BONEMEAL
by Magdeleine
Rating: R for graphic violence and disturbing subject
matter.
Spoilers: Abduction/cancer arc
Summary: Here there be Pigs.
Feedback: I know I'm asking for it.  playwrtrx@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: Not mine.  They'll have more fun in parrotfic,
I promise.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Stream-rounded stones shifted under Mulder's feet as he
walked away from the farmhouse.  The air was clear and
smelled of wildflowers and chickens and the cool mossy scent
of a huge oak tree.  It was so quiet that he could hear the
pigs clanking at their feeding station and the occasional
hum of cars going by on the paved road three farms over,
could hear the murmur of sheriff's deputies in their brown
uniforms as they argued near the pigpen.

The barn was a faded red and scalloped on the bottom where
the dirt was worn from underneath the wood where cats or
dogs or raccoons had squeezed under the boards time and time
again.  He could feel the age of this place, feel the
acceptance of birth and life and death and the cycle of the
corn.  Even buildings could rot here, returning to dust in a
way that the stone cities never could.

His cell phone rang.  He glanced at the number, recognized
it as the local doctor who'd assisted Scully earlier, and
couldn't bear to answer it.  He would bet money that the
woman had left forty messages of varying length on his voice
mail, wanting to know how they'd known about the chip.
Wanting to know how he'd known to come here so quickly.  He
couldn't face answering those questions, not now.

He walked under the oak tree, zeroing in on the swing made
from a stuffed feed-sack dangling from a branch.  The long
rope hung too low for him to try the swing; it was built for
generations of childish legs who had dragged their feet and
worn a rut into the dark brown dirt beneath it.  He gave the
swing a gentle push and it arced away from him with the
ghosts of all those children riding it, came back to tease
its wiry surface against his hands.  On the second arc he
caught it and shoved, and the stuffed sack flew up,
jerking in the air like an executed thief with the hangman's
noose gone tight.

He watched the swing twist and spin, and breathed in the
warm, thick smell of growth and rot entwined, the smell that
people called earthy.  Earth.

Scully put her hand on his shoulder and he turned to stare
at her wildflower face turned up toward his, watered with
shade.  Her eyes asked a question and he nodded, shoulders
slumping.  For a heartbeat her strong fingers curled around
his, squeezing, and then she let go and walked back to the
farmhouse, stepping carefully where the gravel ended and the
mulberry-stained sidewalk began.  Mulder caught up with her
near the steps to the screened-in porch and they entered the
house together.

They had to go through the kitchen first, a huge room that
smelled of boiled potatoes and dry cereal.  It was ringed
with aging appliances and solidly built cabinets and ruled
by a circular table of some orange-ish wood that held only a
round sugar bowl, precisely in the middle.  Circles within
circles.  The door to the root cellar gaped open and a whiff
of cold dirt and mold swept out.  Plastic letters of a
magnetized alphabet clung low on the side of the
refrigerator; the tiny grubby fingerprints that bruised the
appliance marking a child's territory even more clearly than
the letters that spelled out "i lov daddy."

Molly Walmond sat in the living room in the exact center of
the long blue sofa, her hands clasped in her lap and her
head bowed.  She was all bone and whipcord muscle, her hair
scraped back into a wispy ponytail at the back of her neck.
Scully sat beside Molly on the left, half-mimicking her
posture; Mulder found a flimsy plastic folding chair leaning
against the wall and set it up as the third point of the
triangle, slightly to Molly's right.

Footsteps sounded overhead, the hard-soled thumps of cop
shoes on hardwood floors.  A small herd of them, by the
sound of it, more eager to collect evidence upstairs than
deal with the human wreckage left alone downstairs.

"You know what happened to my children," Molly said, very
clearly.  She did not look up.

"Why don't you tell us," Scully suggested, her voice soft as
a chenille blanket.  Outside the open window, the pigs
clanked their feed trough around in their pen, making hollow
metallic noises; one squealed, the sound muted by the thick
air.  Mulder glanced out and saw another police car roll
into the parking lot, the gravel crunching beneath its
tires.  It parked with the others, a ragged line of various
law enforcement, the blue Taurus seeming ridiculously
civilian among them.

"Jason works at the factory during the day."  Molly paused
and seemed to stare at the dull rings on her left hand,
which hung loosely between her bony knuckles.  "He comes
home in the evening and does chores, takes care of the kids
while I go into town to work the night shift.  This farm has
been in his family for a hundred and fifty years and we're
the last ones here.  The last.  He has four brothers and
none of them would stay.  Not one."

Scully waited through this with her patient expression,
leaning in sympathetically.  Mulder couldn't watch this dark
stick-puppet of a woman in her grief; he let his eyes wander
over the tight weave of the carpet, the old television, the
waterless fish tank across the room that housed a single
beady-eyed hamster.  The hamster was attempting to stuff an
entire pretzel rod into its mouth-pouch despite the fact
that the pretzel was four inches long.

"I came home this morning around six and the kids were still
asleep," Molly said evenly, a woman treading rocky ground
with a careful, steady pace.  "I thought.  I thought they
were asleep.  And -- there was a knife on the table.  I was
so tired that I didn't notice the blood.  I sat down with my
bowl of Cheerios and waited for the kids to come downstairs
for breakfast.  They were usually up by that point and I
thought it was strange but I was too tired ... and that was
when Jason came in from doing chores and I saw the blood on
him.  I only recognized the blood on the knife when I saw
the blood on his shirt.  It took me that long.  I ate my
Cheerios at that table --"

Scully reached out and took Molly's bony hand in hers as the
stick-woman began to weep in dry, raspy sobs.  This woman
whose husband had butchered their three children in their
beds and taken the little bodies out to grind them into bone
meal, which he had then fed to the pigs.  This woman whose
husband had calmly come back to eat breakfast with dark
blood soaking his T-shirt and jeans, and who was now sitting
calmly in the county jail, his mind quite gone.

Scully had found a chip in the man's neck only an hour ago.

Another former abductee.  The third they'd found in this
county, the third to turn suddenly homicidal this week.
There was no telling how many more of them there were.  No
telling who would be next, or who they'd kill.

Across the room, the hamster was waddling around the tank
with its head cocked back at a ridiculous angle, the pretzel
rod sticking out and making it look like the last pitiful
descendant of some more violent, prehistoric rodent.
Outside, the pigs snorted and clanked at their feed troughs.

The urge to move was too much, and Mulder left the room.  He
went outside, skirting the huge sheepdog sniffing at the
bloody boot-prints that Jason Walmond had left behind, and
leaned against the mulberry tree.  Fruit rotted beneath his
feet, stinking and sweet.

Scully came outside long minutes later.  He heard her pick
her way through the fallen mulberries with the careful
distaste of a cat walking through mud.  She stopped on the
opposite side of the tree and stood, stiff and silent, not
looking at him.

"Those kids --" he said softly.

"I know."

"It makes me sick, Scully.  Did the police find -- any --"

"Most of it was already gone."  She was looking across the
yard, watching a single police officer shoo chickens away
from the pig pen.  "They got enough to prove what happened."

Her eyes glinted silver in the shade before she turned her
head.

He watched her for a long time, his gaze on the back of her
neck.  "Scully --"

"I'm all right, Mulder."

"I don't --"

"I'll be fine.  You don't have to worry about me."  She
finally looked at him, her will a tangible thing behind her
eyes.

Something twisted and broke inside him.  He took a step
closer, his hand closing over empty space between them,
somehow unable to close the distance.  "What if --"

"Shhh."

He could see her teeth, very white against her red lips.
Her hand was cold as it slipped over his throat in slow
motion, her fingernails scraping his skin.  The wind rustled
the green branches and swirled the life and death of the
world through the air around them.

Her voice fell like the blade of a knife.

"I'm not the one you should worry about, Mulder."


END


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Author's notes: This is not my fault.  Apparently wen has
started a trend;  Sabine handed me three elements and gave
me two hours to write, and this is what came out.  The
elements: pretzel rods, a chenille blanket, and forty voice
mail messages left by the same person.

Don't ask how three innocent things like that turned into
*this*.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Start Time: 10:35 PM, 6/23/00
Finished: 12:38 AM, 6/24/00

Thanks (I think) to Sab for pushing me into this, to Cofax,
Shannono, Marasmus, and Punk Maneuverability for beta, and to
the other Virginians for reading and for taking my panic in
stride.  You're all darling and I will get back at you for
this later.

*** For those of you who are wondering, yes, I'm almost done
with the parrotfic, hereafter to be known as Gutless.  I'm
shooting for posting it starting July 4.  And no, it is
*nothing* like this.

Commentary welcome at playwrtrx@home.com