate them, so they
went inside and lit the Coleman.  There was no place to sit but on
the bed, so they sat together, side by side.

 Things chattered and grumbled in the woods, and from time to time
something fell on the roof of the cabin with a loud crack.  The low
flicker of the lantern made the cabin spookier than full dark.
The cabin door had a strong thick latch on it, and the windows had
been boarded over and nailed shut from the inside.

 Not a good sign.

 The night grew louder, crickets chirping, bullfrogs croaking, night
birds giving sudden loud, piercing cries.  Somewhere in the distance
came the deep bellowing grunt of an alligator.

 "This sucks," Scully said, scratching at the ant bites on her
ankle.

 Mulder lay back on the bed.  "Come on," he said.  "We may as well
try to get some rest."

 She hesitated, then lay stiffly beside him.  Inches apart, they may
as well have been in different countries.

 Finally Mulder said, "Did I ever tell you why I hate the full
moon?"

 I can probably tell YOU, she thought, but she said, "No.  Why do
you hate the full moon, Mulder?"

 "When I was a boy, ten or eleven, I used to have a recurring
nightmare.  I dreamed that the moon was full--it always started like
that, with a full moon."  He was quiet for a minute, and Scully's
interest was piqued.  Mulder's voice grew softer, more thoughtful.
"Or maybe I only had this dream when the moon was full, come to
think of it."

 "The dream?"  she prompted.

 "I dreamed that I woke up in the morning, and went down the hall to
the kitchen, where my parents were eating breakfast, and they had
both turned into alligators in the night."

 Scully smiled, though there was an ache in his voice that found its
echo in her heart.

 He said, "The boy came to collect for the paper, and he was an
alligator, too.  I went outside and all the people in the street
were alligators, driving cars, watering their lawns.  Everyone was
an alligator.  And wherever I went, they all looked at me like I was
something that would be good to eat."

 "Sounds scary," Scully said.

 "You have no idea. I mean, it really doesn't sound all that scary
just telling you about it.  But you see, everyone in the world was
an alien but me.
And that made me the alien.  Do you see what I mean?"

 She nodded silently.  It was not a surprising dream, coming from
him.

 "But the scariest part is yet to come," he said.

 She turned her head to look at him.

 He said, "I ran home from school, where everyone had turned into an
alligator, of course, and ran to Sam's room.  She was still in bed
asleep.  She was curled up on her side, under the blankets, facing
away from me.  I went to her very slowly, terrified, and reached
down to put my hand on her shoulder to wake her up. "

 Scully felt some of the contagion of his boyhood anxiety in the pit
of her stomach.  She wanted to put her hand on his arm, or his
shoulder, or somewhere, but she didn't know if he would push it
away.

 "Don't keep me in suspense," she said.  "Was she or wasn't she?"

 He sighed.  "I don't know.  I always woke up just at that point. "

 "Dammit, Mulder..."

 "Don't you see, it was worse that way.  I could never tell if I
could trust one person in this world or not, if I was the only one
left.  I know I told you the rest of it, how sometimes I'd wake up
and hear my father eating those sunflower seeds, the most comforting
sound in the world.  'Cause alligators can't crunch sunflower
seeds.  They have the wrong kind of teeth for it."  He turned to
her, smiling, though his eyes were sad, and made crunching motions
with his jaw.  "So I knew it had to be him, the non-alligator
version, and things were all right."

 God, if only she could lean over him, smooth that hair back over
his forehead, put her lips to his skin just there, above his eyes.
Tuck him in at night, and be there when he woke up.  But whatever
had damaged him in the first place damaged him still; he had always
drawn away from her, turned her most serious moments into a joke,
only taken her seriously when she was ill.  Now she understood why.
Because of that damn full moon, and the possibility that she might
some day turn into an alligator.  He could not bring himself to ever
look at
her fully in case she, too, on closer inspection, turned out to be
one of Them.

 "Mulder," she began softly.

 He stared up at the ceiling, lost in his own thoughts.

 "I wish now we'd got dinner back in that
little town," he said.  "I'm starving."

 Scully's voice was weary.  "Me, too," she said.

 "Did you--"

 Something boomed against the side of the house so hard it shook the
frame.  Mulder and Scully both sat bolt upright on the bed.

 "What the hell--" Mulder reached for his gun, which he had put on
the floor beside the bed.  Scully already had hers in her hand.

 Something slid against the side of the house, slowly, slowly, like
a giant snake.  They could feel it pushing along the clapboards,
hear the hiss as it passed behind them, around, to the side, and
finally...to the door.

 Scully remembered a fragment of Sandburg poetry, something about
the wind rubbing around the house like a big animal.  That was
exactly what it sounded like.  Whatever it was, it was impossible to
believe that it wasn't sentient, didn't know they were in there,
didn't want them.

 The door rattled gently.  Something began to snuffle under it, like
a big dog.  But there was a mumbling, grunting voice under the
snuffling sounds, not quite human, but definitely not  animal,
either.

 It was the Windigo.  And it wanted in.

*****************************

     Alligator Moon 3/3

     by jordan

             Okay, Scully thought, NOW I'm scared.

             The thing snuffling and mumbling at the crack
     under the door seemed to push its whole weight
     against the flimsy cabin.  They could hear shingles
     being peeled back overhead from the sheer force of
     the wind.  The latch rattled wildly as it struggled to
     hold, and above everything else was that persistent, agonized
     shrieking.

             Mulder rolled off the bed onto the floor.  He
     flailed around underneath and came up with one of the plastic
     bags.  Crawling across the cabin floor, he held one end of the
     bag in his teeth and used his free hand to peel the bag open.
     Then he shook the contents out under the crack at the bottom of
     the door.

             Scully could see the powdery substance being
     sucked through the narrow opening as if a giant vacuum cleaner
     was on the other side.

             Over the din of the banging door latch and the howling
     wind she shouted, "What are you doing?"

             "I think it's hungry!"  Mulder shouted back.

             Scully had her hands over her ears, but she
     risked taking them away when she realized the wind was dying
     down.  Mulder stretched his arm out and  waggled his fingers at
     her for more, and she bent over the edge of the mattress and
     seized another of the baggies to throw to him.

             He pushed his back against the door, legs drawn up in
     front of him, and poured the powder out on the floor.  Again it
     was sucked up instantly, but this time as soon as it was gone,
     the wind was stilled.

             Scully gave a groan of relief when the noise
     stopped.  She went to Mulder and crouched down
     beside him.  His hair was sticking up and he looked
     like he hadn't slept weeks, eyes shadowed, cheeks hollow.  He
     took a long deep breath and let it out in a sigh, grinning up
     at her.   When he smiled there was that old spark in his eye,
     the Mulder she had known long ago, the one that had won her
     heart for all time.  It was a surprise and a relief to see him
     again, after all the barriers they'd so carefully constructed
     between them.

             "Mulder,"  she said, "What the hell WAS that
     thing?"

             "I thought we agreed.  It's the Windigo."

             "I only said I'd heard of it before.  I didn't say--"
     She stopped, wrapping her arms around herself.  "Okay.  Let's
     look at this logically."

             "Great idea."

             "Be serious.  All I remember about the Windigo is that
     it was always cold and always hungry."

             An odd look crossed Mulder's face, a flash of
     pain.  "It's that damn Alligator Moon,"  he  muttered.

             "What?"

             He shook his head and she could feel him pulling away
     from her as he got to his feet, some kind of thing he did
     without making any physical gestures, just a withdrawal of
     attention.  She felt a sudden pang of loneliness for the Mulder
     that had only a moment ago been so tantalizingly near, her old
     friend, the man she trusted with her very soul.  Now the
     stranger was back, distrustful, wary.

             In desperation, she said, "Tell me about the
     Windigo, Mulder.  What is it supposed to be?"

             He went to the wooden shelves and began to run his
     hands along them, feeling for something in the dim light.
     "There must be a tool around here somewhere to open those
     barrels.  I'm guessing a tire iron or something.  You know, one
     of those things you stick in a jack to make it go up and down?"

             "Mulder..."

             "It's the wind, Scully,"  he said, not looking at her
     as he continued his careful search, inch by inch, of the
     cabin.  "Some northern Indian tribes, including the Ojibwa,
     believed that the wind is a living entity.    It can never get
     warm, and it can never get enough to eat, so it howls and sighs
     all the time in rage and frustration."

             He found a broom in the corner, held it out to look at
     it, started to put it back, and and then held it out again,
     scowling.  "What's this thing for?"

             "It's a broom,"  Scully said helpfully.

             "Does it look to you like Eddie did much cleaning up?"

             "Focus, Mulder.  The Windigo?"

             "The Indians believed that all the frustration drove
     the Windigo insane, so it would come around in the form of a
     little breeze, and whisper in someone's ear, and drive him
     mad.  That was how they explained insanity."  He glanced at her
     over his shoulder, only half joking when he added, "Sounds
     crazy, huh?"

             "Not so crazy,"  she said.  "Look at El Nino.  Look
     at the Santa Ana in California.  They blame that for
     all kinds of eruptions of violence, and I believe some studies
     show that when the Santa Ana is blowing,
     there really has been a marked increase in bizarre behavior
     recorded."

             "Well, there you go."  Mulder put the broomstick
     between the lid and the rim of one of the barrels and pushed
     forward.  The lid popped off neatly.

             Scully gave an exclamation of surprised pleasure, and
     Mulder gave her a triumphant smile.  She got up and went to
     stand beside him as they both looked in the barrel.

             "Well, it's white,"  she said.

             Mulder wet his finger in his mouth and stuck it into
     the powder, then pulled it out and held it up to the lambent
     light of the Coleman lantern.  He looked at Scully and she
     shook her head. "Oh, no.  I tasted it last time.  It's your
     turn."

             Making a face, he put his finger in his mouth and held
     it there a moment.  Then he pulled it out and looked up
     thoughtfully.

            "Hmm."

             "Speak to me, Mulder."

             He bent over the barrel, frowning down at the
     contents.  "It's sugar, Scully.  Pure sugar."

             His stomach gave a sudden rumble as if to confirm the
     fact, and they exhanged a sympathetic look.  Scully licked her
     finger and took a taste.  It really was sugar, pure, without
     the faintly bitter aftertaste she'd noticed before, before her
     tongue had begun to go numb.  Her own stomach gave a little
     kick in response, and she was uncomfortably reminded that she
     hadn't eaten anything since lunch almost two days ago.

             Mulder was working on the next drum.  He pulled the lid
     off and let it slide to the floor with a loud clatter.  "Well,
     shit,"  he said.

             Even in the lamplight, Scully could tell it wasn't
     sugar.  It didn't have the crystalline reflective quality.
     "Cocaine,"  she said flatly.

             "And a hell of a lot of it,"  Mulder muttered.  He
     blew lightly on the surface, and powder flew up.  They both
     drew back, but some of the powder clung to the edge of the rim,
     and Scully reached inside her breast pocket and pulled out her
     glasses.  Nearsighted as she was, she was generally a little
     shy about wearing them around Mulder, though she liked it when
     he wore his.

             Now she looked closely at the powder and said,
     "Mulder, this isn't cocaine."

             "What?"

             She licked her finger, picked up some powder,
     tasted it.  "This is baking powder."

             "Well...that does make sense."

             "It does?"

             "If this next drum has cocaine in it, yes, I think it
     does."

             She watched him pry up the lid of the next drum to
     reveal its contents.

             They looked at each other, sighed together, and then
     both wet their fingers in their mouths and dipped them in.
     This time Mulder took as small a lick at his finger as she took
     at hers.

             Their reactions were immediate.  Scully coughed and
     Mulder turned his head and spat on the floor.  "Jeez!"  The
     stuff was bitter enough to bring tears to their eyes.  Scully
     licked her lips and wiped at her mouth.

             "Tastes pretty damn pure to me,"  Mulder said.

             Already Scully could feel the deadening spot on her
     tongue, but this time it was just a mild tingling at the tip.

             "I think we hit the motherlode,"  she said.

     *************

             An hour later, Mulder and Scully sat on the bed again,
     side by side, leaning back against the wall as a sort of
     compromise instead of lying all the way down.  The six drums in
     the room had all been pried open.  Three of them were what
     seemed to be pure cocaine, two were sugar, one was baking
     powder.

             Hot as it was in the cabin, neither of them suggested
     opening the door.  Mulder had taken off his shirt and was just
     in his tee shirt, and Scully had taken off her suit jacket and
     was still sweltering in her cotton jaquard blouse.

             Daylight was still hours away.  Scully thought they
     were possibly experiencing the longest night in the world.
     Even the lumpy bed at the motel they had been staying at seemed
     like a beckoning paradise compared to this, and she would have
     traded her car for a cool shower and a chicken salad sandwich.

             Worst of all, Mulder had retreated inside himself
     again.  She knew he needed the distance because here they were
     again on a bed, side by side, and the Houston kiss loomed large
     over them whenever this kind of silence fell.

             "Okay," Mulder said suddenly, and she jerked to
     attention and gave him a startled glance.  "Here's what I
     think."

             She turned to him, her eyebrow up.

             He said, "I think that Eddie figured out how to
     use the Windigo as sort of a watchdog.  He must have been
     feeding it sugar to keep it quiet.  It worked when he had the
     sugar circle around the cabin--and
     that MUST have been sugar when we first got here.
     The Windigo quit chasing us the minute it got the sugar,
     right?"

             "But why did it kill Eddie?"

             "Wait, I'm coming to that."  Mulder scootched down on
     the bed more comfortably and stared up at the ceiling.  "Okay.
     We know the thing likes sugar and when it gets fed it shuts up
     for awhile.  I'm figuring about eight hours.  That's how long
     it was between the first attack and the second.  If I'm right,
     it should come again at just about daybreak."

             "Something to look forward to,"  Scully muttered
     darkly.

             "So what do you want to bet that the drums in the yard
     are full of sugar?"

             "Why sugar?  Why not cocaine?"

             "Well, in that one drum there's probably a couple
     hundred thousand dollars worth of the stuff, if you stretch it
     with baking powder and sell it retail.  I don't see how our
     Eddie could have gotten much more than that.  And I think the
     reason these drums are inside is because the coke was the most
     valuable, and he wanted it inside and safe."

             "At least that's a theory we'll be able to test as soon
     as it gets light."

             Mulder nodded absently.  "Anyway, suppose
     Eddie knew about the Windigo, knew how to appease it with
     sugar.  So he brings his stash out here in the woods, a little
     at a time, over the years, and packs in
     enough sugar to get the Windigo to hang around, and he protects
     himself by feeding it on a regular basis.  That explains all
     those sacks of sugar he was packing
     in.  And we know he was using the baking powder to
     cut the cocaine, or at least that's a safe assumption."

             "Okay,"  Scully said, "But why did it--"

             "Kill Eddie?  My guess is that it isn't a thinking
     creature, but just a spirit, like the Indians thought, capable
     of only hunger and frustration.  It protected its source, a man
     at the cabin who fed it.  I was at the cabin, so Eddie was then
     the intruder."

             Scully  sat up on her elbows abruptly and looked down
     at him, her eyes wide.  "Oh my God, Mulder.
     All these bags of sugar and cocaine mixed together--  He wasn't
     feeding it.  He was drugging it!  He's been using some of the
     coke to keep the Windigo passive so he could keep coming up
     here and building his stash."

             Mulder smiled at her.  "Who's a clever squirrel?
     That's just what I was thinking. So now we've got something
     just a tad worse than a Windigo with a sugar jones on our
     hands."

             Scully stared at the door as if the creature stood just
     outside it.  "Oh no."

             "We've got a REALLY crazy wind out there,"
     Mulder said.  "And what it needs now isn't food, but a fix."

             Scully fell back on the bed with a groan.  If this was
     going to go on much longer the Windigo wouldn't need to whisper
     in her ear to make her go crazy.  She already had a good head
     start on it.

     ***********

             On the bed again.

             Scully's  watch was clearly broken, or else telling
     time in another dimension where five minutes there equaled an
     hour here.  A spider had begun to crawl across the ceiling in
     slow motion, and she entertained herself with thoughts of how
     fast she could get off the bed should it happen to drop on her
     face.

             Mulder had his hands behind his head, his left elbow
     about an inch from her ear.  She decided that  if he poked her
     with it one more time, this was the arm she was going to rip
     off to kill the spider with.

             Their plan--well, actually, Mulder's plan-- was
     simple.  When daylight came and the Windigo returned, they were
     going to empty all the baggies out and let it get as high as it
     wanted, and then if that wasn't enough, just walk back through
     the woods, along the path, leaving all the barrels at the cabin
     open so it could stay busy while they were escaping and
     hopefully leave them alone.

             Simple.

             Unless the theory was wrong.  Unless it came again in
     the night, like the wolf came to the three little pigs, to huff
     and puff and blow their house down.    Unless --

             "Can't sleep?"  Mulder asked.

             "No,"  she said, in a small voice.

             He turned to her, propping himself up on his elbow.
     "So how to you explain it, Scully?"  he asked.

             Was his voice angry, challenging, hurt?  Scully closed
     her eyes and said, "How do I explain what?"

             "This thing outside.  The Windigo.  The dust devil.
     Whatever the hell it is.  How do you fit it in your cosmology?
     How does your religion account for it?  How are you going to
     explain it to yourself later when you're writing the report on
     this?"

             Scully opened her eyes to look at him.  "How come I
     always have to write up the report?"

             He wiggled a little to shake the bed.  "Answer me."

             "I'm just going to say that Edgar Ray Terran
     fell into a swamp and drowned,"  she said.  Her lower lip came
     out a little, like a child's, in a stubborn pout.  "That's
     all.  I don't see why we even have to mention the drugs."

             "Okay, that's the story you're going to give Skinner,
     but what are you going to tell YOURSELF, Scully?"

             She sighed.  "I don't know.  I can't explain that
     thing.  But--"  she met his eyes resolutely, "That doesn't mean
     it can't be explained by the laws of physics.  Just because we
     don't understand things doesn't mean they don't have an
     explanation, Mulder.  I personally can't tell you how a car
     engine works, but in the absence of a good explanation I don't
     believe that the spirit of Henry Ford somehow twirls those
     rotor things or whatever to make it go.  I trust that there is
     a physical explanation for it, and I honestly believe that
     there's a physical explanation for this Windigo thing, too."

             "Such as?"

             "I don't KNOW!"  she snapped.  "Maybe there's a
     slipstream created by the physical configuration of the
     forest.  Maybe there's -- "

             "Oh, bullshit,"  Mulder said wearily, flopping back
     onto the mattress.  "You just close your mind and that's that."

             "I close MY mind?"  The heat and hunger had worn down
     Scully's patience.  "What the hell are you talking about,
     Mulder?  You...you...search for the most irrational,
     ridiculous, illogical theory for every event that--"

             "And I'm more often right than wrong, aren't I?"
     Mulder rolled over again and put his hand on her arm.  "Aren't
     I?"

             As if suddenly aware that he had touched her, he looked
     at his own hand guiltily, and tried to withdraw it as
     unobtrusively but as swiftly as possible.  The gesture was
     pathetically obvious, and Scully's temper seized the kindling
     to feed itself with.

             "And what the hell is THAT about?"  she demanded.
     "Ever since Houston, it's like I'm some kind of leper, like
     I've got some kind of disease you're afraid you'll contract if
     you even stand too close to me.  I am NOT contagious, Mulder."

             "I'm sorry,"  he muttered.  But she could feel him
     flying away from her at a million miles an hour, disconnecting,
     going somewhere safe and locking the door behind him.

             "Damn you,"  she said softly.  "I wish it had never
     happened too, Mulder.  I wish we'd never gone to Houston.
     Believe me, if there was any way I could do it, I 'd un-kiss
     you and take it all back."

             Mulder was silent for a few long moments.  She could
     feel his body, tense and uncomfortable, breathing beside hers.
     "I wish you could, too,"  he said.

             She looked at him, unsure how hurt to be by his words.
     His voice sounded odd, but not angry.

             She said, "You wish what?"

             "I wish you could un-kiss me.  I wish I could un-kiss
     you.  Then maybe I could forget about it and get some sleep and
     think about something else."

             More moments passed.  The spider paused two thirds of
     the way across the ceiling as if listening to see what they
     would say next.

             Scully said, "Well, why can't you?"

             "Why can't I what?"

             "What you said.  Un-kiss me."

             Mulder's hair made a scratching sound as he turned his
     head on the sugar sack pillow to look at her.  "What?"

             It was a little hard to breathe, probably because of
     the heat in the tightly enclosed cabin.  Oxygen seemed to be
     running low.

             Scully said, "It's what we both want, isn't it?"

             Mulder was half sitting up, supporting his weight on
     one arm.  Scully was looking at his tee shirt, at the shadowy
     wall beyond him, at the oil drums.  Anywhere but at his face,
     at his mouth.

             "You know,"  he said, "That might work."

             Her eyes flickered over his, hardly long enough to see
     them staring at her.  "Think so?"

             "We can try."

             She looked up at him then, briefly, panicky, as he
     lowered his face to hers.  She closed her eyes just as his lips
     brushed hers in a gentle kiss.  Her fists clenched on either
     side of her, but she didn't react in any other way.  Mulder
     raised his head to look at her.  His eyes looked heavy,
     drowsy.  His mouth glowed as if he had been rubbing it with his
     hand.

             Scully looked down.  The blouse over her breasts was
     moving in a tiny jittering dance in time with her heartbeat.

             Mulder said softly, "Well, was it good for you?"

             The music to Traci Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart" had
     begun to play in Scully's head.  Fortunately, she couldn't
     remember any of the words other than those in the title.  She
     swallowed and said,   "I've had better."

             "Maybe it didn't take.  You try."

             "Mulder..."

             "Think of it as science, Scully."

             Although that made absolutely no sense at all, Scully
     reached up and put her hand on the back of his neck, letting
     her fingers slide up into his hair.  She pulled his head down
     gently.

             Whoever had designed the explosion of matter that would
     spin itself into galaxies, whoever had divided the seconds from
     the centuries and separated the soul out of the ashes, had
     before the beginning of time drawn the perfect curve of her
     mouth to fit exactly into the recess of his, waiting for this
     moment, this exact moment in time, to come.

             Something of that sensation of eternity, of fate, of
     the shifting of things in the universe to lock into
     place with a satisfying click, passed through them.

             As an un-kiss, it was something of a failure.  But
     neither seemed to notice.  Scully slipped her left arm around
     his waist, and he put his right arm around her shoulders to
     draw her against him as tightly as he could, their bodies,
     sweating through their clothes, finding perfect places to fit
     against each other.  He rolled on top of her and she opened her
     legs so they fit together there as well, moving against each
     other without even being aware they were doing it.  Scully's
     breath came in a whimper, and his came in a groan, the kiss
     lengthening, hardening, going beyond anything either of them
     even remotely imagined in dreams or fantasies.  The bed
     shuddered underneath them, the walls shook, the door rattled.
     The earth moved.

             Then they were both sitting up, gasping for breath,
     pushing away from each other and falling off opposite sides of
     the bed as they realized that the Windigo was back.  This time
     the howling went from a whine to a demonic scream in the space
     of half a minute, and the cabin vibrated as if they were caught
     in the path of a freight train.

             Bouncing around, Scully found a baggie and tried to rip
     it open, though she spilled most of the contents on herself.
     Mulder had better luck, and he scrambled across the floor to
     the door and shoved the open sack underneath.  There was a
     snarl like someone ripping a sheet in half, and Scully slid
     another of the baggies across the plywood floor to him   He
     scattered the powder under the crack of the door with badly
     shaking hands.

             "Get the real stuff!"  Mulder shouted.  He pointed at
     the drums.  "Let's give it what it wants!"

             Scully managed to hold herself upright by leaning
     against the wildly trembling wall as she made her way to the
     drums.  She scooped out handfuls of the cocaine, but as soon as
     she started for the door, they spilled.

             Mulder got up and staggered across the room to her.
     "The whole thing!"  he shouted, over the shrieking.  "Help me!"

             Scully seized the rim of the drum and tried to shove it
     over, but it was too heavy.  Mulder gestured for her to get
     behind it and push.  When she did, they managed to tip it at a
     forty five degree angle and roll it on its lower edge to the
     door.

             "How are we going to get it out there?"  Scully asked.

             "We're going to have to open the door."

             "Mulder!  No!"

             But Mulder was already pulling at the latch.
     Scully thought of Terran lying in a bloody streak in the
     woods.  She grabbed Mulder's hands and stopped him.

             They looked at each other.  "What if you're wrong?"
     she asked.  "What if it doesn't work?"

             "You have to trust me,"  he told her.  His hands had
     stopped under hers, and it was clear he wouldn't do it unless
     she let him.

             "Yes or no?"  he demanded.

             There was no point in answering;  they could no
     longer hear each other above the sound of the wind.
     After a long moment of searching his eyes, Scully suddenly
     stepped back, spreading her hands in an obvious gesture:  she
     was letting go, putting her faith in him.

             Mulder jerked the latch up out of its cage and kicked
     the door as hard as he could.  He fell forward as Scully fell
     back, and the door flew outward and was ripped completely from
     its hinges.

             Then the door, the drum, and Mulder were all sucked
     into the howling dawn sky.

     ********

             The sound of the rising wind woke Scully.

             Louder, louder.

             She groaned and opened her eyes to blinding daylight.
     She sat up, looking around.  The sound was the wind, but it was
     a wind generated by helicopter blades.

             She leaped to her feet, stood swaying dizzily for a
     moment, and then lurched outside.  A blue police helicopter was
     landing in the clearing, men jumping out and running in all
     directions, holding assault rifles.

             She saw Mulder's body, sock-footed, crumpled by the oil
     drums in front of the cabin.  She cried out and ran to him,
     praying he wasn't dead.

             "Mulder!"  She pulled the upper half of his body up
     into her arms.  He felt loose and heavy, which was good;  he
     was still alive.

             Under any other circumstances Scully would have laughed
     out loud when she saw his face.  It was so covered with white
     powder he looked like a mime.  She brushed at his cheeks, her
     breath coming in short sobs.

             And then, incredibly, Walter Skinner was striding
     across the clearing towards them as the police formed a
     semi-circle around the two agents.

             "Scully."  He managed to convey a world of relief in
     the single word.  "Are you all right?"  He scowled down at
     Mulder, whose eyes had slitted open and were staring, glazed,
     into space.  "What happened to him?"

             "It's a long story, sir,"  she said.  "Can you help me
     get him up?"

             Two officers took Mulder's arms and dragged him into a
     standing position, though Mulder's legs were rubbery and his
     head hung down as if too heavy for his neck.

             "Is he all right?"  Skinner asked, taking Scully's
     arm.  "Are you all right?"

             "I'm fine, sir,"  she said.  "But I think we'd better
     get Mulder to a hospital as soon as we can."

             They made their way back to the helicopter, Skinner
     holding Scully upright, staring at her in undisguised concern.
     Nearby, an oil drum lay on its side, dented in, scoured out.
     Scully glanced at it and shivered as they climbed into the
     helicopter.

             Scully says, "How did you find us, sir?"

             Skinner's voice was gruff with repressed emotion.
     "When no one could reach you two, we knew you were in some kind
     of trouble.  The officers found your jeep in the woods last
     night, but we had to wait until morning to launch a rescue
     mission."

             "But I still don't see how you ever found us in--"

             Skinner looked down and she followed his gaze.  As they
     lifted off, she got a panoramic view of the steaming, primeval
     swamps, dull green in the cloudy grey morning.  In the
     distance, she saw treetops bent down as if a jumbo jet had
     crashed through them, though the trees weren't burned, just
     broken.   It was like a giant line pointing directly through
     the woods from where the jeep had been parked to the cabin.

             "You want to tell me what happened there?"
     Skinner asked.

             She turned her eyes towards him wearily.  "The drums in
     the cabin are full of cocaine, sir,"  she said.  "Mulder and I
     made a drug bust.  Enough coke to supply a small country."

             Skinner was staring down at Mulder, but all he said
     was, "Good work."  He gave Scully's shoulder a slight squeeze
     and said quietly, "Don't worry about it just now, Agent
     Scully.  I'm sure you can explain it all in your report."

             Scully leaned back and closed her eyes, resting her
     hand on Mulder's knee and sighing plaintively.  "How come I
     always have to write the report?"  she asked.




     feedback to jordan@jetson.uh.edu