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danascullysjournal · 1 year

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If You Will Let Me

A Post Milagro X-Files Fic

TW: Horror, Demonic Posession, Minor Blood and Gore, Torture, Autopsy

Chapter 14: Cicada Songs

Cracks of light, so minuscule he questioned their existence, blinked dimly through the rubble as he continued to pound at the foundation bricks. It could be truth… it could be another lie. But, Mulder considered grimly, he was out of alternatives.

Through the darkness, he pummeled at the ancient brick that powdered, bit by bit, under his blow. He tried not to consider the life that the skull in his hands once held, or the lives of the bodies that surrounded him. Scully. Get to Scully.

Pound.

Crumble.

Sweep the debris.

Pound.

Crumble.

Sweep.

He kept himself at a quickened pace, though his biceps burned and his neck ached. The cadence was his only chance. He couldn’t stop.

Fragments of brick began chipping off in earnest, and Mulder felt his hopes rise up. The light that speckled the decrepit wall before him was growing to small, faded beams that teased through the dust.

Turning on his side, Mulder reached both hands to the breaking bricks. The soiled, burning wound in his palm had faded to a tingling ache that he tried to ignore. He pressed his dirt-filled nails into the grit of the foundation and pulled. At the shift in the bricks, his fingers wiggled deeper into cracks, clawed in a frenzy at pieces that rasped and cracked as they gave way. Pinholes grew to a diminutive, ragged opening. His hopes lifted.

Beneath the sound of cracking foundation, falling sediment and his own rhythmic breathing, Mulder felt something. A vibration. One that couldn’t register on his tympanic membrane, but reverberated through each cell of his body. He felt a tingling electricity in the stale air, like the charge of a thunderstorm. They knew what he was doing. He could feel it.

But he had to take the chance. Let them come.

He wouldn’t stop.

Pound.

Crumble.

Sweep.

Repeat.

Find Scully.

_______________

Scully’s eyes took in the gaunt, gray face of Philip Padgett’s corpse. His teeth shone in the darkness, tendons straining in his neck as he pressed tighter on her throat, leaning his flayed body forward. She wanted to tear her eyes away, just as much as she wanted desperately to run. Escape.

But she could do neither.

Her vision was held as captive as her body, and so she stared, struggling to breathe, sensing each movement of his cold body over hers. Watching what should be impossible, fully animated and all powerful, as he began to pull the icy scalpel across her skin.

Don’t give him any pleasure in it. None.

But Scully couldn’t stifle her body’s response to the scalpel that cut beneath her collarbone. The slice of the blade ripped through her, a searing pain that held each nerve ending fast.

Her scream, grated and stifled, escaped her throat, and she lurched against the hand on her neck that held her down.

“Get. Off.” Her words rasped through compressed vocal cords. Muscles strained against dark smoke that swirled over her and held her still. She was drowning under his body and a sea of cold, black emptiness that was smothering her.

Padgett’s dead face grinned down at her with satisfaction. His pale fingers raised the blade to his own gaping chest.

“We aren’t finished yet.” He traced the blackened, vertical opening of his y incision, tilting his head. Gloating. Ebony crusts of his dried blood fluttered down to her bare chest. “You’re going to feel every slice you’ve ever made. All those autopsies. All those bodies. Each. Cut.” He pressed harder on her straining neck, and bent his face to hers.

Scully tried to pull air into her starved lungs. A warm stream of her own blood traced a path from her clavicle, down the side of her chilled, bare chest. Away. Get away. She could think of nothing else as her brain began to slow from lack of oxygen. Padgett’s cold, decaying breath registered dully in her nostrils, and she felt the blade revisit the fresh opening under her clavicle. Finding the next piece of her to parce.

Hssssssssss.

The sound crawled on her skin. It was soft in her dulled eardrums at first, but rose abruptly to an angry crescendo.

The palm of Padgett’s hand withdrew sharply from her throat. Through the darkness, Scully could see his body waver. Change. She gasped air into her lungs, shaking. Grateful. Silent. Something had drawn his attention. The last thing she wanted to do was remind him of her presence. Her eyes searched the dim attic, considering her situation. Low visibility in a seemingly empty room. An undetermined space between the ancient bed she occupied and the stairs. Her aching neck, her bleeding chest. The dead body holding her fast. Not ideal.

Mulder’s words interrupted her pessimistic thoughts, pulling her back to herself.

You are not a victim, he had said. You’re stronger than that.

No.

She wouldn’t be a victim. Not again. She could take back control.

Hsssssssssssssss.

It was coming from nowhere, and everywhere, pricking at her skin, filling the corners of the darkened attic. It was electric, dripping with fury. Something was changing.

The fingers of black smoke that had chained her down released their grip as the sound grew. Peaks of ebony smoke undulated in the darkness, pouring over themselves, and she could make out masses that seemed to climb. Like pillars. Or bodies. Padgett, cold stone over her, lurched suddenly, twisting unnaturally. The white flesh of his torso, the gaping autopsy hole in his chest, all of him wavered. Blackening. His mouth opened, joining the unnatural choir that hissed and grated like a cacophony of cicadas.

It was otherworldly.

Demonic.

The terror pitted in her stomach grew, but she forced it down. With its attention distracted, Scully had an opportunity.

And it could be the only one.

——————————

This has to be enough.

Mulder’s tired eyes strained to size up the crumbled gash he had torn out of the aged foundation, considering how best to squeeze through. Steaming summer air wafted over his dust-coated face in small, featherlight kisses, and what sounded like cicada songs rose up in swells that peaked and grated, a stark contrast to the rhythmic chirps of grasshoppers in the cornfields.

Cicadas meant late afternoon. Evening. Had they been there that long? Through the foundation wall it was a serene, lazy Midwest day, and Mulder caught the grim laugh that threatened in his throat. Peaceful life sang brightly, just outside his grasp, and here he lay in a catacomb. Surrounded by the dead. Dead which he would be joining soon, if he didn’t figure out a way to save himself and his partner. Golden sunlight filtered through the hole, illuminating dancing particles that wavered listlessly before him. Particles, he knew, of skin and bone. Lives long stolen by the beings above him.

Dust to dust.

But that couldn’t be his fate- not yet. Not while the possibility of finding Scully was even remotely plausible. Every second was closer to something terrible for her, he knew. Something meant to break her and fold her into the writhing mass of darkness. He could feel time ripping away from him. The memory of Padgett choking her on the bed, taking every shred of her dignity, was carved into his subconscious. The gloating visage of that man haunted Mulder. Taunting him inside his head.

That hadn’t been real.

But she was somewhere in this tomb of a house. And those shadows… those demons. They could be doing that to her right now. Or worse.

No. He couldn’t let himself dwell… couldn’t think. Every time his neurons fired a pained memory, a fear, they could hear him. He knew. They could hear everything. And they already knew that losing her was what terrified him most of all. Though the legion knew his intentions, as much as they knew every other thought he dared to think, they had seemed to leave him alone when he fell down here, turning attention to find her.

To take her.

He felt suddenly nauseous, and defeated. If that’s where all the dark energy was focused…

God, please. If you’re up there. Please don’t let them…. Mulder didn’t dare finish the thought.

His bloodied hand emerged into the golden glow first, tentatively. Seeking. Was this real? Mulder wasn’t sure anymore. He rotated his body, twisting himself sideways to best match the gash in the bricks, and began to push himself closer with his good hand while his feet kicked and scuffled against the bone fragments that surrounded him. They clattered their displeasure.

“Sorry.”

He knew it was stupid to talk to dismembered, decayed corpses.

But he was sorry. Desperately. Sorry for kicking them. Sorry that they were murdered here by those evil beings in the first place. Sorry that he and Scully had ever met Padgett, that he had written the report that pissed Kersh off. Sorry that Kersh had been so punitive with this assignment. And so very, very sorry he had brought Scully out here on this damn paperwork check and gotten them lost.

His neck bent unnaturally, tight against his shoulder as he squeezed his head through the ragged opening, and he felt his ear catch, then rake its way across the threshold.

As he strained and clawed through the opening, born again from the tomb behind him, the cicada song grew louder, building in pitch and cadence. Frantic. Enraged. Ravenous.

The sun hung high in the cloudless sky, and Mulder knew.

The sound was not cicadas.

Lazy summer heat washed over him, but it did nothing to soothe the chill he felt on the back of his neck, or the sick pit in his stomach.

He struggled to his feet, caked in earth and powdered human remains, and squinted up at the old farmhouse. He was eye level with the front door, standing in the piled lumber refuse of what had once been a covered porch addition. Weather, vermin and time had all taken their share, and the boards had long since rotted and crumbled into piles of porous fragments and peeled, faded paint chips. Before him, the door shook, bearing, for the moment, the raging legion within.

Mulder moved to rub his hands over his face, fighting hopelessness. He stopped short. His palm was covered in blood. The gash was much worse than he had realized, and though matted with dirt and debris, it still trickled fresh crimson as he flexed his fingers.

He figured his scraped ear and forehead were not much better. His shoulders slumped. Exhausted.

This house. These things.

Everything screamed of decay. Of sadness and emptiness, destruction and death. Even himself. He found himself wondering just how much longer. How much more. How much farther he was willing to go before he released his desperate grasp on the notion of ever being with his partner again.

Thud. Thud.

Scrape.

The cacophony shrieking, pummeling behind the door rattled the warped windowpanes that leered at him from above. He felt it reverberating inside him, an electrical impulse that wore him down. Pulled him in.

Thud. Thud.

Snap.

Falling over itself, the door cracked and splintered, raining down in clattering wooden shreds that disappeared into the black sea of smoke that began pouring over him.

He saw his dim hopes eclipsed.

Through the swirling ebony haze, his eyes met the glowing eyes of Samantha, who stared down at him from the darkness in the doorway. Her face was stone.

“Fox.” She was speaking to him, but her lips didn’t move. The voices were many, inside his head. “You’re home now, with us. Don’t you remember?”

“No.” Mulder’s mouth was dry. His eyes burned from human debris. From summer air and dehydration. From the angry tears that threatened to spill over.

They would never stop. He was certain, more certain of it than of anything he had ever claimed or believed in his pathetic life.

He felt himself giving up.

Her lips turned up in a minuscule smile, but the eyes were unwavering. Boring into him, white hot and void of anything but hunger. As the darkness enveloped him, the violent, raging shrieks grew more frenzied, and Mulder felt them wash over him. Through him. Into him.

Through the din, under the currents raging inside his mind, he managed to form two rational thoughts which still belonged to him:

The demons were already consuming him. But maybe he had bought Scully some time.

——————————

Adrenaline coursed through Scully’s veins, her breath quickening, her muscles tense. She steeled herself, eyes wide, and shoved with all her strength, pushing at Padgett’s chilled corpse so she could wriggle free.

And her hands went into him. The blackened flesh was cold as ice, but somehow loose now. Soft. It wavered, suspended for a moment, then began to slide, pieces of thick, black skin and muscle tissue sloughing off onto her as she scrambled backward.

Desperate to escape, Scully backed up blindly, reaching with frantic fingers that found nothing but air, and fell off the bed. She landed, head first, with a stifled groan and a dull thud. Licking her dried lips, she drew in a shaky breath against the musty wooden slats of the dusty, forgotten attic.

Pressing her palms down, she steadied herself. Moving like stone. Mind racing. Her eyes turned slowly up as she twisted to glance behind her.

She wished she hadn’t.

The shrill, unnatural shrieking had stopped. Deafening silence was in its stead. What had been Padgett’s head slithered itself down, eyes locked on hers. They shone white, piercing through the undulating, ethereal mass of smoke that had once been his body. Frantically, her eyes darted to another mass. Then another. And another. Countless clouded forms that had built themselves up pressed into the ceiling of the small attic, looming in each corner, closing in. Each possessed the same cold, beaded white eyes that cut into her soul.

As a child, alone in her darkened room, Scully had imagined the devil. Imagined Hell itself. Nights of staring at the doorway, or crawling into Melissa’s bed, the danger had felt imminent. But it dissipated in the early light. It had been frightening, but like a bad dream, or a fairy tale, removed and safely bound within an old book. Stories, Melissa had reassured her. Just old stories, not truth.

But this. Not even her worst nightmares had prepared her for this.

These were demons. Hungry. Coming for her.

Her logical brain wanted to argue, wanted desperately to find a rational truth to cling to. But there was no logic. Only eyes, and darkness.

Quickly, she pivoted herself, clawing away on all fours, fingernails raking the wood.

Only two thoughts existed in her terror infested mind.

Find Mulder.

Run.

But where? Everything was black. And she had seen the haunting white eyes behind her, watched them fill the room. She could feel them, everywhere.

Except… except for one space. A corner to her left. Run there. She could conjure nothing better, and so she followed her instinct. She hunched forward and bolted, a runner from unsteady blocks. A feral, wounded animal, desperate to escape.

Voices rose up from the living smoke that trailed behind her. They echoed, sang out in waves that hit all octaves. Deep. Sharp. Bitter.

“You won’t leave us. Because he is with us.”

She choked. Froze. Mulder.

An eddy of cold energy lapped at her skin, traversing the nerves in her spinal cord, then up into the gray matter. Parsing through the neurons to find each thought before it touched her tongue.

She knew they were attempting to dig into her. Break her down. She also knew that Mulder would never want her to give in.

He isn’t. And I won’t stay either. The thought was barely formed before the beings retorted, billowing out. Ever closer.

“He is,” the sadistic chorus sang. “He is in us. And. He wants you. With us.” The lilt in the voices turned her stomach. She was reeling, from blood loss, from the spirits ready to claim her. From the loss of her closest friend.

Ankles unstable, Scully stumbled toward the corner that offered a haven from the enveloping smoke, if only for a moment.

A frantic stride.

Another.

Her toes stepped into a void, and hovered gracelessly before gravity seized her, dragging her down the farmhouse stairs, buffeted against the walls. Her body came to rest against the wooden door, heaped over itself like a ragdoll.

Groaning, she unfolded herself, eyes wide. She was thankful for the pain. It burned her, across her chest, through her bruised body. Through its growing intensity, it focused her. Forced her on. The airy, haunting laughter carried down the stairs on waves of black, ghostly vapors. Coming.

She couldn’t think. Wouldn’t think. Just. Act.

Her arm found its way up the old door, fingers groping, and her clammy palm found the brass doorknob.

It turned.

Scully spilled out into the tight, dimly lit hallway, coming to rest on her back, her hands unconsciously covering her bare chest and bleeding wound. Gasping, she lay for a moment, enough to process her new surroundings in this hellish maze of a house.

The attic door was at her feet. Down the hall, to the left, the bathroom. And to the right… Sunlight? Whispers, almost imperceptible, and a chilling in the air told her it was time to move.

She heaved herself up and began moving to the promise of the outside world. Even if it was a lie. She wouldn’t stop until and unless they gutted her.

Not a victim. I’m not a victim. Her pace matched her mantra.

#msr #horror #may be triggering #autopsy #blood #torture #demonic posession #mulder and scully #scully and mulder #txf #txf casefic #haunted house fic #I keep saying things are looking up but we aren't there yet #I swear the next installment is better #hang in there folks

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