Chapter 20: Dub (Patreon)

At 4:50 on Wednesday morning, in the dark, in a Seattle hotel room with a desk chair pushed against an armoire, I opened the panel and swapped out the poison.

Ability Slot 2: Poison Breath → Wind Barrier[SWAP] (5:00)

I'd been thinking about it since Noah's loft. Since the window at the bottom of every frame, the lighthouse and the long dark roof of a barn. Since Mulder's message under my door: 7:30 a.m. Wednesday, Anacortes.

The ferry.

There's a scene in the movie you'd remember even if you forgot everything else. Rachel takes the ferry to Moesko Island, and there's a horse in a trailer on the car deck, and it smells her—smells the seven days on her—and breaks out and goes crazy while she stands in the rain. It rears and screams and kicks the trailer door in, and then it bolts through the parked cars and over the stern rail into the water.

And the propeller.

I don't know why that was the one I couldn't stop thinking about. Four kids dead in October, a chain of strangers down the coast, a girl in a well, and what had kept me up since Monday, what Kristen had to come take me away from at night, was a horse I'd never met going over a rail into a propeller because it smelled me. Maybe it was Pike Place. Maybe it was Duke, the white all the way around his eye and the sound he made. Or maybe it was just the one thing in the whole movie I knew how to stop.

The poison went out of me like a bad taste fading. At the end of the five minutes the other thing came in: the pressure, the long held breath of air around me that I always forgot was there until it was gone. Wind Barrier, Slot 2. I hadn't had it slotted since the night of the fourteenth, since a propane bomb on the porch and Tatum's camera and the hand of God.

Deniable, I thought. Mostly. A gust. A squall. Weird weather on the water. Nobody had ever caught me at it, not once, and I was dumb enough to think that meant something.

I. Anacortes

The ferry terminal at Anacortes was a long low building at the end of a long low road on the end of a long low island, ninety minutes north of Seattle in the dark, with rain coming in sideways off the water and the loading-ramp lights orange in it. Gale had rented a Suburban, because the Town Car wasn't going to fit six people, and because somewhere between Pike Place and Noah's loft Gale Weathers had decided that if she was going to die on Saturday, she was going to do it in something big.

Rachel came with us. She'd left Aidan with Noah and said so once, in the car, in a voice that meant don't ask. Nobody asked.

Mulder and Scully were already there.

I knew them before I saw their faces. You would have too. A tall man in a long dark raincoat under the terminal awning, hands in his pockets, looking at the water, and next to him a small red-haired woman in a navy peacoat looking at the parking lot. Looking at us. Watching the Suburban pull in with the expression of somebody who'd been watching parking lots professionally for years.

They didn't come over. They waited for us to come to them.

We got out. Dewey had the evidence bag under his arm. Gale had her sunglasses on at seven in the morning, in the rain, in January. Rachel had her notebook. I had Sid's scarf and a duffel bag and a walkie-talkie that didn't reach anything, and I walked across the wet lot toward the two of them, and Fox Mulder turned from the water and looked at me.

He was younger than I'd thought. Thirty-five, maybe, with a long tired face, hair that needed cutting, and eyes doing about six things at once. He took me in—face, hands, scarf, duffel—and read me like a file.

"You're taller than I thought," said Fox Mulder.

"Everybody keeps saying that."

"I thought you'd be shorter. I thought you'd be..." He moved one hand vaguely. "I don't know what I thought. I thought you'd be older."

"I'm seventeen."

"I know. I have it in a file." He took his hand out of his pocket and held it out. "Fox Mulder."

I shook it. His hand was cold and dry and perfectly firm.

"Randy Meeks."

"I know," said Mulder. "You're in the file too."

Dana Scully didn't put out her hand. She looked at my face the way a doctor does: the color of it, the eyes, the skin around the nose. She'd see the dried blood in the corner of my left nostril that I'd missed in the mirror, and I watched her see it.

"Did you eat a vegetable?" said Scully.

"Two. A salad and a pickle."

"A pickle isn't a vegetable, Mr. Meeks."

"It was a cucumber once."

Something happened at the corner of her mouth, very small and gone very fast. I don't think anybody saw it except Mulder, who looked at her sideways like a man who'd been waiting four years for it.

Then she turned to Gale, and to Dewey and the cotton in Dewey's nose, and to Rachel, and her face went back to being a doctor's face.

"How many of you watched it," said Scully.

"Three," I said. "Me. Gale. Dewey."

"When?"

"Saturday night, ten-forty. And twelve-oh-eight Sunday, for me."

Scully nodded slowly. She didn't write it down. I watched her file it behind her eyes, next to two autopsies from October and whatever she'd seen in four kids' faces that she didn't have a name for.

"And her?" Scully looked at Rachel.

"No," said Rachel. "They won't let me."

"Good," said Dana Scully. Then, to Mulder, without looking at him: "You see? Some people have sense."

Mulder closed the cabin from a pay phone in the terminal at 7:12 a.m.

I stood next to him and listened, and it was something to see. He dialed the Shelter Mountain Inn from a number on a slip of paper out of his wallet, and when somebody answered, sleepy, he straightened up a little, the way a man does when he's about to put on a voice.

"Good morning. This is Special Agent Fox Mulder of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm calling about one of your cabins." Pause. "Yes. Number twelve." Pause. "Yes, I'm aware it's booked. Friday to Sunday. A party of four, under the name..." He looked at me. I mouthed it. "...under the name of a Mr. Josh's brother. No, I don't know his first name. That's not important. What's important is that Cabin 12 is part of an ongoing federal investigation into the deaths of four minors, and as of this phone call it's closed. Through Sunday at the earliest." A longer pause. "No, sir, you can't put them in Cabin 11. I'd prefer you not put anybody in any cabin. But I'll settle for twelve." Pause. "Refund them. Bill the Bureau." Pause. "Bill the Bureau, sir. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. It's in Washington, D.C. You'll find it." Pause. "Thank you. You've been very helpful. Somebody will be up to collect the key on Friday. Please don't let anybody into that cabin before then, including yourself. Especially yourself. Don't turn on the television in it. Don't take any tapes off the shelf. If you've got a cleaning crew scheduled, cancel it."

He hung up and stood a second with his hand on the phone.

"Skinner's going to kill me," said Mulder thoughtfully.

"Can they really bill the Bureau?"

"No idea," said Mulder. "I've never tried. I've always wanted to." He looked at me. "Your turn. Who's Josh's brother?"

"I don't know. Josh is the boyfriend of a girl named Katie. Sort of. It's complicated."

"It always is." He looked past my shoulder. "I think that's being handled."

At the other pay phone behind me, Rachel Keller was on the line with her sister. I couldn't hear Ruth. I could hear Rachel. Yes, I know. Yes, I know you said she could. Ruth. Ruth, listen to me. I'm asking you. I'm asking you as—no. No, it's not about the cabin, it's—the cabin's closed, Ruth. The FBI closed it. Yes, the FBI. No, I'm not joking.

Then a different voice came on the line, so loud I could hear it from six feet away, coming out of the receiver like a tiny furious radio.

"YOU'RE RUINING MY LIFE!"

Rachel closed her eyes.

"I know, sweetheart," she said into the phone. "I know I am."

"IT WAS GOING TO BE THE BEST WEEKEND OF MY WHOLE LIFE AND YOU CALLED THE FBI—"

"I didn't call the FBI. The FBI called them." Rachel opened her eyes and looked at me across the terminal with something in them I couldn't read. "Katie. Katie, listen. I'll take you somewhere. Next weekend. Anywhere you want. I'll take the four of you to Whistler. I'll pay for it. Okay? Just not this weekend. Just not there."

A pause. A sniff. A much smaller voice.

"...Whistler?"

"Whistler."

"...Can Josh come?"

"Josh can come. Scott can come. Becca can come. The whole Garfield High varsity can come." Rachel's voice cracked a little. "Just stay home this weekend, Katie. Please. Watch movies with your mom. Make popcorn." She stopped. "No. Don't watch movies. Read a book."

She hung up and stood with her hand on the phone, the way Mulder had, and then she walked over to me.

"I just promised four sixteen-year-olds a ski trip to Canada," said Rachel Keller.

"I'll chip in."

"You'll pay for the whole thing." Her eyes were very wet and very hard. "If I'm wrong about this. If I'm wrong, and you're wrong, and it's all a stupid carbon monoxide leak, and I made my niece cry on a Wednesday morning for nothing—"

"Then I'll pay for Whistler," I said. "And you'll have the best story of your life. Local Reporter Fooled by Teenage Crank."

Rachel held my eyes.

"And if I'm not wrong," she said.

"Then on Monday night Katie's at home, alive, mad at you," I said. "And she'll stay mad at you for a week. And then she'll forget about it, and she'll grow up and go to college and get married and have kids, and she'll never know why her aunt called the FBI on her once, in January, when she was sixteen."

Rachel didn't answer. She turned and looked at the water—the long gray swells coming in under the terminal, and the ferry coming out of the rain toward us, huge and white and lit up like a building, its horn going low and long.

"Okay," said Rachel Keller.

II. The Horse

The ferry was the Elwha: big and white and green, with a car deck you could've parked a hundred cars on and two passenger decks above it, windows all the way around, rows of vinyl booths, and a snack bar selling clam chowder and hot dogs and coffee in paper cups that burned your hands. On a Wednesday morning in January, in the rain, it was nearly empty. A few trucks. A school bus with no kids in it. A dozen cars.

And at the back of the car deck, near the stern, a horse trailer.

I saw it when we drove on. A dirty silver two-horse trailer hitched to a rusty Ford pickup with Moesko County plates, back gate shut, a tarp tied over the top against the rain. You couldn't see the horse, but you could hear it. Over the engines and the rain on the steel, even from inside the Suburban, you could hear it moving in there, shifting its weight, hooves on the trailer floor in a hollow, restless thunk, thunk.

Mulder saw me looking at it. He didn't say anything. He looked at me looking at it, then at the trailer, then back at me, and I saw him file that too.

"Upstairs," said Gale when we'd parked. "There's coffee. I want coffee. I want very bad coffee in a paper cup, in a booth by a window, and I want to sit there for an hour and look at the water and not think about anything."

"Me too," said Dewey.

"I'll catch up," I said.

Gale stopped with her hand on the stairwell door. She looked at me, then down the car deck at the trailer. She'd been on Dewey's couch. She'd been in the doorway of the cheese shop.

"Randy," she said.

"I'll stay away from it," I said. "I promise. I'll stay on this end. I just want to—I want to see if it notices."

That was true. I wanted to see whether the thing in the movie happened here, in this world, on this ferry, to me. Whether it was a rule or just a scene.

Gale studied me for a second and then went up the stairs. Dewey went after her, and Rachel after him, with a long look back at me.

Scully stayed by the Suburban with her arms crossed and looked at me, then at Mulder. "Mulder, don't," she said, in the voice of a woman who'd said it many times, and went up the stairs too.

That left Mulder. He leaned against the side of the Suburban with his hands in his raincoat pockets.

"I'd like to ask you something," he said. "While it's just us."

"Okay."

"In October," said Fox Mulder, "you put a list on the internet. Fourteen items. COMING SOON. I've had it on my wall since the day Scully printed it for me, which she says she didn't do, and which she did. Item four was a dream demon. A month later six kids in a psychiatric hospital in Springwood, Ohio, stopped dying in their sleep, and you were on a plane to Columbus. I can't prove you had anything to do with it, and neither can anybody else, which I find very interesting. Item nine was a talking doll. In December your street got a Globotech recall that Globotech has never heard of." He paused. "Item six was this."

"Yeah."

"I've checked them, Randy. All fourteen. I've spent more of the taxpayers' money than I'd like to say on checking a high school kid's website." He didn't look away. "Three of them have happened, near enough. And the others haven't happened yet. And I have a feeling you know when they will."

I kept quiet.

"I asked you how you know," said Mulder, "and you told me you couldn't tell me. And I believed you. That's never happened to me before. I'd like to know why I believed you."

And the horse screamed.

I'd been walking the whole time he talked—away from the trailer, slowly, toward the bow along the line of cars with my hands in my pockets, keeping my distance and my promise. I was at least eighty feet off, with wet steel deck and parked cars and the school bus between us.

It didn't make any difference.

The scream came out of the trailer like something tearing, high and ragged and human, the sound Duke had made in Pike Place but louder, because it came out of a metal box that made it ring. Then the trailer moved. The whole thing, trailer and pickup, rocked a foot sideways on its springs as if something inside had thrown itself against the wall. Again. Then hooves on the back gate, BANG, BANG, BANG, like somebody going at it with a sledgehammer.

The tarp came loose and flapped in the wind.

Down the deck a crewman in an orange vest started running toward it, shouting into a radio. An old man in a feed-store cap got out of the rusty pickup and stood staring at his own trailer with his mouth open.

BANG.

The trailer's back gate bent outward. I saw steel bend like a beer can in a fist.

BANG.

The latch went. The gate flew open and slammed against the side of the trailer, and the horse came out.

A big dappled gray mare with a white mane, beautiful, eyes rolling white all the way around, foam on her mouth and blood on her legs where she'd kicked the gate. She came out backward and spun on the wet deck, hooves sliding and sparking, went down on one knee and came up again, and the crewman in the orange vest threw himself sideways out of her way.

She turned her head and looked down the car deck at me.

Eighty feet. Of course she knew. Duke had known at thirty feet, and this one had known from the second I drove onto the boat. She'd been smelling me for forty minutes in a metal box.

She screamed again and reared straight up, enormous against the gray light at the open stern, rain coming in around her and the wake churning white behind her, and for a second I thought she was going to come at me—a thousand pounds of terrified horse down the car deck between the parked cars—and I'd have to—

She turned the other way.

She did what the horse in the movie did. She turned away from the thing that smelled like the bottom of a well, toward the only way out there was. The stern rail. The open water. The propeller.

She ran.

Until that second I hadn't really thought about what Wind Barrier was.

It's a barrier, and by default it goes around me. That's what the text says: by default it is a barrier around the user. It deflects projectiles and elements and doesn't do much against physical force. And everything I'd ever done with it I'd done close—a gust over my shoulder at a sniper's pellets in a side yard, a wall of air in front of a porch to carry a bomb into the street.

The horse was eighty feet away and running the wrong direction.

Default, I thought. So there's a non-default.

There wasn't time to think anything else. I took my hands out of my pockets and put my right hand out at the horse and the rail beyond her, the way I had on the porch on the fourteenth, and pushed—past her, at the rail.

I felt it go out of me, a lot of it, more than on the porch, more than ever, like opening a door in a hurricane and having it pull you through. It rushed out of my chest and down my arm and out of my hand, and eighty feet away at the stern of the Elwha, the air stood up.

I don't have a better way to put it. It stood up, a wall across the whole width of the car deck at the stern, rail to rail, fifteen feet high. You couldn't see the air. You could see the rain. The rain blowing in around the open stern hit it and stopped and went sideways all at once in a perfect sheet down its face, like water poured down a pane of glass, and the wake beyond it wavered, like the view through a fishbowl.

The gray mare hit it at a dead run.

It didn't hurt her. It wasn't hard, and it wasn't built to stop force. It gave, like a mattress, like the face of a wave. She went into it up to her shoulders and it slowed her and slowed her the way surf slows you when you run into it, the wind in it roaring, her mane standing straight up, hooves scrabbling and sliding on the wet steel, and she stopped.

Three feet from the rail.

She stood in the roaring air with her legs braced and her sides heaving, mane straight up, screaming.

I held it.

It was like holding a door shut against a crowd, and every second it pushed back. The energy kept pouring out of me down my arm faster than I could feel it go. My hand started to shake, and then my whole arm, and something warm ran out of my nose and over my lip, and I didn't wipe it. Behind me I heard somebody running—the old man in the feed-store cap yelling Bella, Bella, whoa, Bella—and the crewman on his radio saying something about the engines.

Slow down, I thought at the boat. Slow down. Slow down. Come on.

The deck changed under my feet. The deep shuddering hum of the engines dropped, and dropped again. The wake went from white to gray.

And the gray mare—Bella—stopped screaming.

She stood braced against the wall of wind while her head came slowly down and her ears came forward and the white went out of her eyes, and then she just stood there in the rain, shaking, three feet from the rail.

The old man got to her and got a hand on her halter. A woman in a barn coat came running down the deck from somewhere with a black bag, shouting I'm a vet, I'm a vet, let me through, and had a syringe out of the bag and into the mare's neck before anybody could say a word.

I let go.

The wall came down. The rain fell straight again and the roaring stopped, and Bella's mane fell back against her neck, and she stood with the old man's arms around her face and the vet's hand on her shoulder, her head going lower and lower and her eyes half closing.

I sat down on the wet steel deck.

I didn't mean to. My legs just did it. I sat down hard against the side of somebody's Honda with my arm shaking and my nose bleeding onto Sid's scarf, and I couldn't get my breath. I felt like I'd run five miles, like I'd thrown ten spears. I'd never emptied it like that, not even in the side yard on the fourteenth, and the inside of my chest felt scraped out and cold.

Standing over me, hands in his raincoat pockets, was Fox Mulder.

He'd watched the whole thing from six feet away. He'd been right next to me when I put out my hand.

He wasn't looking at the horse, or at the stern, where the crewmen were gathering now, staring at the rail and at each other and at the sky. He was looking at my right hand on the wet deck, still shaking.

He crouched down next to me slowly, like I was something wild that might bolt.

"Randy," said Fox Mulder softly.

"Yeah."

"That wasn't the wind."

I thought about lying. It was a squall. Weird weather on the water. The boat turned. I had a dozen of them ready, the way I'd had them ready for four months.

And I thought about a man who'd spent his whole adult life being told that what he saw wasn't real. By his bosses. By the Bureau. By his own partner, who loved him, and who'd have found an explanation for this one too if she'd been here—a good one, a reasonable one, one that would hold up.

He'd seen it from six feet away.

"No," I said.

Mulder didn't get excited. He didn't grab my arm or ask me twenty questions or take out a notebook. He crouched there next to me on the wet car deck of the Elwha, in the rain, looking at my hand, for what felt like a very long time, and his face did something I'd only seen once before, at the kitchen table on Sunday morning, on my mother. Like something he'd been holding up for years had finally been set down.

"Okay," said Fox Mulder.

"You can't tell Scully."

"She'd find an explanation."

"I know she would."

"She'd find a good one." He almost smiled. "She'd say it was a microburst. Downdraft off a squall line. They happen over open water. There's literature." He looked at the stern, at the crewmen, at the gray mare with her head on the old man's shoulder. "She'd be right, too, mostly. Except for the part where you pointed at it."

"Mulder."

"I won't tell her." He looked back at me. "Not because you asked. Because it's yours. It's not mine to tell." He paused. "Is that why? The way you know things? Is it—this?"

"No," I said. "It's a different thing. They're both part of something. I can't tell you."

"Yet?"

I thought about it.

"Maybe not ever," I said. "I'm sorry."

Mulder nodded slowly. He didn't look disappointed. He looked like a man who'd been told maybe not ever about a lot of things in his life and had learned that maybe was the important word.

He took a handkerchief out of his raincoat pocket, a real white cloth one, and handed it to me.

"Your nose," he said.

I pressed it to my face. It came away red.

Over Mulder's shoulder, at the stern, past the crewmen and the vet and the old man and the gray mare, a man stood by the rail.

A big man in a gray parka, motionless the way large men are, like furniture, rain running off his hood. He wasn't looking at the horse. He was looking at me, and he'd been looking at me the whole time.

I knew him. A face like a closed door behind the windshield of a cable van at the end of my street in December. A big gray man who'd caught a falling kid off a utility pole.

He met my eyes across eighty feet of car deck. He didn't nod, or do anything else; he just looked at me with no expression at all. Then he turned and walked to the stairwell on the far side of the deck and went up and was gone.

Mulder had turned his head to follow my eyes and caught the back of him going up the stairs.

"Who was that?" said Mulder.

I looked at the empty stairwell.

"I think," I said, "he works for Delaware."

Mulder let that sit.

"The charitable trust," he said slowly. "The three a.m. reader."

"Yeah."

"You told me to look, in October."

"Did you?"

"I looked," said Fox Mulder. "I've been looking since October." He stood up and held out his hand to help me up. "I'll tell you what I found sometime. When you can tell me how you know things."

I took his hand, and he pulled me up, and my legs held, mostly.

And in front of my eyes, in the gray light from the open stern, the panel opened.

Feat: Hold a horse off the propeller.Silver Ability (held).Story in progress: Seven Days.

I looked at it. Then I looked past it at Bella on the deck with her head on the old man's shoulder and her eyes half closed, and the vet stroking her neck—it's okay, girl, it's okay, I don't know what got into you.

I knew what got into her.

Upstairs I found Gale, Dewey, Rachel, and Scully standing at a booth by the window, staring out at the stern, where the crewmen were still at the rail looking up at the sky. Scully looked at me as I came up the stairs: at the handkerchief in my hand, at the blood on Sid's scarf.

"What happened down there?" said Dana Scully.

"The horse got loose," I said. "It almost went over. There was a gust."

"A gust."

"A big one."

Scully studied me. Then she looked at Mulder, who'd come up the stairs behind me with his hands in his pockets and his face perfectly blank.

"Mulder," she said. "What happened?"

"Microburst," said Fox Mulder. "Downdraft off a squall line. They happen over open water." He sat down in the booth and picked up somebody's coffee. "There's literature."

Scully looked at him.

I watched her not believe him, and decide not to ask, and put it away behind her eyes next to the autopsies and the four kids' faces and whatever else she'd been putting there for four years. Then she sat down across from him and took her coffee back.

III. The Fifth Friend

Moesko Island was eleven miles long and three wide, a hump of dark green in the gray water with a lighthouse on its north point and one town at its south end, where the ferry came in. The town was a main street, a harbor, a Lutheran church, a gas station, and a general store with a hand-painted sign that said BAIT · GROCERIES · VIDEO. It was the kind of place where everybody knew everybody, and within an hour of the Elwha docking the whole town knew that Old Man Hennessey's gray mare had nearly gone over the stern on the morning boat.

And that she'd done it when a skinny kid in a long green scarf walked past.

I could feel them knowing it. In the general store, where Gale bought a map of the island and the man behind the counter watched me over her shoulder the whole time. At the gas station, where a woman pumping gas into a truck stopped and stared. On the main street, where an old man on a bench outside the church watched the Suburban go by and lifted his hand slowly and made a sign on his chest that I didn't recognize and didn't like.

"They all know," said Rachel from the back seat. "Everybody on this island knows what happened to their horses."

"What happened to their horses?" said Dewey.

"Nineteen seventy-eight," said Rachel. "Or seventy-nine. The newspaper wasn't sure, and nobody here would tell me. The Morgans had the best horse ranch in the San Juans. Prize stock. They won ribbons at the state fair. And one winter all of them went into the sea. Every one. They swam out past the point and drowned." She watched the green hills go by in the rain. "Then other people's horses started doing it. Not all at once. One a year. Two. People stopped keeping horses here." A pause. "Mr. Hennessey's is the last one on the island, I think. He's been trying to sell that mare for six months. Nobody will take her."

Nobody said anything for a while.

"Where are we going first?" said Scully.

I looked at the map in Gale's lap. The lighthouse at the north end. A long road running up the spine of the island through the hills to a square of land with nothing marked on it but a name: MORGAN.

"Not there," I said. "Not yet. There's somebody I have to see first."

Danny Walsh lived with his mother in a gray house at the edge of town, on a street that ran down to the water, with a dead garden out front and a basketball hoop with no net on the garage. His mother answered the door. She was small and tired, with the face of a woman who'd buried her nephew in October and had been waiting ever since to find out whether she was going to bury her son.

She looked at Mulder's badge and Scully's, and her face didn't change. She'd seen them before, in November.

Then she looked at me.

"He won't talk to you," she said. "He won't talk to anybody. He won't come out of his room. He hasn't come out of his room since Thanksgiving, except to use the bathroom, and he cries at night, I can hear him through the wall, and I don't know—" She stopped. Her mouth worked. "What do you want with my son?"

"I want to tell him he's not in trouble," I said. "And that it's not all his fault. And that he's still here."

She studied me.

"Who are you?"

"I'm the one he wrote to," I said. "In November. On the internet. He asked me what happens after seven days."

Mrs. Walsh put her hand on the door frame.

Then she stepped back out of the doorway and pointed down the hall at a closed door with a curling NIRVANA poster on it, and went into the kitchen and stood at the sink with her back to all of us. I heard the water start running, and keep running, and nobody turned it off.

I went in alone.

Mulder wanted to come; I could see it. I asked him not to, and he looked at me—remembering the car deck, I think—and nodded and stayed in the hall. Scully stood next to him with her arms crossed. Gale and Dewey and Rachel stayed in the Suburban, because six strangers in a sixteen-year-old's bedroom isn't a conversation, it's a raid.

The room was dark. The curtains were drawn with a blanket pinned up over them, and the only light came from a lamp on the floor with a T-shirt draped over the shade, so the whole room was dim and brown and close, like the inside of a paper bag. It smelled like a room a boy hadn't left in seven weeks. Plates on the floor. Clothes. A stack of library books about Washington State history and the Morgans and the island, with slips of paper sticking out of them.

There was no TV. There was a pale rectangle in the dust on the dresser where a TV had been, and a cut cord hanging off the back of the dresser with its end wrapped in electrical tape.

Danny Walsh sat on his bed with his back against the wall and his knees up and the hood of a gray sweatshirt up over his head. He was sixteen and looked twelve. His wrists looked thin enough to snap, and his eyes in the brown light were huge and dark and very, very tired.

He looked at me when I came in and didn't say anything. Then his eyes went to the scarf and to my face, and I watched him know me, the way Rachel had in the P-I lobby. From TV. From Gale's hour on Thursday.

"You," said Danny Walsh.

"Yeah."

"You wrote back." His voice was a whisper, cracked from not being used. "You wrote back. In November. You said don't show anybody. You said—" His face folded up. "And I did. I did it anyway. I showed somebody—"

"I know," I said. "I read it. At Christmas."

I sat down on the floor by the door, not on the bed, with my back against the wall across the room from him, the way you sit down across from a dog that's been kicked. Low, out of his way, where he could see the door was open.

"I wrote back to that too," I said. "You didn't see it."

"I stopped looking. I stopped looking at everything. I—"

"I said you didn't do anything I wouldn't have been scared enough to do," I said.

Danny stared at me.

And I felt it come up in my throat—the hum, the organ's lowest note. Unbroken. You can always tell what words someone needs to hear to get back on their feet. I knew what he needed, the way it let me know things. It was right there. Easy.

It's not your fault.

Only it wasn't true, not all the way. He'd known; I'd told him. He'd been scared and sixteen and he'd done it anyway, and a man on a ferry had done it to somebody else, and somebody had done it to somebody, all the way down the coast to a motel in Woodsboro. It was his fault, a little. He knew that. If I told him otherwise he'd hear the lie in it, the way you always do when somebody tells you what you want to hear and you know it isn't so.

Only true things. I'd written it down on Christmas Eve at 11:59. YOU decide if it's true. If it isn't, don't say it.

So I said the true thing instead.

"You were sixteen," I said. "And you were alone. And your cousin was dead, and your three friends were dead, and you found that tape in Tyler's room and watched it because you wanted to know what killed them. And then the phone rang, and you had seven days, and you wrote to the only person in the world who seemed to know anything about it. And he said don't show anybody, and that's all he said. He didn't say I'll come. He didn't say here's what else you can do. He didn't say call me. He just said don't." I looked at him. "I left you alone with it, Danny. I'm sorry. That part's on me."

Danny was crying without making any noise, the way you cry when you've been at it for seven weeks and there's nothing left but the water.

"You did a bad thing," I said. "Because you were scared. You know that. I know that. I'm not going to tell you it wasn't bad. But it's not the only thing you did. You didn't go home and forget about it. You didn't pretend. You've been sitting in this room for seven weeks thinking about a man on a ferry whose name you don't know. You cut the cord off your TV." I looked at it, hanging off the dresser. "You went to the library and read everything about the Morgans you could find. You were trying to figure it out on your own. Weren't you?"

A very small nod.

"That's the other thing you did," I said. "That's the part that counts."

Danny put his face down on his knees and cried, and I sat on the floor and let him. Out in the kitchen I could hear Mrs. Walsh's water running and running.

When he lifted his head his face was a mess. He wiped it on his sleeve and looked at me across the room.

"Are you going to fix it?" said Danny Walsh.

"I'm going to try."

"How?"

"I don't know yet," I said. "I've got three days. I know some things. I don't know enough." I looked at the library books on the floor. "Tell me what you know."

He knew more than Mulder or Rachel or anybody, because he'd heard it from Tyler.

Tyler had told him the Tuesday after the cabin, on the phone, at night, scared and trying not to sound it. The four of them—Tyler, his girlfriend, and two buddies from the football team—had gone up to Shelter Mountain the last weekend of September and rented Cabin 12 because it was the cheapest. There was a TV and a VCR and a shelf of tapes in the closet. On Saturday night it was raining, and one of the buddies had money on the Sonics game and couldn't watch it live because they all wanted to go down to the lodge and play pool, so they decided to tape the game off the cabin's TV.

"So they put in a blank tape," said Danny. "From the shelf. One that didn't have a label. And they hit record, and they went down to the lodge." He swallowed. "And when they came back the game wasn't on it."

"What was on it?"

"That," said Danny. "It. The ring, and the lady, and the well, and all of it. Tyler said the TV was on when they got back. They'd turned it off, and it was on, and it was static, and the VCR was still recording. Recording the static." He looked at me. "Tyler said the cabin made it. He said the cabin made it. Right there, while they were gone. He said it was like it was waiting for somebody to put in a blank tape."

Neither of us breathed for a second.

It was made. Noah in his loft with his back to the screen. There's no control track. It was never there.

"And then they watched it," I said.

"They thought it was a prank. They thought somebody at the lodge had swapped the tapes. They watched it, all four of them, and they laughed, and then the phone rang." Danny's voice went down to almost nothing. "And Tyler took it home with him. To prove it. To show me. He wanted to show me. He said it's the creepiest thing you ever saw, I'll show you next weekend." His face crumpled. "And then next weekend he was dead."

I let the quiet stretch out.

"Danny," I said finally. "Did you ever go up there? To the cabin?"

He shook his head hard.

"Did anybody? After October?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. It's a long way. The lodge closes in the winter, mostly, except weekends." He looked at me. "Why?"

I thought about Katie. About Becca and Josh and Scott. Four sixteen-year-olds on a rainy Friday night in January in Cabin 12, deciding to tape something off the TV so they could go play pool.

It was like it was waiting for somebody to put in a blank tape.

"No reason," I said. "Not anymore."

I stood up. My knees cracked. Danny watched me.

"Danny," I said. "One more thing. Then I'll go and leave you alone."

He waited.

"Open your curtains," I said. "Today. Just for an hour. And go eat something your mom made, and let her see you do it." I looked toward the hall and the sound of the water. "She's been standing at that sink since we got here. She thinks she's going to lose you."

Danny looked at the door for a long while.

"Am I?" he said. "Is it—is it still—"

"It's not yours anymore," I said. "You showed it to somebody, and your seven days stopped. You're not on the clock. You're not going to die on Saturday. You're just sixteen and sad and really, really sorry." I put my hand on the door frame. "That's survivable. I promise. I've seen people survive it."

I went out into the hall.

Behind me I heard him get up off the bed. Then the blanket coming down off the window, the thumbtacks popping out of the wall one by one—tik, tik, tik—and the curtains sliding open on their rod. Gray light, the first in seven weeks, fell across the floor of the room, across the plates and the clothes and the library books, all the way to the door.

In the kitchen, Mrs. Walsh turned off the water.

Mulder was waiting in the hall. He'd heard all of it. So had Scully, who was looking at me with the doctor's face and something under it I couldn't read.

"You told him the truth," said Scully, once we were out on the porch.

"Yeah."

"You could have told him it wasn't his fault. It would've been kinder."

"It would've been a lie," I said. "He'd have known."

Scully looked at me in the rain on the porch, with the netless basketball hoop behind her.

"You're very strange, Mr. Meeks," said Dana Scully.

"I know."

"I don't mean it as an insult."

"I know," I said. "That's what makes it strange."

IV. The Morgan Ranch

We stopped at the island clinic first, because Rachel insisted. She'd tried to talk to the island doctor twice by phone in the fall and been hung up on twice. In person, with two FBI badges behind her, Dr. Grasnik didn't hang up.

She was a big gray woman in her sixties in a cardigan, with reading glasses on a chain and hands like a farmer's. She sat behind her desk and looked at all six of us crowded into her office, and at me longest. Then she took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes and told us about Anna Morgan.

You probably know some version of it already, so I'll keep it short.

Anna and Richard Morgan had wanted a child for ten years. Anna lost four babies, one miscarriage after another, and the last one nearly killed her. After that she went away for most of a year to a hospital on the mainland—a rest, the island called it, the way islands do—and when she came back, she had a little girl with her.

"She said she'd adopted her," said Dr. Grasnik. "Nobody asked from where. We were all just so glad for her. Anna had been so sad." She turned her glasses over in her hands. "And then the horses."

The horses had gone first. Then Anna started coming into the clinic. Headaches. Nosebleeds. Burns on her hands that she said she'd gotten from the stove. Pictures in her head, she'd told Dr. Grasnik once in this office, crying. Pictures that weren't hers, like somebody was putting them there. She shows me things, Anna had said. She doesn't mean to. She can't stop.

"I sent Anna back to the mainland," said Dr. Grasnik. "To Eola. And they kept the girl there too, for a while. For observation." She put her glasses down. "And then they both came home. And then the girl was gone. Anna said she'd sent her to live with relatives. Back east." She looked out at the rain. "And then Anna went off the cliff by the lighthouse. And Richard stopped coming into town, except for feed."

"When," said Mulder.

"Nineteen seventy-nine." Dr. Grasnik looked at him. "Agent Mulder, I'm the only doctor on this island, and I've been the only doctor on this island for thirty-one years. I've signed every death certificate. Anna's. Old Mr. Hollis's. The four boys' in October." She paused. "I never signed one for that little girl."

Nobody spoke.

"I'm not saying that means anything," said Dr. Grasnik. "Children move away. Families send them to relatives." She looked at me again. "But I've wondered. For eighteen years I've wondered. And when a horse goes crazy on the morning ferry because a boy walked past it..."

She didn't finish.

"Her name was Samara," I said.

Dr. Grasnik closed her eyes.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. It was."

The road to the Morgan ranch ran six miles north along the spine of the island through dark wet hills of fir and alder and bare white birch, rain coming down, wipers going, nobody talking. At the end of it was a gate and a long gravel drive between empty fields gone to rushes and blackberry, with the rotten remains of white fences running through them like the bones of something.

At the end of the drive stood a house and a barn.

I knew the barn before I'd properly seen it. I'd seen its roof from above at the bottom of every frame of the tape: long and dark and steep, with a cupola at one end and a running-horse weather vane on the cupola. And at the other end, high up under the peak of the gable, one small square window.

I stood in the gravel drive in the rain and looked at it, and it looked back, and I felt something in my chest that wasn't Battle Maniac and wasn't Survivor—something small and cold, like a fingertip.

There, I thought. She sat there. For years. Looking out.

"Randy," said Gale beside me. "Are you—"

The front door of the house opened.

Richard Morgan was in his sixties, tall and stooped, in a canvas barn coat and rubber boots, with a long gray face and very pale eyes, and he was holding a shotgun. He wasn't pointing it at anybody; he held it like a rake. He came out onto the porch and stood at the top of the steps and looked at all of us in his drive.

He looked at Mulder. "I asked you to leave in November."

"You did," said Mulder. "And I left."

"Then leave again."

"We'd like to ask you some questions, Mr. Morgan—"

"I don't answer questions." Richard Morgan looked past him: at Scully, at Gale and Dewey standing close together, at Rachel with her notebook. And at me.

He stopped.

He looked at my face and at the dried blood on Sid's scarf, and something went across his own face, slow and terrible, the look of a man recognizing something he'd hoped never to see again.

"You've seen it," said Richard Morgan, very low. "You've all seen it."

"Three of us," I said.

"Get off my land."

"Mr. Morgan—"

"You've brought it here," said Richard Morgan. His voice was shaking, and so was the shotgun. "You've brought it back here. To this house. Do you have any idea—" He stopped and breathed. "I won't help you. There's nothing to help. You can't stop it. It doesn't stop. It never stops. It just goes on."

"She just goes on," I said.

He went white.

"You know what she wants," I said. "Don't you? You've always known."

Richard Morgan stood at the top of his porch steps with the shotgun shaking in his hands and looked at me without saying anything. Then he turned around and went back into the house and closed the door, and I heard the bolt go.

We went to the barn anyway.

Mulder said it was probably trespassing, Scully said it was definitely trespassing, Mulder said probably and walked across the yard toward the barn in the rain, and nobody stopped him.

The barn was dark and huge and smelled of old hay and rot and something cold under both, like a cellar. The stalls had been empty for eighteen years. Some of the doors still had brass nameplates, gone green: DUCHESS. CAPTAIN. MAYBELLE. In one stall a halter still hung on a nail, its leather gone gray and stiff.

And at the far end, a ladder going up into the dark to a door in the ceiling.

I knew the ladder. I'd seen it at Dewey's at midnight and frame by frame in Noah's loft. A ladder leaning against a wall, against nothing.

"I'll go," I said.

"We'll all go," said Mulder.

"No." I looked at him. "Please. Just me. The first time. I'll call you."

He looked at me, and at the ladder, and then nodded and stepped back, and put his hand on Scully's arm when she started forward. She looked down at his hand on her arm and didn't move, and I went up the ladder with the rain drumming on the barn roof over my head.

Somebody had built a room up there.

It wasn't a hayloft, or hadn't been in years. Somebody had put it in under the roof of the barn years ago, plank floor and plank walls and a ceiling that sloped down on both sides with the pitch of the roof, so you could only stand straight in the middle. Maybe twelve feet by fifteen. Along one wall, an old iron hospital cot with no mattress, just rusted springs. In the middle of the floor, a wooden chair facing the window.

And the window.

One small square window under the peak of the gable at the end of the room, old glass, wavy and dirty. I walked across the creaking planks and looked out.

The lighthouse, off to the north on the point, white with a red top, small and far away in the rain. Below, the long dark roof of the barn falling away. Beyond that, the fields gone to rushes with the bones of the white fences running through them. Where the horses had been. Where they'd run, all those years ago, while a little girl sat in a chair by this window and watched them.

I turned around and looked at the room.

Somebody had papered the plank walls a long time ago, cheap wallpaper with little flowers, faded now to almost nothing, with brown water stains running down from leaks in the roof. It was peeling at the seams. On the wall across from the window, by the cot, a big piece had come loose at the top and hung down in a curl, and behind it, on the planks, there was something black.

I went over and took the curl of wallpaper between my fingers, carefully, the way I'd taken the fly out of the screen, and pulled it down. It came away in a long dry brittle strip with a sound like tearing paper.

Behind it, burned into the planks, every line scorched black into the wood like a brand, was a tree.

A tree alone on a hill, its branches spread wide against nothing. I'd seen it on the tape, burning by itself in the dark.

Nobody had painted it or carved it. It was burned into the wood from the inside, the way a picture burns onto the screen of an old TV left too long on one channel—soft at the edges, the wood around it scorched brown.

She'd done it. Sitting on this cot, looking at this wall, she'd thought it so hard for so long that the wall had kept it.

I stood there with the strip of wallpaper in my hand and stared at it.

"Mulder," I called. My voice came out strange. "You can come up now."

They came up one at a time: Mulder, then Scully, then Rachel, then Gale and Dewey. Nobody spoke. They stood in the little room under the roof and looked at the cot, and the chair facing the window, and the window, and the tree burned into the wall.

Rachel went to the window and looked out, and I watched her see the lighthouse. Her face changed.

"That's the view," said Rachel. "On the tape. At the bottom. Noah—"

"Yeah."

"She was here." Rachel turned around. "They kept her here. In a barn. In a room in a barn."

"With the horses," I said. "Until the horses died."

Scully had gone to the cot. She was looking at the springs and the frame and something on one of the iron legs I hadn't noticed: an old leather strap buckled around the leg, with a cuff on the end. Small. The size of a child's wrist.

Scully looked at it and didn't touch it.

"Mulder," she said, in a voice I'd never heard out of her.

He went and stood beside her and looked at the strap. After a moment, very carefully, as if he thought nobody was watching, he put his hand flat on the middle of her back. She didn't move away.

Gale was standing at the tree on the wall with her hand up an inch from the scorched wood, not touching it, Dewey behind her. She'd finally taken her sunglasses off, and her face in the gray light from the window was very pale. A thin line of blood was coming out of her left nostril, and she didn't wipe it.

"Randy," said Gale Weathers. "What does she want?"

I looked at the chair, the window, the lighthouse, the fields and the bones of the fences.

"Somebody to come up the ladder," I said.

Then, from the house, faint through the rain and the barn wall and the floor of the loft, I heard something I knew.

A radio, a woman singing an old scratchy song from a long time ago. Under it, a low electrical hum. And water running into a tub.

I knew that scene too.

I was down the ladder before anybody could say anything. I skipped the last six rungs and landed on the barn floor and ran, out the door and across the yard through the rain to the back of the house. Behind me Mulder shouted my name, somebody came down the ladder fast, and Scully said Mulder, the house, sharp, in a completely different voice—the voice of a doctor who's just heard the word tub.

The back door was locked. I put my shoulder into it.

I'm not big. I've never been big. But I'd been running five miles a day since September and climbing walls, and Survivor said the frame's rotten, hit it low, very calmly, at the back of my neck. I hit it low, and the frame went, and I went through into a kitchen that smelled of coffee and dust and old man, and down a hall toward the sound of water and the radio.

The bathroom door was open.

Richard Morgan sat in the old claw-foot tub in his clothes—barn coat, boots, everything—with the water running in, up to his chest and rising. All around him on the rim of the tub and on the floor, plugged into an orange extension cord that ran out the door and down the hall to an outlet in the wall, were things. A radio, playing. An electric heater glowing orange. A hair dryer. A lamp with no shade. A space heater. A toaster. A dozen of them. Every electrical thing in the house on one cord, lined up on the rim of the tub like an audience.

He was holding the heater in his hands over the water.

He looked up at me when I came into the doorway, and his face was calmer than it had been all day, calmer than I'd ever seen anybody.

"You don't know what she is," said Richard Morgan.

"I know what she is."

"She'll never stop." He looked at the heater in his hands. "She'll never stop. Not for anyone. Not ever. I'm sorry for you, son. I'm sorry I can't help you."

"You can," I said. "You can help me. You're the only one who can—"

He let go of the heater.

I don't know how fast I moved. I've thought about it a lot since, and I still don't. I know I didn't go for the heater. It was four feet away and falling, and nobody's that fast, not even me with everything I had. I went the other way.

I went for the cord.

It lay on the hall floor right behind me where it came in the bathroom door. There wasn't time to pick it up properly. I threw myself down and backward and grabbed it with both hands and pulled with my whole weight, like a tug-of-war, all of me, backward down the hall away from the bathroom.

At the end of the hall the plug came out of the wall.

SNAP.

The radio stopped. The heater stopped glowing in midair a foot above the water. The lamp went out and the whole room went gray, lit only by the window over the tub.

The heater hit the water.

It went in with a big flat splash and sank and lay on the bottom of the tub between Richard Morgan's boots, a dead orange box in four feet of cold water.

Nothing happened.

I lay on my back on the hall floor with the end of the extension cord in both fists and the plug in my lap, three inches of brown prongs, and listened to the water still running into the tub. That was all. Water running, and a man breathing.

Then Scully came through the broken back door at a dead run and stepped over me without looking, and went into the bathroom, and I heard her, very calm and very fast: "Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan, look at me. I'm a doctor. I'm going to get you out of the water now. Don't move. Mulder, turn off the tap. Mulder—"

Mulder stepped over me too and went in and turned off the tap.

Then Dewey was in the hall, and Gale, and Rachel, all of them, and Dewey crouched down next to me saying Randy, Randy, you okay, buddy, and I said yeah, and I didn't let go of the cord. I couldn't make my hands let go. I lay on the floor holding it like a live thing that might crawl back to the wall.

In the bathroom, Richard Morgan started to cry—an old man's crying, dry and terrible and quiet, like something tearing very slowly. Like something that had held itself up for eighteen years and couldn't anymore.

"She was never ours," I heard him say, to Scully, to the water, to nobody. "She was never ours. Anna wanted her so much. And she was never ours."

And Scully, very gently, getting him out of the tub and a towel around him, in a doctor's voice: I know. I know. Come on. Come on now. Let's get you warm.

I lay on the hall floor and looked at the ceiling, and in front of my eyes the panel opened.

Feat: Pull the plug on a story's ending.Silver Trait (held).Story in progress: Seven Days.

I closed my eyes. Not this time, I thought. Not him either.

V. Dub

Dr. Grasnik kept Richard Morgan overnight at the clinic in the one bed she had, and Scully sat up with him until ten. He didn't say anything else. He lay there in a borrowed flannel nightshirt with an IV in his arm for the cold and looked at the ceiling, and when Scully asked him questions, he closed his eyes.

We stayed at the Harbor House, a white clapboard bed-and-breakfast on the water three doors down from the ferry dock. It was run by a widow named Mrs. Lindqvist, who'd heard about the horse and the Morgan place, and who looked at me over her reading glasses when I signed the register the way the old man on the church bench had. She gave us four rooms on the second floor. She didn't ask why there were six of us, or why one was a deputy from California carrying an evidence bag. She said breakfast was at seven, the TV in the parlor didn't work, and she'd be obliged if nobody tried to fix it.

I called home at nine from the phone in the hall.

"Did you look at her yet?" said Martha, first thing, before over, before hi, before anything.

"Not yet," I said. "But I found where she lived."

A long pause on the line.

"Was it bad?"

I thought about the cot. The strap on its leg, the size of a child's wrist. The chair facing the window. The tree burned into the wall.

"Yeah, Mart," I said. "It was bad."

"Okay." Another pause, very small. "Then you have to look at her twice as hard. Over."

At ten-thirty Mulder knocked on the door of the room I was sharing with Dewey.

Dewey had been asleep since nine-fifteen, face down on top of the covers in his clothes with the evidence bag on the pillow next to his head. I'd taken his boots off and he hadn't woken up.

Mulder looked past me at him, then at me.

"Can you come downstairs," said Mulder. "Scully wants to tell you something, and she wants me there when she tells you." He paused. "I don't know what it is. I think I'm about to find out."

The parlor of the Harbor House had a low fire going, old furniture with lace on the arms, and a TV in the corner with a crocheted afghan thrown over it, which I suspected had nothing to do with whether it worked. Scully sat on a little sofa by the fire with her hands folded in her lap and her coat still on. She'd come straight from the clinic.

Mulder sat in an armchair across from her. I sat on a footstool between them, by the fire.

"Agent Mulder," said Scully.

Mulder's eyebrows went up. She never called him that, I'd learn later—not when they were alone, not unless it was very bad or very official.

"In December," said Scully, "on the nineteenth, you interviewed a man in Everett. A Mr. Paul Arneson. The second of your three survivors."

"I remember."

"He gave you a videotape. A copy. He said he'd made two in a panic and only shown one, and he wanted the other one out of his house. You logged it into evidence at the field office in Seattle and had it shipped to Washington, to your evidence locker, so you could have it analyzed."

Mulder had stopped moving.

"I took it out of your locker," said Dana Scully, "on the twenty-third. Before you came back from Washington State. Before you'd had time to think about watching it." She looked at the fire. "You would have, Mulder. You know you would have. You'd have told yourself it was for the case. You'd have told yourself you needed to know what was on it. And a week later you'd have been dead on your apartment floor, and I'd have done your autopsy and found nothing."

Mulder didn't say anything. He was looking at her.

"I've had it since the twenty-third," said Scully. "I put it somewhere you'll never look. I've known where it is every minute of every day since. I haven't watched it. I'm not going to." She finally looked at him. "And I'm not going to tell you where it is."

"Scully—"

"That's the point, Mulder." Her voice didn't rise; it got softer. "That's the whole point. If I tell you, you'll know. And then some night when you can't sleep, and you're thinking about your sister, and about all the things nobody will ever show you, you'll go and get it. And you'll put it in. Because you have to see." She stopped. "So I'm not going to tell you. Not ever. And when this is over I'm going to burn it, by myself, and you'll never know where."

The fire popped.

Mulder sat in the armchair looking at her. I thought he was going to argue. I'd watched him argue with her on TV for nine seasons in another life, and I knew the shape of it: Scully, if there's even a chance—

He didn't.

He looked at her, then at me on the footstool between them, and I watched him remember an email from a kid in California at Christmas. And if Scully finds it, let her hide it from you. She'll be right.

"He told me you'd do that," said Fox Mulder slowly. "In December. He told me to let you."

"I know," said Scully. "He told me on the phone, on Sunday. That's why I'm telling you now." She looked at me. "I didn't think anybody else in the world would ever say that to you, Mulder. That you should let me. And then a seventeen-year-old in California said it. On the internet." Something moved at the corner of her mouth. "I thought you should hear it from me, too."

Mulder didn't answer for a long while.

Then he leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor and said softly, "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For hiding it from me." He didn't look up. "I would have watched it."

"I know you would."

"I'd be dead by now."

"I know."

"Scully—"

"Don't." She stood up and buttoned her coat, though it was already buttoned, and looked at the fire. "Don't say anything else, Mulder. It's late. Some of us have been sitting with a man who tried to electrocute himself for six hours, and some of us need to sleep." She went to the door and stopped there with her hand on the frame, the way Martha had stopped in my bedroom door. "Mr. Meeks."

"Yeah?"

"Trust no one," said Dana Scully, "but trust Scully." She looked at me over her shoulder. "Where did you get that?"

I thought about a TV in a group home in another life, late-night reruns with the sound down low so nobody would hear. A ten-year-old boy who'd watched two people in a dark room with flashlights and decided that was what it would look like, if somebody ever had your back.

"I always knew it," I said. "I just wrote it down."

Scully looked at me a moment longer. Then she went up the stairs.

Mulder sat with his elbows on his knees long after she'd gone.

"Dub," he said finally, to the fire.

"What?"

"That's what Arneson called it. The second copy. The dub. Like he was talking about a tape he'd made off the radio." Mulder shook his head slowly. "She had it in her hands for three weeks. Every day. And she never once—"

"She's Scully," I said.

"Yeah." Mulder looked at the stairs where she'd gone. "Yeah, she is."

On my way back up I passed the window at the end of the second-floor hall, the one that looked out over the porch and the harbor.

Gale and Dewey were on the porch swing in the dark under one blanket, with rain falling past the porch roof in a curtain and the harbor lights beyond it, the masts of the fishing boats swaying. Gale had her head on Dewey's shoulder. Dewey had his arm around her. They weren't talking, just swinging very slightly, looking at the harbor.

I stopped. It was none of my business, and I stayed anyway.

"Gale," said Dewey after a while, so softly I could barely hear him through the old glass.

"Mm."

"When this is over—"

"Don't." She didn't lift her head. "Don't, Dewey."

"I just wanted to—"

"I know what you wanted to." She paused. "Don't say anything to me tonight that you'd say to a woman who's going to die on Saturday. I don't want to hear it like that. I don't want the first time I hear it to be because of this." Her hand found his under the blanket. "Say it on Sunday."

Dewey took a long time to answer.

"Okay," he said. "Sunday."

"Promise."

"I promise, Gale."

"Good." She settled her head back on his shoulder. "Then I'll be there to hear it."

I went to bed and left them the porch.

Kristen took me to her kitchen that night.

Her mom's kitchen in Springwood, Ohio, on Elm Street—yes, that Elm Street, but a yellow house with green shutters down the block from 1428, with a linoleum floor and a feed-store calendar and a half-finished popsicle-stick model of the Thompson house on top of the refrigerator, gathering dust.

"I wanted you to see it," said Kristen. She was sitting on the counter in the RANDY vest, swinging her feet. "You've never been. I've been to your house twice. You've never been to mine."

"It's nice."

"It's small." She looked around. "My mom's never home. She's at the club. Or with her boyfriend. It's okay. It's quiet." She looked at me. "Where were you today?"

So I told her about the horse and Danny and the barn, the room up under the roof, the strap on the cot, the tree on the wall. And Richard Morgan in the tub with the heater in his hands.

She listened to all of it, swinging her feet.

"You pulled the plug," said Kristen.

"I pulled the plug."

"You literally pulled the plug."

"I'm aware of the metaphor, Kris."

She laughed—the first time I'd heard her laugh since Sunday. Then she stopped and looked at me, and her face got serious.

"Randy," she said. "When you go down there. In the well. Can I come?"

"You can't. It's not a dream. It's real."

"I know." She looked at her hands. "I know it's real. I just—" She stopped. "I hate this. I hate that you're going somewhere I can't come. I've always been able to come. Every time. In October I could always come in and get you." Her voice wobbled. "And this time I can't."

I went and stood in front of the counter. In the dream she was sitting on it, so for once we were the same height.

"You've been coming in to get me every night," I said. "Since Sunday. You've been holding a door open from Ohio, in the wind, so I could sleep. You said so." I looked at her. "That's coming in to get me, Kris. That counts."

She looked at me for a while. Then she leaned forward and put her forehead against mine, and that was all, and we stayed like that in her mother's kitchen under the popsicle-stick house until I fell asleep inside the dream and didn't know anything at all.

VI. Eola

On Thursday morning I went to the clinic before breakfast.

Richard Morgan was sitting up in the bed with a cup of coffee in both hands, looking out the window at the harbor. Dr. Grasnik was at her desk in the next room with the door open. She looked at me when I came in, then at Richard, and then she got up and closed the door and left us.

He didn't look at me. He looked at the harbor.

"You pulled my cord," he said.

"Yes."

"I've been trying to do that for eighteen years. Every winter. I always got as far as the tub." He turned the coffee cup in his hands. "Eighteen years, and the one time I meant it, a boy pulls the cord out of the wall."

"I'm sorry."

"No, you're not."

"No," I said. "I'm not."

Something tugged at the corner of his mouth, a muscle that hadn't been asked to do anything in a long time.

"Anna took her up the mountain," said Richard Morgan.

I didn't move.

"Before they built the cabins. It was just a field up there then. A field and an old well from a homestead that burned before the war." He was still looking at the harbor. "Anna said she was taking her to see the horses. There were horses up there then, at the stables by the lodge. Samara loved the horses. Before." He stopped. "Anna came home without her. She said it's done. She said it's over now, Richard, it's over. And I didn't ask. I never asked. I never went up there. I never—"

He stopped.

"I never looked," said Richard Morgan. "Not once. Not at her. Not after the horses. Anna loved her so much at first, and then she was so afraid of her, and I just—I didn't look. I worked in the barn. I fixed the fences. I let Anna put her in that room, and I put the strap on the bed myself, and I went down the ladder every night and I never looked back up." His hands were shaking on the cup. "Eighteen years, son. And I still can't see her face. I try. I can't. I never looked at her long enough to remember it."

I let the room stay quiet.

"I'm going to the well," I said. "Saturday. Before midnight."

He nodded slowly.

"And I'm going to look at her," I said. "And I'm not going to look away. Whatever she is. Whatever comes out." I looked at him. "That's what she wants, Mr. Morgan. I think it's all she ever wanted. For somebody to come up the ladder."

Richard Morgan sat in the bed and didn't say a word.

"You could come," I said.

He closed his eyes.

"I'm not asking you to," I said. "I'm just telling you that you could. It's three hours to Shelter Mountain. Cabin 12. Saturday night." I stood up. "She's still your daughter. Whatever else she is."

I went to the door.

"Son," said Richard Morgan behind me.

I stopped.

"What color were her eyes?"

I thought about a girl in a white dress with her hair in her face, in a movie, in another life. I'd never seen her eyes. Nobody had. That was the point.

"I don't know," I said. "I'm going to find out."

I went out without looking back, past Dr. Grasnik at her desk, who didn't look up either.

We took the noon ferry back to Anacortes. There were no horses on it. I checked.

From the ferry terminal Mulder made two phone calls and Scully made one. When they were done, Mulder came over to the Suburban, where the rest of us were waiting in the rain, and leaned in Gale's window.

"Eola," he said. "The state hospital records are in the basement of the old administration building, outside Sedro-Woolley. The hospital closed in '89. The building's still there. There's a records clerk named Mr. Prentiss who's been there since 1971 and has never once been asked for anything." He paused. "He's expecting us at three. He sounded excited."

The Eola State Psychiatric Hospital was a long brick building on a hill in the Skagit Valley—three stories of tall narrow windows, most of them boarded, a clock tower with no hands, and a lawn gone to moss and dandelions, all of it inside a chain-link fence. A sign on the gate read STATE OF WASHINGTON · NO TRESPASSING, with a smaller, newer one under it: RECORDS · ADMIN BLDG · BASEMENT · RING BELL.

Mr. Prentiss was a small man in his sixties with a cardigan, a bow tie, and a ring of keys on his belt the size of a dinner plate, and he was, as Mulder had said, very excited. Nobody had asked him for a file in two years. He took us down two flights of iron stairs into a basement that went on forever, rows of steel shelving under bare bulbs, cardboard boxes, filing cabinets, the smell of old paper and damp and mice, and he talked the whole way.

"Morgan," he said. "Morgan, Morgan. Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Pediatric observation. That would be Dr. Scott's patients. Dr. Scott was in charge of the children's ward, you see, a very modern man, very interested in new techniques, he videotaped everything, every session, it was quite controversial at the time—" He stopped at a shelf and ran his finger along a row of boxes. "Here we are. MORGAN, S."

He pulled the box down. Inside was a thick manila folder and, under it, a videocassette. Not VHS: a big one, the size of a hardcover book, gray plastic, with a paper label on the spine in faded typewriter capitals.

MORGAN, SAMARA / SESSION 7 / 11/14/78 / DR. SCOTT

"U-matic," said Mr. Prentiss happily. "Three-quarter inch. We've still got a player. Nobody's used it since 1989. I keep it dusted."

Everybody looked at the tape.

"It's not the tape," I said. "It's a hospital recording. It's safe."

"How do you know?" said Rachel.

"Because it's got a label," I said. "And because she didn't make it. Somebody made it of her."

The player was a big beige machine on a rolling cart in a corner of the basement, with a little twelve-inch monitor on top and dust on the screen. Mr. Prentiss plugged it in. It hummed and clicked, and the monitor came up gray.

We all stood around it—me, Gale and Dewey, Rachel, Mulder and Scully, and Mr. Prentiss with his hands clasped in front of his bow tie, beaming, until he saw our faces and stopped beaming.

He put the tape in and pressed play.

A room. White walls, a table, a window with wire mesh in the glass. At the table, a man in a white coat with his back to the camera, only the back of his head and one shoulder showing: Dr. Scott. Across the table from him, facing the camera in a white hospital gown with long dark hair falling over her face, a little girl.

She was maybe seven, and very small. She sat in the chair with her hands in her lap and her bare feet not touching the floor, and she didn't move at all.

The doctor asked her questions—simple ones, in a soft professional voice. How are you feeling today, Samara. Do you know why you're here. Do you miss your mother. Do you miss the horses.

She answered some of them. Her voice was small and hoarse and very patient: exactly the voice from the phone in Dewey's kitchen. Gale made a sound beside me, and Dewey's hand found hers.

Do you miss the horses.

They're not dead, said the little girl.

Samara, the horses died. All of them.

They're not dead, she said. They just went in the water.

I made myself keep looking.

The hard part was the pull. I could feel it the way it must have pulled at all of them—at Anna and Richard and Dr. Scott and everybody who'd ever been in a room with her—the wanting to look away. She wasn't scary, on that tape. She was a little girl in a hospital gown with her feet not touching the floor. The pull came from somewhere older, like looking into the sun, when something very deep in you says don't.

I kept looking.

At the back of my neck, Survivor said, very calmly, She's not doing anything. She's just sitting there.

In my throat, Unbroken hummed. Your will is a locked door.

Samara, said the doctor. Your mother says you make her see things. Pictures. Is that true? Do you put pictures in her head?

The little girl didn't answer.

Then she lifted her head.

Her hair moved—not all the way, but enough that for the first time you could see a sliver of pale face behind it, and one eye. She wasn't looking at the doctor. She was looking at the camera. At us, through the lens, through twenty years and three-quarter-inch tape and a twelve-inch monitor in a basement in the Skagit Valley, at the six of us standing around a beige cart under a bare bulb.

At me.

Rachel took a step back. Mr. Prentiss made a small sound and put his hand over his mouth. Behind me Scully said Mulder, very softly, and Mulder didn't say anything at all.

I didn't step back.

I looked at the one dark eye in the sliver of pale face behind the hair, and I didn't look away. My eyes burned. My nose started bleeding again, warm over my lip, and I didn't wipe it. I looked at her the way I'd looked at the fly and the tree on the wall—the way Martha had told me to. Twice as hard.

Her eye was gray. Gray like the water off the point at Moesko. Like rain.

I'll tell him, I thought. Mr. Morgan. They're gray.

And on the screen, still looking out of the monitor at me, Samara Morgan said in her patient, hoarse voice:

I don't want to hurt you.

The doctor started to say something.

But I do, she said. And I'm sorry.

A pause. Her hair fell back across her face. She looked down at her hands in her lap.

It won't stop.

The screen went to snow.

Nobody spoke.

Mr. Prentiss, white as paper, reached out with a shaking hand and pressed STOP. The snow went away and the monitor went gray, and the player hummed in the basement.

I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. It came away red. Scully handed me a tissue without looking at me; she had the tissues too.

"That's not the end of the tape," said Mr. Prentiss faintly. "There should be—the session's fifty minutes. It should go on. There's more. There's—"

"There isn't," I said. "Not anymore."

He looked at me.

"She was done," I said. "She said what she wanted to say."

Gale was holding Dewey's hand so hard her knuckles were white. Rachel had her arms wrapped around herself. Mulder was looking at the monitor. And Scully was looking at me—at the tissue in my hand, at my face—with the doctor's look and something under it I didn't have a name for.

"She looked at you," said Dana Scully, barely above a whisper. "On the tape. Twenty years ago. She looked at you."

"She looked at all of us."

"No," said Scully. "She looked at you."

I folded the tissue and put it in my pocket.

"Randy," said Gale. Her voice almost held. "It's Thursday."

"I know."

"It's four o'clock on Thursday. We've got—" She looked at Dewey, then at the Hamilton on my wrist. "Two days. Two days and six hours, for me. For us."

"I know."

"So what do we do?"

I looked at the gray monitor.

I don't want to hurt you. But I do. And I'm sorry. It won't stop.

Not I won't stop. It won't. As though it had happened to her. As though she were inside it too, with the rest of us—a machine somebody had switched on a long time ago that nobody had ever come back to switch off.

"We go up the mountain," I said. "Tonight."

We drove up in the dark.

Gale drove. She said she needed to, and nobody argued. The Suburban went east out of the valley on Highway 20 and then up into the Cascades on a two-lane road switchbacking through the trees, the rain turning to sleet and then to snow on the windshield, big wet flakes coming out of the dark into the headlights, white, white, white, like static.

Mulder and Scully followed in their rental. I could see their headlights in the side mirror, two small lights in the snow, staying close.

Nobody talked much. Rachel called Noah from a gas station in Concrete and talked to Aidan, and came back to the car with her face wet and didn't say anything. Dewey sat in the back with his hand on the evidence bag in his lap. I sat up front next to Gale with Sid's scarf around my neck, the unicorn notebook with Aidan's drawing in my lap, and the walkie-talkie on the dashboard, hissing at nothing.

At nine I called home from a pay phone outside a closed diner at the top of a pass, in the snow.

"Did you look at her?" said Martha.

"I looked at her."

"What did she look like?"

I thought about it.

"Like a kid," I said. "Like a kid who's been waiting a really long time for somebody to come get her."

A long silence on the line. Static. Snow falling past the phone booth.

"Then go get her," said Martha Meeks. "Over."

"Over," I said.

The sign came up in the headlights at 11:40 p.m. Old carved wood, the letters painted white a long time ago, half covered in snow.

SHELTER MOUNTAIN INNCABINS · LODGE · STABLESEst. 1981

Gale slowed the Suburban without stopping, and we rolled past the sign at ten miles an hour, all of us looking at it while the snow came down on it and on us, white, white, white.

Est. 1981. Two years after Anna came home alone and said it's done. They'd built the place right on top of her.

I looked at the Hamilton.

11:41 p.m. Thursday, January 16, 1997.

Gale and Dewey had forty-six hours and fifty-nine minutes. I had an hour and a half on top of that.

Gale turned up the long drive through the trees toward the lights of the lodge. Somewhere beyond it, up the hill in the dark and the snow, was a row of little cabins—and the twelfth one, locked by order of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with a TV and a VCR and a shelf of tapes—and under it, a well.

Due back Saturday night, I thought, like a sticker on a rental, and for the first time since Dewey's kitchen phone rang, the thought didn't scare me.