Chapter 21: Due Back (Patreon)

The lodge at the Shelter Mountain Inn was dark when we pulled up at 11:52 on Thursday night, except for one yellow window by the front door with a hand-lettered sign taped inside the glass: NIGHT BELL →. Snow came down slow and heavy through the porch light. The lodge roof was a long white slope, and past it, up the hill through the trees, I could see the cabins—small and dark and square, snow on their roofs, a row of them climbing the hill along a path like a row of teeth.

Mulder rang the bell.

The man who came to the door was in his fifties, in a bathrobe over long johns, with a flashlight in one hand and a ring of keys in the other. He studied Mulder's badge in the porch light, then the rest of us standing behind him in the snow, and sighed the sigh of a man whose winter had been going fine until Wednesday morning.

"You're the FBI," he said.

"I'm the FBI," said Mulder.

"The one who canceled my weekend booking."

"That's me."

"The kid's dad called this afternoon. Josh's brother's dad. He was pretty steamed." The manager held out a key on a plastic tag shaped like a pine tree, with 12 on it in white paint. "He said the FBI owes him a ski trip."

"Somebody's already paying for that," said Mulder, and looked at me.

"I'm aware," I said.

Then the manager looked at me too, in the porch light with the snow coming down: at my face, the scarf, the blood dried in the creases of my left nostril that I'd stopped bothering to wipe.

"I've got Eleven and Thirteen open on either side," he said slowly to Mulder, still looking at me. "And Nine. Heat's on in all of them. I'll put it on the Bureau's tab." He held out three more keys. "I don't want to know what's going on in Twelve, do I?"

"No, sir," said Mulder. "You really don't."

The manager nodded. He didn't seem surprised. He'd been running this place for years, on this mountain, over the spot where a well had been, and I thought maybe some part of him had always known.

"Checkout's at eleven," he said. "Sunday. If you're still here." And he closed the door.

I. Cabin 12

Nobody went in that night. At midnight the six of us stood on the path below it in the snow with our flashlights and looked at it.

It was just a cabin. A little square log cabin with a peaked roof, a porch with two chairs on it, a wooden 12 by the door, and a curtained window on either side. Snow on the porch and the chairs. An unshoveled path up to it, white and smooth, no footprints since Wednesday.

It looked like every cabin in every movie where something bad happens in a cabin. It looked like the Knowby cabin. It looked like Crystal Lake. It looked like it was waiting.

"Tomorrow," I said. "In daylight."

Nobody argued.

I slept in Eleven with Dewey. Gale slept in Thirteen, on the other side of Twelve, with Rachel. Mulder and Scully took Nine, down the hill; I don't know how they divided it up, and I didn't ask.

There was a TV in Eleven, a little Zenith with rabbit ears on a stand in the corner, and a VCR under it, and twenty or thirty lodge rentals on a closet shelf with their spines labeled in black marker. CADDYSHACK. BEETHOVEN. THE MIGHTY DUCKS. I unplugged the TV and turned it to face the wall. I unplugged the VCR. I carried every tape out onto the porch in my arms and left them in a pile in the snow.

Dewey watched me from the bed.

"You think there's one of those in there?" he said.

"No."

"Then why—"

"Because I don't know there isn't," I said. "And because Tyler Walsh's group put a blank one in and hit record and went to play pool."

Dewey got up off the bed and checked the closet himself with his flashlight, all the way to the back. Then the dresser drawers, under the bed, the cabinet under the bathroom sink. He didn't find anything. He came back and sat on the bed.

"Okay," said Dewey.

Kristen took me to the garage roof again that night, in the summer, with the crickets. Neither of us said much.

"Two more nights," she said once, toward the end.

"One more," I said. "Tomorrow night I'll be up."

"Then tomorrow night I'll be up too," said Kristen Parker. "By the phone. All night. In case you call." She looked at the street, the streetlight, the summer that wasn't. "You'd better call."

On Friday morning, in daylight, in the snow, Mulder opened the door of Cabin 12.

One log room with a pine floor, a braided rag rug, a cold woodstove in the corner, and a little kitchenette along one wall with a two-burner stove and a sink. A double bed with a green spread. A table with two chairs. A window at the back looking up the hill into the trees. And a TV, a twenty-inch Panasonic on a stand against the wall facing the bed, with a VCR on the shelf under it blinking 12:00, 12:00, 12:00 because the power had gone out at some point and nobody had reset it.

The closet door was open. There was a shelf in it, and tapes on the shelf.

We stood in the doorway on the porch in the cold and looked, and for a while nobody went in.

"It's just a cabin," said Gale finally, in a small voice.

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

I went in first.

I went straight to the TV and pulled its plug and the VCR's out of the socket behind the stand, and the 12:00 quit blinking. Then I went to the closet. Twenty-two tapes, most of them labeled rentals like Eleven's—HOME ALONE 2, FREE WILLY, HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS—and at the end of the shelf, three without labels. Plain black cassettes, the cheap kind you buy in a three-pack at the drugstore. Blanks, for guests. In case you want to tape something.

I took them out one at a time and held them.

They were just tapes. I didn't feel anything. They weren't cold and they didn't hum. They were blank tapes waiting for somebody to put them in a machine.

"Dewey," I said. "You got another bag?"

He had three. Of course he did; he'd brought a box of them from the station, folded flat in his duffel, the brown paper kind with the red tape and the lines on the front. He held one open, I put the three blanks in, and he sealed it and wrote on it in block capitals:

ITEM: VHS cassettes, blank, 3CABIN 12DO NOT RECORD

And under that, smaller:

ever

The well was under the floor.

I'd known it would be since Richard Morgan in the clinic, looking at the harbor, saying before they built the cabins. And before that, in another life, in a theater, when Rachel Keller pulled up the floorboards and found a stone ring with a heavy lid under the cabin, right under the TV.

Here it wasn't under the TV. It was under the bed.

Mulder found it. He'd been walking the whole floor slowly, heel to toe, the way he must have learned at some academy in Virginia a long time ago, listening to the boards. By the bed he stopped, stepped back, stepped forward again, and the board under his foot sounded different. Hollow.

Mulder and Dewey and I lifted the bed, the iron frame scraping on the pine, and set it against the wall by the window. Under it, a square of floorboards about five feet across was a little newer than the rest, a slightly different color, the nail heads gone to rust.

Mulder looked at me.

"There's a pry bar in the Suburban," said Gale behind us. "In the back. With the jack." She'd gone very pale. "I saw it when I rented it."

Dewey went and got it.

It took an hour. The nails were old and the wood was hard, and Dewey and Mulder took turns with the pry bar while nobody said much. The boards came up one at a time with long screeching groans of rusty nails, and Scully stacked them neatly against the wall, the way she did everything. Rachel stood by the door with her arms wrapped around herself. Gale sat on the porch in one of the snowy chairs with her back to the room, looking at the trees.

Under the boards was dirt, packed dark and cold, and in the middle of the dirt was a ring of stones.

Old gray stones, rough, fitted together without mortar in a circle about four feet across and coming a foot or so up out of the ground. Across the top lay a lid: a round concrete slab poured in a form long ago, cracked across one side, with a rusted iron ring set in the middle for a handle.

I'd seen it on the tape. Not the lid, but the ring of stones in a field in gray light, the camera moving toward it slowly, the way you walk up to the edge of something, knowing you shouldn't look down. Here it was under a bed in a cabin, with twenty-two tapes on a shelf in the closet and a TV across the room facing it.

They built it right on top of her, I'd thought last night at the sign. They'd done worse than that. They'd built it so she could see out—a TV right there across the room, every day for sixteen years, for whoever was renting the place. A window. A screen.

No wonder the cabin made tapes.

"Randy," said Mulder softly. "Do we open it?"

I looked at the lid and didn't answer.

We argued about it, and I'll tell it fast, because it wasn't a good argument, only a necessary one, and I knew how it would come out before it started.

Gale wanted to do it the way it's done in every ghost story ever written. You find the body. You bring it up. You bury it properly, in consecrated ground, with a priest, next to her mother. The ghost is at rest, the curse is lifted, and everybody goes home.

"Because that's how it works, Randy," said Gale Weathers on the porch in the snow, arms crossed, face white, voice shaking. "That's how it always works. You've read the same books I have. You've seen the same movies. The unquiet dead. The body in the walls. You find her, and you give her a funeral, and she goes."

"It won't work."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know," I said. "Because it's not what she wants."

"You don't know what she wants! Nobody knows what she wants! She's a ghost, Randy, she's a dead little girl in a hole, and she's been in there for eighteen years, and nobody ever came to get her out, and maybe that's it. Maybe that's all it is. Maybe she just wants out."

I didn't answer.

She wasn't wrong, not all the way. Samara did want out. She'd wanted out for eighteen years, so badly she'd made a tape and a curse and a chain of strangers down the coast. But out wasn't the same thing as up, and a funeral wasn't the same thing as somebody looking at you. I knew how the movie ended. Rachel finds her and brings her up and holds her in the water and cries, and the bones come apart in her hands, and everybody thinks it's over. And then the TV turns on at Noah's.

"Gale," I said. "If we bring her up and it doesn't work, we've lost a day."

"And if we don't, and it would have, we've lost everything." Gale's voice cracked. "Randy, I've got thirty-six hours. Dewey's got thirty-six hours. You've got thirty-seven and a half. I can't just sit here for thirty-six hours on a theory a seventeen-year-old got out of—out of wherever you get things. I have to do something. I have to try the thing that works." She looked at me. "Please."

I held her eyes, and I thought: It's her life too.

It was her clock. Her thirty-six hours, and Dewey's. It wasn't mine to decide alone, any more than it had been mine to decide on Dewey's couch at midnight whether they'd pass it on.

"Okay," I said, and Gale shut her eyes and nodded and went inside to tell the others.

Mulder went down.

He insisted. He was the only one of the six of us who wasn't on the clock and wasn't Rachel, and Rachel had a son. Scully had looked at him and opened her mouth and closed it again, and I think she'd decided it was better to have him at the bottom of a well where she could see him than up here wondering. He tied a climbing rope from the Suburban's emergency kit around the iron bed frame and around himself under his arms, with a knot Scully checked twice and then re-tied, and Dewey and I lifted off the lid.

It was heavy, and it scraped on the stones. When it came off, cold came up out of the hole like breath: wet, smelling of stone and earth and something old and sweet and wrong under both.

I looked down. Dark, round and going down, the flashlight beam stopping on nothing, on black, on a faint gleam far below that might have been water. I didn't see her. I hadn't expected to. Not yet.

Mulder went down slowly, Dewey and I paying out the rope, Scully on her knees at the edge with a flashlight, Gale and Rachel behind her, the rope creaking on the bed frame. Twenty feet. Thirty. His flashlight a small yellow circle getting smaller. The sound of water. A splash.

"I'm at the bottom," Mulder called up. His voice echoed, round and hollow, like a voice in a pipe. "Water. About knee deep. It's cold. It's very cold." A pause. "The walls are—Scully. There are marks on the walls."

"What kind of marks?" called Scully.

A long pause.

"Fingernails," said Fox Mulder.

Nobody up top said anything.

Then: "There's something in the water."

He sent her up in a canvas duffel from the Suburban, slowly and carefully, Dewey and me pulling the rope hand over hand and Scully guiding the bag over the lip of the stones. Mulder came up after, soaked to the thighs and shaking with cold, his face like stone.

Scully laid the bag on a tarp on the cabin floor and opened it.

I'm not going to describe what was in it. It was small. That's all I'll say. It was very small, and it had been in cold water in the dark for eighteen years, and there was still long dark hair, a great deal of it, tangled in everything. And a scrap of white cloth.

Scully knelt over it with her hands in her lap. She didn't touch it. She looked at it with the doctor's look, the professional distance, and I watched the distance fail to hold. It came apart on her face very slowly, the way the boards had come up.

"She was seven," said Dana Scully softly. "Maybe eight. There's no—I don't see any trauma to the skull. No fractures." She stopped. "She was alive. When she went in. She was alive for—" She stopped again.

"Seven days," I said.

Scully looked up at me.

"The fingernails on the wall," I said. "She was down there seven days before she died. In the dark. In the water." I looked at the bag. "That's where it comes from. That's where the number comes from."

Nobody said anything. Rachel turned around and went out onto the porch, and I heard her throw up in the snow. Gale stood by the wall with her hand over her mouth and her eyes very bright, looking at the bag, Dewey behind her with his hands on her shoulders.

"Okay," said Gale finally, muffled. "Okay. Now we bury her."

It took the rest of the day.

Mulder called the Skagit County sheriff and Scully called the coroner. They came up the mountain in the afternoon in two cars with chains on the tires, a deputy and a heavy, tired man in a parka with a medical examiner's bag, and they looked at the hole under the floor and the bag on the tarp and the two badges and didn't ask many questions. Mountain people. Some part of them had always known too.

Scully went down the mountain in the back of the coroner's car with her hand on the bag.

Mulder called Richard Morgan from the lodge phone, standing at the front desk with his back to the room. I don't know what he said. I know it took a long time, and that when he hung up he stood with his hand on the phone the way he had at Anacortes.

"He's coming," said Mulder. "Tomorrow. On the morning ferry."

"To bury her?"

"He didn't say," said Mulder. "He just said he's coming."

The coroner said she could be released to the family by Monday, for a funeral on Moesko next to Anna by Wednesday. Gale wrote it all on her pad—Monday. Wednesday. Next to Anna—and underlined next to Anna twice. Then there was nothing left to do but wait and see if anything had changed.

We waited in Cabin 13, Gale's. Nobody wanted to be in Twelve, with its open hole in the floor and the rope still tied to the bed frame, the bed shoved against the wall, the unplugged TV across the room facing it.

We sat around the little table, five of us with Scully gone. Rachel had called Noah and Aidan and Katie and then come back and sat down without a word. Mulder sat by the window with his wet trousers drying on him, looking out at the snow. Dewey sat next to Gale. I sat across from them.

Nobody turned on Thirteen's TV. It sat on its stand in the corner, unplugged, facing the wall.

Gale's nose hadn't bled since four o'clock. Neither had Dewey's. She'd noticed it in the side mirror of the coroner's car, touched her lip, looked at her fingers, and said nothing, and I'd watched her start to hope.

Ten-forty was their minute. Every night since Dewey's couch Gale had looked at a clock at ten-forty, and she'd never said so.

At 10:30 she took Dewey's hand on the table.

At 10:39 I looked at the Hamilton. The second hand swept around without a sound, and I counted it down under my breath, and nobody told me to stop.

Ten-forty. Twenty-four hours to go.

Nothing happened. The TV in the corner stayed dark. The lights stayed on. The snow kept falling outside the window, and Gale's hand was white on Dewey's.

Ten forty-one. Nothing.

Gale let out a long breath, like a woman letting go of one she'd been holding since a motel room in Woodsboro. She touched her lip and looked at her clean fingers. She looked at Dewey, and her face started to come apart.

"It worked," said Gale Weathers. "Dewey. My nose stopped. Yours stopped. It worked. We found her, and we brought her up, and—"

Next door, in Cabin 12, the phone rang.

We all heard it through the log wall and the snow: an old phone with a real bell in it, loud, in a cabin with nobody in it and a hole in the floor.

It rang once. Nobody moved. It rang again.

I got up without deciding to. I was just up, and out the door, and on the path in my socks with the cold coming through them, and up the three steps onto the porch of Twelve and through the unlocked door into the dark.

The phone was on the wall by the kitchenette, beige, with a long coiled cord, ringing. I picked it up. I didn't say hello.

The sound of a very large, very empty space, like the inside of a seashell. Like the bottom of a well—except this time I'd been to the edge of the well and looked down, and I knew what it sounded like, and it sounded like this.

Then the little girl's voice, close, right up against my ear. Soft and hoarse and patient.

"Tomorrow."

The line went dead.

I stood in the dark in Cabin 12 with the receiver in my hand, the open well breathing cold three feet away, the rope still tied to the bed and the unplugged TV across the room facing it all.

In the doorway behind me, Gale Weathers made a sound I'm never going to forget.

I hung up the phone and turned around. She was standing in the doorway in the snow with Dewey behind her, Rachel behind him, and Mulder behind all of them on the path, and in the light from the open door her face was gray.

"It didn't work," said Gale.

"No," I said.

"You knew."

"Yeah."

"You knew it wouldn't, and you let me—"

"It was your clock," I said. "You had to try. I'd have tried too."

Gale stood there a long time. Then she walked into the cabin past the hole in the floor without looking at it and put her arms around me and held on hard, the way Tatum had in the Rileys' kitchen, the way Mom had at the airport.

"Okay," said Gale Weathers into my shoulder, shaking. "Okay. Then we do it your way."

"Okay."

"What is your way?"

I looked over her shoulder at the hole in the floor and the rope tied to the bed, going down into the dark.

"Somebody goes down," I said. "And she comes up. And they look at each other."

Gale didn't let go.

"Who?" she said, though she already knew.

II. Saturday

I didn't sleep Friday night. Kristen didn't come; I'd told her not to on the phone at ten-fifty, after the bell in Twelve, and she'd said are you sure three times and then okay in a voice like a door closing. I lay on the bed in Eleven with my eyes open, listening to Dewey not sleeping either in the other bed, until the window went gray.

At six I got up and went out on the porch.

The snow had stopped. The sky over the mountains was clear and very pale, almost white, and the whole hill lay smooth and white under it, the cabins sitting in it like boxes in cotton. The pile of tapes I'd left on the porch Thursday night was a white lump. Somewhere down the hill a raven was talking to itself.

Gale was on the porch of Thirteen in her camel coat and a blanket, holding a cup of lodge coffee in both hands. She'd been there a while; there was no snow on her chair.

She looked at me across the porch of Twelve between us, with its open door and unplugged TV and the hole in its floor.

"Morning," said Gale Weathers.

"Morning."

"Sixteen hours and forty minutes," she said. "For me. Give or take."

"Give or take."

She drank her coffee and looked at the mountains.

"I wrote some letters," she said. "On the plane. And at the Alexis. And on the island." She didn't look at me. "To my mother. To my producer. To a man I used to work for in Bakersfield who gave me my first job, and who I never thanked, because I was twenty-two and I thought I'd gotten it myself." She turned the cup in her hands. "To Dewey."

I waited.

"I gave them to Rachel," said Gale. "Last night. After the phone. I told her, if." She almost smiled. "She said she wasn't going to mail them. I said she's a journalist, and journalists always file." She finally looked at me. "I didn't write one to you."

"That's okay."

"I didn't write one to you," said Gale, "because I'm going to say it to your face. Tonight. After."

Down the hill the raven said something rude.

"Okay," I said, and we sat there on our two porches with an open door between us and watched the sun come up over the mountains.

Richard Morgan came up the mountain at four in the afternoon in the rusty pickup with Moesko County plates I'd last seen hitched to Bella's trailer on the Elwha—Old Man Hennessey's truck. Hennessey stayed in the passenger seat with the engine running and his feed-store cap on and his hands on his knees, looking at the cabins and at me. He lifted one hand an inch off his knee, slowly, and put it back down.

Richard got out.

He was wearing an old black suit, too big for him now, the kind a man buys for a wedding or a funeral and keeps in a closet for thirty years. A white shirt, no tie, and his barn boots. He stood in the snow in the parking area by the lodge and looked up the hill at the row of cabins, at the twelfth one, and didn't move for a while. Then he walked up the path.

He passed Mulder on the porch of Nine, then Rachel, and Dewey, and Gale on the porch of Thirteen, and me, without a word to any of us. He climbed the three steps onto the porch of Twelve and stopped in the doorway with his hand on the frame and looked at the hole in the floor.

He stood there while the light went. The sky over the mountains turned gold, then pink, and the snow on the hill turned blue, and Richard Morgan stood in his funeral suit in the doorway of the cabin they'd built on his daughter and looked at the place where she'd been.

I went up the steps and stood next to him.

"I didn't know what to bring," said Richard Morgan, without looking at me. "I thought about it all the way up. On the ferry. In the truck. I thought I should bring something. Something of hers. Flowers. A toy." His hand tightened on the door frame. "I didn't know what she liked. I never knew. Eighteen years, and I sat in that truck for three hours trying to think of one thing she liked, and I couldn't."

"Horses," I said.

He closed his eyes.

"She liked the horses," I said. "Before. That's what you told me. She used to sit up in the loft and watch them run. The window's in every picture on the tape, Mr. Morgan. Every single one, at the bottom. The window and the fields and the fences." I looked at the hole. "She liked the horses."

Richard Morgan stood in the doorway with his eyes closed.

"The horses went into the sea," he said.

"I know."

"Because of her. Because she couldn't—she didn't mean to. She'd sit up there and look at them and think about them, and they'd—they'd feel it. Whatever she was. And they couldn't stand it." His voice cracked. "They couldn't stand being looked at like that. By her. So they went in the water."

"I know," I said. "She told the doctor. On the tape. They're not dead. They just went in the water."

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

"I'm going down tonight," I said. "Before ten-forty. Before she comes for Gale and Dewey. I'm going to be at the bottom when she comes up, so she has to come through me first." I looked at the rope still tied to the iron bed frame by the window, coiled at the edge of the stones. "I don't know what happens then. I think she looks at me. I think I have to look back. I think that's all it is." I looked at him. "And then I think she's going to want to see you."

Richard Morgan didn't say anything.

"You don't have to come down," I said. "Just be at the edge, with a light. When I call. And look."

"And if I can't?" he said, barely audible. "If I get to the edge and I look down and I can't? Like before? Like every night, going down the ladder, never looking back up?"

I thought about it.

"Then you'll have come up the mountain," I said. "In your suit. That's more than anybody else ever did."

At seven Rachel called Seattle from the lodge.

She came back up the hill in the dark with her flashlight and a very strange look on her face, found me on the porch of Eleven, and sat down next to me on the cold step.

"Aidan wanted to talk to you," she said. "I told him you were busy. He said—" She stopped.

"What did he say?"

"He said, Tell him she's not mad. Tell him she's just been waiting a really long time and she's tired." Rachel looked at her hands. "And then he said, Tell him to take the scarf."

I put my hand to my neck. Sid's scarf. I'd been wearing it for six days. It had my blood on it from the ferry and from Eola, dried brown, and it still smelled a little like Sid's house, laundry soap and the woodstove in their living room.

"I was going to," I said.

"He knew you were going to," said Rachel. "He drew it." She was quiet a while. "Katie's not speaking to me. She's at Ruth's, in her room, with the door locked. She's going to be mad at me for a week." She almost laughed. "She's alive. Tonight she's alive, and she's going to be alive tomorrow, and she's going to be mad at me for a week."

"That's the best thing," I said. "That's the very best thing."

"I know," said Rachel Keller. "I know it is."

At nine I called home from the phone at the lodge.

Dad picked up before the first ring finished. I heard Mom in the background, and Martha right beside him, breathing.

"It's tonight," said my father.

"It's tonight."

"Do you know what you're going to do?"

"Yes," I said. It was true. I didn't know if it would work, but I knew what I was going to do.

He was quiet a long while.

"One minute after," said my father.

"Twelve-oh-nine. I'll call."

"We'll be here." He breathed. "We'll all be right here, Randy. All of us. By the phone."

Martha got on.

"Over," she said.

"Over."

"Are you going to look at her?"

"Yeah, Mart. Tonight."

"Twice as hard."

"Twice as hard."

A pause, static on the line, and very faintly behind her a sound I knew: her walkie-talkie on the kitchen table, hissing at nothing, eight hundred miles from its partner in the left front pocket of my jeans.

"Mine's on," said Martha. "Is yours on?"

I took it out of my pocket and turned it on. It hissed softly at nothing.

"It's on," I said.

"Okay," said my sister. "Then I'll be right here. Over."

"Over," I said. Not out. You don't say out until you're back.

At 9:40, in the bathroom of Cabin 11, with the door locked and the light off, I opened the panel.

Ability Slot 1: Dark Spear → Morbing[SWAP] (5:00)

I'd thought about it all day, what to take down. Wind Barrier stayed; I'd had it since the ferry, and if the water came, or the walls, or anything a wall of air could turn, I wanted it. But the other slot held the spear, and the spear was for fighting. It was for something you wanted to kill.

I didn't want to kill her. I didn't think you could. And even if you could, killing her was just the movie with a different ending. She'd be one more thing nobody ever looked at except to put it down.

But I knew one thing about the well for sure, from Mulder, from the marks on the walls, from a little girl on a tape saying they just went in the water. There was going to be water. And Morbing was functionally the same as Vampire Physique, and a vampire is dead, and the dead don't breathe.

The spear went out of me like cold leaving your hands when you come in from the snow. Then, slowly, at the end of the five minutes, the other thing settled in the way it always did: heavy and patient, down in the chest under the heart, like something asleep with one eye open.

It doesn't come on by itself. You have to call it, out loud. Volume insufficient. Please SHOUT. I was going to have to shout it at the bottom of a well.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub in the dark and laughed once into my hands, because if I didn't laugh I was going to do something else.

At ten o'clock we were all in Cabin 12.

It was the only way it made sense. At ten-forty Gale and Dewey had to be somewhere, and if she was coming, she was coming from here, from the stones in the floor, and I wanted them where I could hear them. Where I could get between.

Mulder and Dewey had tied off the rope again, properly this time, with the knots Scully had taught them, doubled around the iron bed frame and a log of the wall behind it. Scully had come back up the mountain at six with the coroner's report in a folder she didn't open, and she checked the knots and re-tied one and didn't say anything.

The TV was still unplugged on its stand across the room, facing the hole, its cord coiled on the floor behind it with the plug a foot from the wall. Nobody had suggested moving it. I think we all knew it wouldn't matter.

Richard Morgan stood at the edge of the stones in his funeral suit with a flashlight in his hand, switched off, looking down into the dark. He'd been standing there since nine without moving.

Gale and Dewey sat side by side on the edge of the bed, pushed back against the far wall, holding hands. Gale had her sunglasses in her lap and kept turning them over.

Rachel was by the door. Mulder was by the rope. Scully stood next to him with her medical bag open at her feet—a flashlight, a blanket—and a look on her face like she was about to perform surgery and wasn't sure on whom.

I took off my coat and kept the flannel. I kept Sid's scarf, wrapped twice with the ends tucked in the way she'd done it on the Rileys' lawn. I put the walkie-talkie in my left front pocket and Mulder's flashlight, a big black Maglite like the one from Bradley Video, in my belt. I tied the rope around myself under my arms, and Scully checked it, and re-tied it, and checked it again.

"Randy," said Gale from the bed.

I looked at her.

She opened her mouth and closed it. She looked at Dewey, then back at me.

"After," said Gale Weathers. "I'm saying it after."

"After," I said.

At 10:18 p.m. on Saturday, January 18, 1997, I sat down on the edge of the stones with my legs hanging over the dark and looked at Richard Morgan.

"When I call," I said. "Turn on the light. And look."

He didn't answer. His face was gray and his hand was white on the flashlight. But he nodded once.

I looked at Mulder at the rope.

"Slow," I said.

"Slow," said Fox Mulder.

I turned around and put my hands on the cold stones and let myself down over the edge into the well.

III. The Well

It was cold.

That was the first thing, and for a while the only thing. A cold that came off the stones into my hands and through my flannel into my back, wet and close and old, like the inside of a refrigerator left shut for years. The rope creaked above me. The circle of light at the top—the lamp in the cabin—got smaller, with faces at the edge of it looking down. Mulder. Scully. Richard Morgan, gray, his flashlight still off.

Twenty feet. Thirty.

The walls went by in the beam of the Maglite on my belt, close enough to touch: fitted stones black with damp and furred with a pale moss that grew in the dark. And starting about ten feet from the bottom, the marks.

Mulder had told me, and I'd been seeing them in my head since Friday. Seeing them for real was different. Scratches, long and short, in groups of four, going up the wall as high as a little girl could reach standing on her toes in the water. Hundreds of them, over and over in the same places, so that in spots the stone was worn smooth and pale where she'd scratched it again and again. At the bottom of some of them, in the cracks between the stones, small dark things were wedged. I didn't look at those long. I knew what they were.

Seven days.

My boots hit water.

It came up over my ankles, then my shins, and stopped below my knees. Colder than the air. Colder than anything I'd ever put my body into, colder than the creek in October or the ocean at Goat Rock, and my legs went numb in about ten seconds and stayed that way.

I stood at the bottom of the well with the rope slack around me and looked up.

It was a long way. The circle of light at the top was the size of a dinner plate, a ring of white on black, ragged at the edges where the stones were broken. Like the sun in an eclipse.

Like the first image on the tape.

Oh, I thought.

That's what the ring was. It was the view. The last thing she saw for seven days, standing in this water: the crack of light around the edge of the lid after Anna put it on. A ring of light very far away that never got any closer. She'd put it at the start of the tape because it was the first thing anybody should know about her. This is where I was. This is what I could see.

I stood looking up at it until my neck hurt.

"Randy?" Mulder's voice from the top, round and hollow, bouncing down the stones. "You okay?"

"I'm at the bottom," I called up. "I'm okay. Give me a minute."

I unclipped the Maglite and shone it around. The well was round, maybe four feet across at the bottom. The water was black and perfectly still, and so clear under the light that I could see the bottom—gravel, silt, nothing else. The coroner had taken everything. There was nothing in the water but me.

She's not the bones, I thought. She was never the bones.

I looked at the Hamilton. 10:29 p.m. Eleven minutes.

At 10:33 the water started to rise.

I felt it before I saw it, pressure on my legs and the cold climbing slowly past my knees. When I looked down, the black surface around my thighs was moving—not rippling but rising, smooth and silent and fast, like a bath filling from underneath, the waterline climbing the wall dead level, past the first of the scratches.

"Randy," said Mulder's voice from the top, sharp. "Randy. The TV just came on."

I looked up. At the edge of the well, against the light, the faces had all turned the same way: toward the far wall of the cabin, toward the TV on its stand, unplugged, its cord coiled on the floor a foot from the socket.

I couldn't see it from down there. I didn't need to. I could hear it, faint, coming down the stones: the hiss of static.

"Don't touch it," I called up. "Nobody touch it. Gale, Dewey, stay on the bed. Stay together. Richard. Mr. Morgan. Stay at the edge."

The water was at my waist.

It was so cold it had stopped feeling like cold. It felt like pressure, a fist closing around my legs, my hips, my stomach. My breath went short and fast. The Maglite's beam shook on the walls and the scratches as the water came up over them.

Chest.

At the back of my neck, Survivor said, very calmly, That's the bottom of your lungs. Do it now.

I took the deepest breath I could, in the freezing dark at the bottom of a well with the water at my collarbones, and I shouted.

"IT'S MORBIN' TIME!"

It went up the well like a gunshot. I heard it go, bouncing off every stone in the long column—MORBIN' TIME, MORBIN' TIME, time, time—and burst out of the top into the cabin, and for one second, through the hiss of the static and the noise of the water, I heard Dewey Riley say, very small, from up there:

"...What?"

And Mulder, under his breath: "Don't ask."

Then it came, the way it always did: down out of the chest and out all at once, a cold that wasn't the water's, from the inside, down my arms to my fingers and up into my jaw. My heart slowed, and slowed, to sixteen beats a minute the way it had in the garage in November—thud, a long silence, thud. My teeth ached and sharpened. And my eyes—

The dark went gray. The way the world looks in the hour before dawn, every shape clear and every color gone. The walls, the scratches, the water, all in silver and charcoal and black and perfectly sharp, like somebody had turned up the contrast on the world. I could see every stone, every scratch, every grain of silt on the bottom through water that wasn't black anymore. It was gray glass.

And I stopped needing to breathe.

That was stranger than the teeth or the heart. The water came up over my chin, my mouth, my nose, and the part of me that had been breathing for seventeen years, and twenty-six before that, waited for the panic—the burning, the need, the thing your body does underwater when it wants up.

It didn't come.

The water closed over my head.

I stood at the bottom of the well in the gray and the silence, the cold all around me and nothing in my chest but a slow heart going thud, a long pause, thud. Sid's scarf floated up off my shoulders and drifted around me, long and green and lumpy, like seaweed. The Maglite on my belt shone up through the water at the ring of light far above. The rope went slack and floated, coiling.

I was dead, functionally, for the next quarter of an hour or so.

Dead things don't drown, I thought. Sorry, Samara. I cheated.

She came at 10:38.

I didn't see her come. One second the water in front of me was empty—gray glass and silt and the far wall with its scratches—and the next, she was there, standing on the bottom of the well four feet away, facing me.

She was smaller than I'd thought, even after the tape, even after the bag on the tarp. A little girl in a dress that had been white once and was gray-green now, stained, the hem torn, floating around her knees. Bare feet on the gravel. Hands at her sides. And her hair, long and black and endless, hanging over her face to her waist. The water moved my scarf, the rope, my flannel. It didn't move her hair. It hung straight down in front of her face as if she were standing in air.

She didn't move, and neither did I.

Thud, said my heart. Long pause. Thud.

Above us, very far away through the water, I heard the static in the cabin get louder.

She was going up. That was where she'd been headed all along: at 10:40, up the well, through the water and the stones and into the TV across the room and out of the screen onto the cabin floor, for Gale and Dewey on the bed. The way she'd gone for four kids in October. The way she'd have gone for Katie and Becca and Josh and Scott next Saturday at ten o'clock. The way she'd gone, maybe, for a lot of people in a lot of places over eighteen years, every time somebody watched and looked away and passed her on.

And I was standing in the way.

She took a step toward me.

It wasn't a step the way a person steps. All of it was wrong, jerky and broken, like a bad edit, like a tape with frames missing. Four feet. Then three. Then two. Her joints moving in ways joints don't. Her head tilting slowly on her neck, too far.

Every part of me said look away.

It wasn't fear, exactly. Survivor had my nerves, Morbing had my heart, and my body was too cold and too dead to do what fear does. It was older than fear—the thing I'd felt in the basement at Eola in front of the beige cart. Like looking into the sun. Like something very deep at the bottom of your brain saying don't. Don't look at that. You're not allowed to look at that.

Everybody had listened to it. Her mother. Her father. The doctors. The horses. Four kids in October and a chain of strangers down the coast. Every one of them had looked for a second, felt that, and looked away.

I didn't.

Samara, I said.

I couldn't say it out loud—I was underwater and dead, with no breath to say anything with—so I said it in my head, and in my throat, under the water and the cold, I felt the hum. The organ's lowest note. Unbroken. Your voice is the key you hand to others.

She stopped, one foot away on the gravel in the gray water, hair over her face, head tilted.

And her hair began to move. It parted slowly, on its own, not with the water. It drew back from the middle of her face a strand at a time, like a curtain going up on a stage, like the wallpaper coming down off the planks in the loft.

I'm not going to describe her face. I'll tell you what I told her father later, when he asked. It had been in the water a long time, seven days in the dark and eighteen years after, and it looked it. It wasn't the face of a little girl anymore, not the pale, sad, pretty one a movie would give you. It was the face of what happens to a little girl at the bottom of a well.

And her eyes were gray.

Gray like the water off the point at Moesko. Gray like rain. Wide, dark at the center, and very, very old. Looking at me.

Look away, said the thing at the bottom of my brain.

I didn't look away.

And she pushed.

It came into my head like a hand pressing on a door.

I'd felt something like it before. Freddy in a dream, reaching for the place where Theo ended and the kid began. A doll's voice in the dark, chanting in a language I didn't know. Little pushes, testing, and every time the door had held, because I'd built it. Because Batman, of all people, had given me a deadbolt on the inside, and Christmas Eve had made it stronger. Your will is a locked door. You resist Mind Control and Mind Reading in proportion to your mental strength.

She pushed, and the door held.

It held easily, which surprised me. She was strong enough that I could feel it the way you feel a truck through a wall, and the door held anyway, solid, clack, not even trembling. She couldn't get in. She couldn't put her pictures in my head the way she'd put them in Anna's, and the horses', and onto a videotape. She couldn't make me see.

She pushed again, harder, and the door held.

And standing at the bottom of the well with her face a foot from mine, I understood what I was doing.

I was doing it too—what everybody did. Sure, I was looking at her face, with my eyes, twice as hard, like Martha said. But I'd locked the door, the only door she had left. Everybody else had looked away with their eyes. I was looking away with everything else. Keeping her out. Keeping her on the other side of the glass, where she could be seen but not known, where she was safe to look at. Like a picture. Like a tape. Like something on a screen.

Somebody to look at her and not look away. That's what I'd told Gale on Dewey's couch, and Martha on my bed. It wasn't all of it.

She didn't just want somebody to look at her face. She'd been showing people her face for eighteen years, on the tape, on the screen, crawling out onto their floors. They'd all seen her face, at the very end.

She wanted somebody to look at what she saw.

The loft. The window. The horses running in the field and then going into the sea. Her mother's hands brushing her hair, then shaking, then not touching her anymore. The strap on the cot. Her father going down the ladder every night without looking back up. The road up the mountain, the stables, her mother saying come see the horses. The ring of light.

Seven days in the dark, in the water, with the ring of light up there and nobody coming.

Everybody who'd ever known her had locked that out. Looked at her and said no. Not that. I'll look at your face if I have to, I'll put you on a tape, I'll pass you on, but I won't look at that. She'd made the tape so people would see it, and they'd watched it and felt it pushing and done exactly what I was doing.

They'd locked the door.

Your will is a locked door, the panel had said on Christmas Eve, in the dark. And your voice is the key you hand to others.

It was my door, and I had the key.

Only true things, I'd written. It knows what they need to hear. YOU decide if it's true.

I looked at the gray eyes a foot from mine at the bottom of the well.

Okay, I thought. Okay, Samara. Show me.

And I opened the door.

I couldn't give you all of it if I wanted to. There were no words in it, not even pictures, the way the tape was pictures. It was everything at once, the way you remember your own childhood—not in order, not in scenes, but as a whole country you used to live in. She came through the door like water through a broken dam, and I let her, and held nothing back, and didn't look away.

A loft. A window. Gray light. Horses running far below in a field with white fences, and the wanting to be down there with them so badly that the wanting went out of her like heat, and they felt it, and stopped running and looked up at the window, and were afraid.

A woman's hands, warm, brushing her hair. A hundred strokes, a woman's voice counting. Then one day the hands shaking. Then the hands not touching her at all.

A man on a ladder. The top of his head, going down. Every night. Never once looking back up.

A strap. The cold buckle of it.

A road. A mountain. A field with a stone ring in it. Come see the horses, sweetheart. Come see.

Hands on her back.

Falling.

Water.

A ring of light, very far away, getting smaller as the lid went on, until it was just a ring of light around a circle of dark, and her in the water looking up at it.

Her fingers on the stones, scratching and scratching for seven days, and the ring of light up there all seven days, never getting any closer, never once with a face in it.

Then not seven days. Years. The water. The dark. The ring. Men with machines up there, pouring concrete, building a floor. And then one day, through the floor and the stones, a sound—a hum, light, a TV across the room turned on, faces watching it—and her at the bottom reaching for it the way she'd reached for the horses. Reaching for the only window she had left.

A blank tape. A red light. RECORD.

Look, she'd said into the tape. Look. This is what I saw. This is where I am. Look at me. Please.

And everybody who'd ever watched it had felt her reaching, and been afraid, and locked their door.

I stood at the bottom of the well with my eyes open in the gray water and let her show me all of it.

Every year. Every face that had ever watched the tape and looked away. Four kids in October, laughing in Cabin 12 and then not laughing. A boy on Moesko Island alone in his room. A man on a ferry. A chain of strangers. A motel room in Woodsboro. A deputy's apartment at 10:40, Gale and Dewey on a couch, their faces scared in the light of the screen. And then me at 12:08, on a coffee table, with a remote in my hand.

She showed me something I hadn't expected, too. She showed me me: what I'd looked like from inside the tape at 12:08 on Sunday morning at Dewey's, watching. What I'd looked like in Noah's loft, frame by frame. In the basement at Eola in front of the beige cart, when she lifted her head and looked out of the monitor.

I hadn't looked away once. She'd noticed. She'd been noticing for seven days.

That was why she'd said tomorrow. It hadn't been a threat at all. Tomorrow, like a kid who's been told a friend is coming over. He's coming tomorrow.

I didn't know I was crying until I noticed how strange it was, crying underwater with no breath and a heart going thud, a long pause, thud.

I see you, I said in my head, through the open door. I see all of it.

She didn't move.

Your name is Samara, I said. You were seven. You liked the horses. You used to sit at the window and watch them run, and you wanted to be down there so much that it scared them, and that wasn't your fault. Your mom brushed your hair a hundred strokes and counted. You were in the loft for years. Your dad never looked back up the ladder. And then your mom brought you here, and you were down here for seven days, and you scratched the walls, and nobody came.

The hum in my throat, low and even. Only true things.

Your eyes are gray, I said. Like the water off the point. Your dad asked me. I'm going to tell him.

Her hair drifted a little around her face. Her head straightened slowly on her neck until it wasn't tilted anymore.

Why, she said—no voice, no words, just the shape of it in my head through the door, small and hoarse and patient and very, very tired. Why did you come.

I thought about the true answers. Because Gale and Dewey were on the stairs. Because I didn't want to be able to quit. Because I knew how the movie ended and didn't like it. All true. None of them the true thing.

Because somebody should have, I said.

She looked at me.

And because you've been down here a really long time, I said, and nobody came to get you. And I'm the kind of guy who comes to get people. I thought of a dream, a girl in a vest in chains on a stage, a kid in a green vest with forty-eight batteries in his pants. It's kind of my thing.

The water was perfectly calm. The silt hung in it motionless, like stars.

Your dad's up there, I said. He came up the mountain. In a suit. He wants to see you.

She went still.

He's scared, I said. He's been scared for eighteen years. He's never looked. But he came. I looked up through the water at the ring of light far above. Do you want to see him?

She didn't answer. But she turned her head slowly and looked up too, up the well, through the water, at the ring of light.

And I opened my mouth in the water, the dead air in my lungs going out in a long silver stream of bubbles, and shouted, out loud this time, with what was left, into the water and up the well.

"NOW!"

It came out as a roar of bubbles and noise. I don't know how much of it reached the top. Enough.

Far above, at the edge of the ring of light, a flashlight came on.

A small yellow beam pointing down, shaking. Behind it, leaning out over the edge of the stones against the lamplight in the cabin, a shape: a man in a black suit on his knees at the edge of the well, one hand braced on the stones and the other holding the light, and his face turned down.

Toward us. Toward the water, toward the bottom, where his daughter stood in her gray dress with her hair drawn back off her face, looking up.

And the water fell.

All at once—falling, not draining, like a held breath let out. It dropped down the walls past the scratches, past my head, my shoulders, my waist, in a long rushing sigh, down and down until it was below my knees again, black and still, as if it had never risen. My scarf fell back against my chest, soaked. My hair streamed water into my face. My dead lungs didn't care.

And in the light of her father's flashlight, standing in water to her shins, Samara Morgan looked up the well at her father with her face uncovered, and he looked back.

He didn't look away. I watched him not look away. His face was small and far off at the top of the well at the edge of the lamplight, and I saw it break. I saw all of it come apart at once—the eighteen years and the ladder and the strap and the tub—his mouth opening, his hand shaking so hard on the flashlight that the beam danced on the water. But he didn't look away.

"Samara," said Richard Morgan.

His voice came down the well, round and hollow and broken.

"I see you," he said. "I see you, sweetheart. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I see you."

She stood motionless in the beam of light.

"Gray," said Richard Morgan. "They're gray. Your eyes are gray. Like your—like the water off the point." His voice cracked all the way in half. "I never knew. Eighteen years and I never knew what color your eyes were."

She looked up at him. Then she looked at me.

Above us, faint through the stones, I heard the static in the cabin stop.

It didn't fade. It stopped, like somebody had pulled a plug—except nobody needed to; it had never been plugged in.

I held the Hamilton close to my face in the gray dark and read it with my dead man's eyes. 10:41 p.m.

At the top of the well, in the cabin, I heard a woman gasp like somebody coming up out of deep water, and then a man's voice, Dewey's, saying Gale, Gale, Gale over and over, like it was the only word he had left. Ten-forty had come and gone, and they were both still there.

Samara didn't go.

I'd thought she would. I'd thought, the way you do in movies, that she'd look up at her father and he'd look back and she'd smile, maybe, and go soft at the edges and fade the way ghosts do when they're finally at rest. Like Freddy's children in the movie palace getting their faces back and walking out of the theater.

She stood in the water and looked at me with her hair drawn back and her gray eyes very wide. Then she reached out slowly with one small hand, colder than the water, cold all the way down, and took mine.

Her fingers closed around mine at the bottom of the well and held on. The way Martha had held my arm at the kitchen table when the phone rang. The way the kid had held Kristen's hand at Westin Hills while she slept. Like a little girl holding on to the one person who came.

Don't, she said in my head, very small.

Don't what?

Don't look away.

I looked at her.

I won't, I said.

She nodded once, slowly. Her hand stayed in mine, cold, and her face stayed turned up toward mine, and then she wasn't there.

She didn't fade or dissolve. She was there and then she wasn't, the way she'd come, like a bad edit, like a tape with frames missing. The water was empty. The gravel was empty. My hand was empty, held out in the gray at the bottom of the well with nothing in it.

It was still cold, though. My fingers, where hers had been—cold all the way down, colder than the water—and it didn't go away. It hasn't, yet.

"Randy!" Mulder's voice, close to the top, shouting down. "Randy, answer me! Are you there? RANDY!"

I looked up at the ring of light.

There were faces in it now, all of them. Mulder and Scully and Rachel and Gale and Dewey crowded around the edge of the stones, five faces against the lamplight, and Richard Morgan in the middle on his knees with his face wet and his flashlight still pointing down. All of them looking down the well at me. Nobody looking away.

"I'm here," I called up. My voice came out raw and strange, from dead lungs with no breath behind it. "I'm okay. I'm coming up."

And in front of my eyes, at the bottom of the well, in the gray, the panel opened.

Feat: Don't look away.Gold Trait (held).Story in progress: Seven Days.

Still in progress, I thought, and looked at the Hamilton. 10:42. An hour and twenty-six minutes to go, for me.

I took hold of the rope and started to climb.

IV. One Minute After

They pulled me out at 10:51.

I climbed most of the way. For the last ten feet my arms quit, Morbing or no Morbing; the cold had gotten into the muscle and didn't care how many beats a minute my heart was doing. Mulder and Dewey hauled the rope hand over hand, and Richard Morgan reached down over the stones with both arms in his funeral suit and got me by the back of the flannel and pulled, and I came up over the lip of the well onto the dirt floor of Cabin 12 like something being born.

I lay on my back in the dirt and looked at the ceiling. Log beams. A cobweb. The lamp. Faces over me, all of them.

I let Morbing go. It doesn't need a shout to turn off; you just stop holding it. My heart kicked once, hard, and started going like a heart again, fast—ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum—and my lungs remembered they were lungs and pulled in air all at once in a huge ragged whoop, and the cold came in. The real cold, the human kind, every second I'd spent in that water landing on me at once like a truck.

I started to shake so hard my teeth clacked.

"Blanket," said Scully, already moving. "Blanket. Get his shirt off, it's soaked. Mulder, the other blanket. Mr. Meeks. Mr. Meeks, look at me." She had my face in her hands. Her hands were warm and her eyes were very close. "How long were you under?"

"T-t-twelve minutes," I said. "M-maybe."

Dana Scully looked at me for a long, long time.

I watched her decide. I watched her do a doctor's math—cold water, twelve minutes, a seventeen-year-old's lungs, and a pulse she could feel right now in my jaw under her fingers, fast and strong—and I watched it not add up, and I watched her put it away behind her eyes, in the place where she kept a gust on a ferry and four kids' faces in October and a fly on a windowsill.

"You were under for a minute," said Scully softly. "Maybe two. The cold slows everything down. People lose track of time." She tucked the blanket around me. "There's literature."

Behind her, by the rope, Mulder made a sound that might have been a laugh.

My right hand was still cold.

They got me out of the wet flannel and into Dewey's sweatshirt and two blankets and a pair of Mulder's wool socks, and sat me on the bed against the wall, and Scully made me sip hot water from a thermos lid. The shaking slowed. My toes came back, and my face, and my left hand.

My right hand didn't. It wasn't numb—I could feel it fine and move the fingers—but it stayed cold all the way through, the way hers had been, as if I were still holding something.

I didn't tell anybody. I held the thermos lid in my left hand and kept the right one curled under the blanket in my lap, and every so often I opened and closed it, and it was still cold.

Gale was sitting next to me on the bed.

She'd been there since they put me on it. She'd sat down close, her shoulder against mine through the blankets, and looked at the hole in the floor without saying anything.

Her nose wasn't bleeding. I noticed it the same moment she did. She touched her upper lip with one finger and looked at the finger, and it was clean. Then she put her hand back in her lap and sat without saying anything.

"I was going to say something to you," said Gale Weathers. "After."

"I know."

"I had a whole thing." Her voice almost held. "I wrote it in my head. On the plane, and on the island, and up here. I was going to say thank you, and then I was going to say something about the night on the station steps in September, when I made you say Neil's name on live TV and you hated me for it, and I deserved it." She turned the sunglasses over in her lap. "And then I was going to say something about weasel. You called me a weasel once. On your website. Did you know I read that? I read it every day for a week."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. I am one." She looked at the hole. "That was going to be the joke. You're not a weasel either. Something like that." She paused. "It's not good enough. Any of it. So I'm not going to say it."

"Okay."

"I'm going to say this instead." She turned and looked at me. Her makeup had run long ago and she hadn't fixed it, and she was thirty-one years old, and her face was very tired and very young. "I'm never going to write about tonight. Not one word. Not the tape, not the well, not the girl. Not you." She held my eyes. "I'm Gale Weathers. I've never not written about anything in my life. And I'm never going to write about this."

It took me a while to answer.

"That's a pretty good thing to say," I said finally.

"I know." She looked back at the hole. "I had a lot of time to think of it."

At 11:59, Dewey stood up.

He'd been sitting on the floor against the wall by the door since they pulled me out, the evidence bag in his lap, watching Gale. He'd looked at his watch maybe forty times. At 11:59 he got up and went and stood in front of the bed. In front of Gale.

She looked up at him.

He just stood there in the middle of Cabin 12, the well open behind him, Richard Morgan sitting on the edge of the stones with his face in his hands, Mulder and Scully by the rope and Rachel by the door, and he looked at his watch. We all watched him look at it. Nobody knew what he was doing except Gale, and I watched her know. Her hand went to her mouth.

Dewey watched the second hand go all the way around to the top.

"It's Sunday," said Dewey Riley.

Gale didn't move.

"You said say it on Sunday," said Dewey. His ears were bright red and his voice was shaking, and he didn't look away from her. "So it's Sunday. And I love you, Gale. I've loved you since the day you made me drive you to the airport at four in the morning for your earrings. I loved you before that. I'm always going to. And I'm saying it on Sunday, like you said, and you're here to hear it, like you said."

Gale Weathers sat on the edge of the bed in Cabin 12 with her hand over her mouth and her eyes full of water.

Then she stood up and put both hands on Dewey's face and kissed him, in front of all of us—in front of the FBI and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a man in a funeral suit and a hole in the floor—and didn't stop for a while.

Mulder looked at the ceiling. Scully looked at Mulder. By the door, Rachel wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and laughed softly at nothing.

When Gale let go, she kept her hands on his face.

"Say it again," said Gale Weathers.

"I love you."

"Again."

"I love you, Gale."

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Good." She put her forehead against his chest, and he put his arms around her, and they stood there like that.

I looked at the Hamilton. 12:01 a.m. Sunday, January 19, 1997. Seven minutes.

I didn't want to be in the cabin for it. I think I didn't want them to have to watch.

So at 12:04 I got up off the bed in Mulder's socks with the blankets around me and walked out onto the porch of Cabin 12 and sat down in one of the snowy chairs. It was very cold. The sky had cleared all the way, and there were more stars than I'd ever seen, the kind you only get on a mountain in winter with no city for a hundred miles, thick and white and close, like snow that hadn't fallen yet.

Nobody followed me out. I heard Gale start to, and Dewey say something low, and her stop.

I sat in the chair and held the Hamilton up to the light from the open door.

12:05.

My right hand was cold under the blanket.

12:06.

I thought about Dad at the kitchen table with the phone, Mom next to him, Martha with the walkie-talkie. All of them right there by the phone at nine minutes after midnight, eight hundred miles away, waiting.

12:07.

The cabin behind me was silent. I could hear the stars. That isn't possible, I know. I heard them anyway.

12:08.

The second hand went around, and nothing happened. The TV in the cabin behind me stayed dark. The phone on the wall stayed quiet. The stars stayed where they were. I sat in a snowy chair on the porch of Cabin 12 wrapped in a blanket and watched the second hand go all the way around the face of my great-grandfather's watch without a sound and come back to the top.

12:09.

I let out a breath, and in front of my eyes, in the starlight, the panel opened.

STORY COMPLETE: Seven Days.Feat: Nobody passes.Platinum Random.All tickets unlocked: 5.Fuse charges: 1.[FUSE] unlocked. [DISMANTLE] unlocked.Next story loading.

I looked at it a while.

Then I closed it and got up out of the chair and ran—down the path in Mulder's socks in the snow, blankets falling off me, down the hill to the lodge with its night bell and its one yellow window and the pay phone on the wall by the door. I didn't feel the snow. I didn't feel anything. I dialed the number with my cold right hand without having to look.

It didn't finish the first ring.

"Randy," said my father.

"One minute after," I said.

The line was silent a long time. Then I heard a sound I'd never heard my father make in either of my lives—no word, just a breath going out of him all at once, like something heavy being set down. Behind him Mom was saying is it him, Ted, is it him, is he— and Dad said it's him, Diane, it's him, and the phone moved, and it was Mom.

I'm not going to tell you what my mother said. Some things are just yours.

And then Martha.

"Over," said Martha Meeks. Her voice was very small and very wet and perfectly even.

"Over," I said.

"Did you look at her?"

"Twice as hard, Mart."

A long breath on the line, static, and then behind her on the kitchen table, eight hundred miles away, I heard her walkie-talkie click. Just a click: her thumb on the button.

Back up the hill, on the floor of Cabin 11 where Scully had thrown my wet clothes, in the left front pocket of my jeans, was its partner—eight hundred miles out of range, and it had been to the bottom of a well, and it was probably dead. It didn't matter. It was on.

"Are you back?" said Martha.

"Not yet. Tomorrow. Monday."

"Then you can't say out," said my sister. "Not until you're back."

"I know."

"So say over."

"Over," I said.

"Over," said Martha, and I heard her smile. You can hear it on the phone when somebody smiles. I'd forgotten that.

I called Ohio at 12:20.

It was 3:20 in the morning there. She picked up before the first ring finished, like Dad.

"Did you call home first?" said Kristen Parker.

"Yeah."

"Good." A long breath. "Good. That's right. You call them first." Another breath, shaking. "Are you—is it—"

"It's done," I said. "Nobody died."

Kristen didn't say anything for a while. I could hear her radiator ticking, and a car going by outside on Elm Street in the snow.

"You went somewhere I couldn't come," she said finally, very low.

"Yeah."

"And you came back."

"Yeah."

"Okay," said Kristen Parker. Then, in a voice trying very hard to be her normal voice, and almost managing: "Then you owe me a dream. A real one. Somewhere I haven't been. You pick."

"Anywhere?"

"Anywhere with no TVs."

I looked at my cold right hand on the receiver.

"I'll think of somewhere," I said.

V. Due Back

This is how I know it ended everywhere.

At eight on Sunday morning in Cabin 11, with Dewey and Mulder watching and Gale on the bed in Dewey's sweatshirt with her hair down, Dewey Riley took the original tape out of the evidence bag, wrote OPENED 1/19/97 8:02 AM, SHELTER MTN, D. RILEY on the bag, and handed it to me. We'd agreed days ago that if anybody was ever going to put it in a machine again, it would be me.

I plugged in the VCR and the TV in Eleven, turned the TV back around from the wall, put the tape in, and pressed play.

Static, for a second. And then a horse.

A black horse running in a green field under a blue English sky, strings swelling, and a British voice, the horse's voice, talking over the running. Black Beauty, the 1994 one with Sean Bean. I'd shelved it at Bradley Video a hundred times. Family, aisle six.

"What," said Dewey.

I stopped it and ejected it and turned it over in my hands. The faded orange sticker on top: BE KIND, REWIND. On the spine, under where somebody had peeled a label off long ago, I could just make out the ghost of a store's printed sticker: BELLINGHAM VIDEO & GAMES.

"Somebody in Bellingham dubbed it onto a rental," I said. "They grabbed the first tape they had and taped over Black Beauty." I looked at it. "And now it's just Black Beauty again."

Mulder took the tape out of my hands very carefully and looked at it, and then at me.

"Again," he said. "You said again. Tapes don't do that. When you tape over something, it's gone. The signal's overwritten. It doesn't come back."

"No," I said. "It doesn't."

Mulder looked at the tape for a while. Then he went outside and stood in the snow and called his office in Washington on the cellular phone from his rental, which was the size of a brick and only worked on the porch. He was on it for forty-five minutes, and he came back in with a very strange look on his face.

"Arneson," he said. "In Everett. The man who gave me the dub. He kept the first copy—the one he made and didn't show. In his attic, in a shoebox, for a month. He called the field office at 10:45 last night. He said he'd gone up to look at it because he couldn't sleep, because he hasn't slept since November. He said he could hear it. Up there. In the box. A hissing." Mulder sat down on the bed. "And at 10:40 it stopped. And he went up and put it in the machine, God help him, and it's his daughter's third birthday party. From 1993. That's what was on the tape before he dubbed over it."

Nobody said anything.

"Scully," said Mulder, to the door, where Scully stood in her peacoat with her arms crossed.

Scully looked at him.

"I'm not going to check," she said. "The one I hid."

"Scully—"

"I'm not going to check, Mulder. I'm not going to go and get it and put it in a machine and see what's on it now. Not even if it's a birthday party. Not even if it's Black Beauty." She uncrossed her arms. "I'm going back to Washington on Monday, and I'm going to get it from where I put it, and I'm going to burn it. Without looking. Like I said. And you're never going to know where it was."

Mulder looked at her.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Okay," said Fox Mulder. "Trust Scully."

Rachel went down the mountain at nine, to Seattle, to Aidan. On the way she stopped at the door of Eleven and looked at me.

"I'm going to write it," she said. "The October cluster. Four kids from Moesko who died of something nobody understands." She paused. "And that it stopped. That's all. That it stopped."

"That's a good story."

"It's eleven inches on B-6," said Rachel Keller. "Nobody's going to read it." She almost smiled. "Katie's still not speaking to me."

"She will."

"I know." She put her hand on the door frame. "Aidan said to tell you something. On the phone this morning. He said, Tell him she likes him." She looked at me. "I didn't ask what it meant."

"Thanks," I said.

She went. I heard her car go down the hill.

Richard Morgan left at ten with Old Man Hennessey in the rusty pickup. He'd slept in Nine in his funeral suit on top of the covers, and before he left he came to the door of Eleven and stood there with his hands at his sides. He wasn't a man who said much.

"Wednesday," he said. "On the island. Next to Anna. The pastor from the Lutheran church said he'd do it. Nobody else is coming." He looked at the floor. "I'd like it if you came."

"I'll come."

He nodded.

"Gray," said Richard Morgan softly, more to himself than to me. "Gray." Then he looked up at me for the first time that morning. "You told her. Down there. What color they were. Didn't you."

"Yeah."

"Thank you," said Richard Morgan, and turned and walked slowly down the path to the truck in his barn boots and got in. Hennessey lifted one hand an inch off his knee and put it back down, and they drove away.

I was alone in Eleven at ten-thirty, packing my wet clothes into a plastic bag from the lodge, when the TV came on.

It was still plugged in from the morning. I'd turned it off. It came on by itself with a soft electric pop, and the screen went gray—static, hissing very softly—and I froze with the wet flannel in my hands.

I'd been afraid for seven days, and this wasn't that. I just stood there and watched the screen and waited.

The static thinned. Under it, faint, like something coming up through water, there was a picture: a green-gray field in gray light, white fences, and a horse running. A dappled gray mare with a white mane, running free along the fence line with her mane flying, through a field on an island in the rain.

Bella.

She ran the length of the screen. Then the static came back up over her, softly, like water closing, and the TV clicked off.

I stood there a long time. Then I put the wet flannel down and opened my right hand and looked at it. Still cold, all the way through.

"Hi, Samara," I said to the dark screen.

Nothing, of course. But for a second the cold in my hand got a little colder, like somebody squeezing back.

The network plane took us home on Sunday afternoon.

Mulder and Scully drove us to Boeing Field. Gale and Dewey went up the stairs first with the bags and the evidence bag. On the tarmac by the bottom step, Mulder shook my hand and held on to it.

"You still owe me," he said. "How you know."

"Maybe not ever."

"Maybe," said Fox Mulder. "That's the important word." He didn't let go. "Walk with me a second."

We walked twenty feet along the side of the plane, out of the wind off the engines, to where the rental car was parked with its flashers on. Scully stayed by the stairs with her arms crossed and watched us go, with the face of a woman who knows exactly what her partner is about to do and has decided to let him so she can say so later.

Mulder leaned on the trunk of the car and looked at the plane for a while, and at the big gray hangars and the half-painted Boeing test jets parked in rows down the field like something out of a dream about airports.

"The Bureau keeps a list," he said. "Consultants. Outside experts. A forensic odontologist in Baltimore. A woman at Ohio State who knows more about bees than the bees do. A retired magician in Vegas we call when somebody claims they can walk through walls." He glanced at me. "You get a laminated badge that says VISITOR, and a background check, and a check for your time that takes about four months to clear."

"I'm guessing I'm not going on the list."

"You are absolutely not going on the list." He said it pleasantly. "You're seventeen. You were on national television in October. And there's a man on the Elwha car deck with a Delaware address on his paperwork who reads everything that list touches, probably before I do." He took his hand out of his coat pocket with a business card in it. "So this is the other list."

He held it out.

A regular FBI business card—white, the seal in the corner, raised black letters reading FOX W. MULDER, SPECIAL AGENT, FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, and a Washington number. On the back, in ballpoint, in the worst handwriting I'd ever seen on a federal employee, was a second number, and under it one word, underlined twice.

Consultant.

I looked at it.

"There's no other list, is there," I said.

"There's no other list," Mulder agreed. "It's a card. You're the only name on it." He put his hands back in his pockets. "Here's how it works, since I'm making it up as I go. Every few months something lands on my desk that nobody else in the building wants. Most of it's nothing. Swamp gas. A guy who wants to be on Hard Copy." He looked at the plane again. "And some of it isn't. And some of the some of it, I'm starting to think, is the kind of thing a kid in California put on a list on his website before it happened."

I waited.

"When one of those lands on my desk," said Mulder, "I'd like to call that number on the back and describe it to somebody who'll tell me whether I'm right. That's all. You don't have to come. You don't have to tell me how you know. You can say I can't tell you that, and I'll write it down and underline it." He shrugged. "Unofficially, of course. Consultant." He paused, the way he did before saying something he knew Scully would hate. "In the supernatural."

"Mulder," said Scully from the bottom of the stairs, twenty feet away, over the engines. I don't know how she heard him. I think she just knew.

"I said unofficially," Mulder called back.

"He's a minor."

"He's a minor who went down a well." He turned back to me. "Well?"

I turned the card over in the fingers of my cold right hand. I could feel its edge, and under the edge, faintly, something else. Small. Curious. Looking.

Five weeks ago a doll had walked into a toy store on Main Street and introduced himself to an army as a consultant. Martha had heard him say it in our side yard—Command sent me—and it had worked because nobody checked. That was the whole trick. Say you're the expert, and the people who want one will believe you.

Mulder was the opposite. He'd checked everything, and he'd been checking since October. He'd stood on the car deck of a ferry and watched the wind do something the wind doesn't do, asked me one question, and taken no for an answer. And then on Friday he'd gone down a well himself, into the dark, to bring a little girl up in a duffel bag, because somebody had to.

"Three things," I said.

Mulder's eyebrows went up. "You're negotiating."

"I'm seventeen. I'm always negotiating." I held up one finger. "One. My dad hears about every call. Before I do anything. Every time. That's his rule, and it's older than yours."

"Your father sounds like a reasonable man."

"He made me promise to come back from every single thing I do. Out loud. Twice." Two fingers. "Two. I don't lie to you. But I'm going to say I can't tell you that a lot. More than you're going to like."

"I've been lied to by better," said Mulder, "and told the truth by worse. And three?"

"Three," I said. "If it comes to me first. If something lands in my guestbook before it lands on your desk." I held up the card. "I call you."

Mulder looked at me, and his face did the thing I'd seen on the car deck in the wind, when he'd said that wasn't the wind and I'd said no. The look of a man who'd been told maybe for a very long time by everybody he'd ever asked, and had just heard somebody say yes.

"Collect," he said. "Call collect. The Bureau can afford it." He held out his hand. "Deal?"

I shook it.

"Deal," I said. "Consultant."

"In the supernatural," said Mulder, with deep satisfaction, and let go. "I'll be reading the guestbook."

Scully was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. She didn't say anything about the card. She looked at it once in my hand, and then at Mulder, who was walking back to the car very casually with the air of a man who has done nothing wrong and expects to be told otherwise in the car.

Then she reached into her peacoat and held out a card of her own. Same seal, same raised letters—DANA K. SCULLY, M.D., SPECIAL AGENT—and on the back, in small, neat, entirely legible handwriting, a phone number, and under it:

If he calls you at 3 a.m., call me first.

"I want it noted," said Scully, "that I think this is a terrible idea."

"Okay."

"You're a minor. He has no authority to do this. If anyone at the Bureau finds out, he'll be in the basement until the next century, and he'll enjoy it." She looked at my face the way she had at Anacortes—the color of it, the eyes, the skin around the nose. No blood. "And you were underwater for twelve minutes on Saturday night, and you won't let me run a single test."

"No, ma'am."

"So if you're going to do this," said Dana Scully, "you're going to have a doctor's number in your wallet. That's my condition." She nodded once at the card. "Eat a vegetable, Mr. Meeks."

"I'll eat a pickle."

"That's not—" She stopped, and something happened at the corner of her mouth that didn't go away so fast this time. "Goodbye, Randy."

Gale fell asleep over Oregon on Dewey's shoulder with her hand in his and her sunglasses in her lap. Dewey fell asleep about five minutes later with his cheek on top of her head. The evidence bag with Black Beauty in it sat on the seat across from them, sealed again, with CASE CLOSED written under DO NOT VIEW in Dewey's careful capitals, and under that, smaller:

ok you can view it now

I sat by the window with Sid's scarf around my neck, still damp, still bloodstained, still smelling a little like laundry soap and woodstove, and watched the clouds below us go from gray to white to gold. Then I opened the panel.

Tickets (unspent): 5Fuse charges: 1

Five of them, held for a week, glowing in a row. A fly out of a screen. A horse off a propeller. A plug out of a wall. A door I'd opened on purpose. And the last one, the big bright one: Nobody passes.

I looked out the window for a while first. Then I reached for the first one.

VI. Five

The first one was the fly.

[PULL] Bronze Item.

It came out of the panel the way items always do, into my hand instead of my head. My right hand, the cold one. Something small and hard and round dropped into my palm out of nothing, and I closed my fingers on it before it could roll off across the seat, and opened them.

A blue bead the size of a marble, smooth, with a faint glow at its center like the pilot light on a stove.

Cleaning Stone (Common Item)A small blue bead that slowly cleans and removes filth and dirt from everything within a 10-meter radius of it.

A fly out of a TV screen, I thought, and the Gacha gives me a Roomba.

Then I looked down at Sid's scarf.

Green. Lumpy. Wider a foot in, for no reason. Six days around my neck through rain in Seattle and snow on a mountain and the bottom of a well, and the blood—mine, from the ferry and Eola and the well—in long brown streaks down the front where I'd wiped my nose without thinking, again and again. It's a loan. So you have to bring it back. Since the cabin I'd been wondering how I was going to hand it back to her like that.

I sat over Oregon with the blue bead in my palm and watched. It took about ten minutes. You couldn't see it happen any more than you can see a clock's hour hand move, but the brown got lighter, and lighter, and then it was gone, and the scarf in my lap was just green and lumpy and very long and smelled like laundry soap and a woodstove, the way it had on the Rileys' lawn.

I put the bead in my pocket. Across the aisle, Gale's camel coat, which had been through a barn and a well and a bathroom floor on Moesko, was starting to look like it had just come back from the dry cleaner's. She was going to wake up and think she was losing her mind.

The second was the horse.

[PULL] Silver Ability.

It came in through both hands, a pins-and-needles feeling like when you've slept on your arm, without the hurt, and then a sense of reach, as if my hands had gotten longer without changing shape.

Summon Item (Common Ability)You are able to mark up to 10 items weighing less than your lifting strength that you can summon to your location at will and send back to where you last summoned them from.8th ability. Stored.

Ten things.

I sat there thinking about what my ten would be. It's a strange question if you've never been asked it: if you could always get ten things back, wherever you were, which ten? Theo would have said the M60, I think, the bottomless one from the dream. The kid in the green vest would have said the remote. Randy, the one from before both of us, would have said his whole VHS collection and been told no, that's three hundred things.

I knew what the first one would be, as soon as I could slot it. Martha's walkie-talkie was in a wet pair of jeans in a plastic bag at my feet, probably dead from the well, and I wanted it marked anyway. So you can always come get me, I'd written on the card at Christmas. Now I could always go get it, too.

The third was the plug.

[PULL] Silver Trait.

It came in at the back of my head, cool and odd and a little crooked, like a picture hung a hair off level.

Crazy Lure (Rare Trait)Crazy, mentally unstable, or otherwise insane people find themselves more attracted to you, and it is easier to gain their affection and favour. It is also easier for you to reason with them.

I read it twice. Then I put my face in my hands and laughed without a sound so I wouldn't wake Gale.

Thanks, I thought. Really. Thank you. Because what my life needed was more of that.

Then I stopped laughing and thought about it. Easier for you to reason with them. A man in a bathtub with a heater in his hands, very calm, telling me I didn't know what she was. A boy who hadn't left his room in seven weeks. A little girl at the bottom of a well whom a hospital full of doctors had looked at and written down as disturbed. Six kids in a psychiatric hospital in Ohio in October whom every adult in the building called crazy because they said a man was killing them in their dreams. And he was.

Crazy, I thought. According to who?

I left it on.

The fourth was the door.

[PULL] Gold Trait.

It came in through my blood. Not my head, not my hands—it went into me through my chest and my heart and then out everywhere at once, down every vein, warm and old and strange, like the taste of something I'd never had and somehow remembered. My heart did something it hadn't done since the bottom of the well. It slowed, just once—thud, a long pause, thud—and then went back to normal.

In Slot 1, under my breastbone, Morbing lifted its head the way it does when I'm about to say the words, and purred.

Tepes (Rare Trait)You possess blood of the Tepes bloodline, the original vampires, or something like that. As a Tepes, Infernal and Necro abilities are slightly more potent and your natural charisma is increased thanks to your nobility, especially towards creatures of the night. If your Race/Form is Vampire or Vampire adjacent, the effect of this trait is greatly increased.

Or something like that, said the Gacha. Very scholarly.

Tepes. Vlad Tepes. Vlad the Impaler. I sat on a corporate jet over Oregon and worked out that I'd just been made a Dracula, more or less, for not looking away from a dead girl, and that the Gacha considered this a reward.

Then I thought about Samara's hand in mine at the bottom of the well, cold, holding on. Especially towards creatures of the night.

My right hand in my lap was still cold. That hadn't changed. But when Tepes went into my blood I felt the cold in my fingers notice, like somebody in the next room hearing a sound and lifting their head.

Then the panel did something it had only done once before, in the woods in November with a nosebleed. It updated.

SYSTEM NOTICETepes × MorbingVampire Physique detected (Ability Slot 1). While Morbing is active, your Form counts as Vampire, and the effect of Tepes is greatly increased:· Your superhuman physical abilities are significantly enhanced.· Your Infernal and Necro abilities are significantly more potent.· Your natural charisma is greatly increased, especially towards creatures of the night.Morbing (Rare Ability) → Morbing: Tepes Blood (Elite while active)

I read it three times. Then I put my head back against the seat and laughed without making any noise, the way you laugh in church.

Because it was the dumbest power in the multiverse—a catchphrase from a movie that wasn't going to exist for twenty-five years, a joke for exactly one person—and the Gacha had looked at it, looked at the blood it had just put in me, and decided it was nobility. Vampire Physique, but the real kind. The old kind. The kind with a castle.

Infernal and Necro. The Dark Spear smelled like Hell to a doll who'd know. And Morbing was dead, more or less, while it was on; I'd stood at the bottom of a well without a heartbeat to speak of. Both had just gotten stronger. And creatures of the night—I didn't know what that meant yet. Vampires, probably. Wolves. Things that only came out after dark. A little girl who'd lived in the dark for eighteen years, holding my hand.

I'd still have to shout it. The panel was very clear about that. It always is.

"Count Meeks," I said under my breath, to the window, and across the aisle Dewey snored.

The last one was the big one.

[PULL] Platinum Random.

I took a breath first. I don't know why. I'd pulled a Platinum once before, on the plane home from Columbus with Gale asleep, and gotten a vampire with a catchphrase. You learn not to hope.

Random → Item.

It didn't come into my hand; it was too big. I felt it arrive in storage instead, the way Soul Solid had in September—a sense of weight just behind my left shoulder, in the place where the Gacha kept things, as if somebody had leaned something long and heavy against the inside of my back.

Gae Dearg (Elite Item)Type Moon - A legendary spear carried by the hero Diarmuid. This spear is capable of severing and nullifying magic, making all forms of magical protection almost useless against it. This effect is not useful for dispelling spells but for bypassing them.Stored.

I read it, then read it again.

Elite. 4.8. The highest number I'd ever seen on the panel, higher than the Spirit Gun, higher than anything.

I couldn't take it out, not on a plane, not a seven-foot spear in a cabin the width of a hallway. I didn't need to take it out to see it, either. Theo knew it. He'd watched an anime about it in a group-home TV room in a year that hadn't happened yet: a man with a beauty mark under his eye and two spears, one red and one gold, fighting in a shipyard at night, and the red one going straight through a suit of armor that magic was supposed to make unbreakable.

The red one. The crimson rose of exorcism.

I sat with it leaning against the inside of my back and thought about all the things I'd met in five months that magic was supposed to protect. A dream demon who couldn't be killed in his own world. A doll with a voodoo binding that screamed when the spear went in. And all the things coming that I'd written on a list in the dark in September: a man made of bees and belief, a box that opened onto Hell, a clown in a storm drain who'd been eating children for three hundred years.

All forms of magical protection almost useless against it.

And I had Novice Polearm Mastery, from a night in the woods in November with a spear made of dark that froze my hands. Teach a spear to be a spear.

Okay, I thought. Now I've got a real one.

Tickets (unspent): 0Fuse charges: 1

One charge. I looked at it a long while. I thought about exorcist things and vampire things, things in my blood and things in my back, and about Battle Maniac, quiet for once under my breastbone, curled up like a dog that had been out all day.

Not yet, I thought. Home first.

I closed the panel.

Across the aisle Gale Weathers stirred on Dewey's shoulder and opened her eyes and looked down at her coat. At the cuff she'd turned under on Tuesday in Noah's bathroom so the blood wouldn't show.

She turned it back out. It was clean.

She stared at it. Then she looked at me, and I looked out the window.

"Randy," said Gale, very low.

"Mm."

"My coat."

"It's a nice coat."

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she put her head back down on Dewey's shoulder and closed her eyes.

"I'm not going to write about that either," said Gale Weathers.

Below us the clouds went gold, then pink, and then the plane tipped its wing, and through a gap, very far down, I saw the coast, and the hills brown and green in the folds, and somewhere in them a little town in a valley I couldn't see yet but knew was there. I put my cold hand flat on the window and kept it there until we were down through the clouds.

Tag: Once

On Sunday night the conference room was on the ninth floor, at the end of the east corridor past the water fountain, where it had been for most of the 1980s. Margaret Pell found that almost comforting.

He sat at the head of the long table with the Seattle Times and a cup of coffee that was, for once, still hot. Dunphy stood by the door in his gray parka with snow melting on the shoulders. He hadn't been told to come. He'd come anyway.

"Contracts," said Margaret Pell, and opened the folder. "Every copy we were holding went blank at ten-forty Pacific last night. Not static. Blank. Whatever was on the tapes before somebody dubbed over them is back. A Seahawks game. A Christmas morning in Spokane. A church choir." She turned a page. "The one Customs pulled at SeaTac on Thursday, bound for Osaka, is a wedding reception in Tacoma. The bride's father does the chicken dance."

"Every copy," he said.

"Every one we know of, sir. And Applications can't find a single one anywhere that isn't."

He put the coffee down.

On the side table by the shelf, under the tapes, the red telephone rang.

Once.

Margaret Pell didn't say anything. She'd been told years ago what once meant. She watched him not smile, and then smile.

"And the girl?" he said to Dunphy.

Dunphy took a moment. "Containment can't find her, sir. Not in the well. Not on any of the tapes. Not anywhere." He paused. "I watched him go down, sir. I didn't catch him."

"I know you didn't." He looked at the red phone. "And Containment won't find her. They wouldn't know where to look."

"Sir?"

"She went home with somebody, Mr. Dunphy." He picked up the coffee again, looked into it, and drank. "For the first time in her life."

He sat a while without speaking.

"He looked," he said. "That's all it ever was. Nobody in the movie ever thought to just look." He set the cup down. "Write it in the file, Margaret. Under Seven Days." He paused. "Not yet. And under that: he's better at this than I was."

Margaret Pell wrote it down.