From: LoneGunGuy Date: 24 Dec 2000 20:59:17 GMT Subject: NEW: Inversus (1/9) by LoneGunGuy TITLE: Inversus AUTHOR: LoneGunGuy SPOILERS: Paper Hearts, Biogenesis RATING: PG-13 CLASSIFICATION: XA INFO: Originally written for VS8 (www.i-made-this.com). Also available at http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html ARCHIVE: Anywhere with permission (which will be happily granted). DISCLAIMER: Mulder and Scully belong to 1013 Productions, and have been borrowed only temporarily. All else is mine, except what I've stolen from my betters (e.g., Carroll, Borges, Hitchcock). FEEDBACK: Needed for survival. Send anything and everything to lonegunguy@aol.com SUMMARY: "It seems very pretty," Alice said when she had finished it, "but it's rather hard to understand! Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas -- only I don't know exactly what they are! However, somebody killed something: that's clear, at any rate -- " * * * Inversus (1/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * PROLOGUE Boston, Massachusetts May 6, 2001 The first curious thing happened around midnight. Ethan Usher had been hammering away at his typewriter, just improvising at the keyboard to fill the blank expanse curled around the roller of his ancient Hebrew Underwood, the keys clattering from right to left across the page. In the mirror above his desk, he could see the reflection of the digital clock on his bedside table. As a result, he knew the precise moment when things began to cross over. At 12:02 in the morning, a muffled crash came from downstairs. Usher heard it between keystrokes. The sound of the crash itself -- a brusque crunch of glass -- might have been a grace note slipped between the chattering melody of the typewriter, something to fill in a chord or cadence. But it lodged in the back of his mind nevertheless, leaving a hesitation, a hint of uneasiness. Usher stopped typing and listened. Around him, his house stretched warm and dark, rain sluicing down the rooftop and rattling smoothly down the gutters. In the mirror, the clock changed. Usher looked up. His reflection looked back at him, the face of a slender man of about thirty, dark in complexion, its eyes silently asking: Did you hear anything? He had almost convinced himself that it had been his imagination when, from below, there came another crash. It was louder this time, and it seemed to go on and on, as if an armful of dishes and silverware had been dropped down the stairs. Usher jumped. So did his reflection. Usher stood up, his heart fluttering in his chest. Automatically, he glanced down at the manila envelope on his desk, spotlit in the halo of the green lamp. The envelope was thick with manuscript pages, already stamped, addressed and ready to be posted. He grabbed it, tucked it protectively under one arm and looked over at the bedroom door. It was ajar. He stood there for almost a full minute, hugging the envelope to his chest, listening to the storm outside and his own nervous breathing. He waited. Downstairs, the intruder in his house, whoever it was, seemed to have grown silent. Best to deal with it himself. Usher reached under his desk for his shoes, slipped them on, then opened the bedroom door. A landing led to the stairs. Further down, in the shadows, the sounds resumed more softly -- odd scraping and clinking noises, the faint ring of metal against metal. His pulse high, Usher descended, the steps creaking beneath his weight. At the foot of the stairs, he groped for the row of light switches, turning them on one by one. Overhead, the fixtures flared; the living room was plunged into brightness, revealing the old furniture, the television gathering dust in the corner. A large bay window looked out onto the street. On some level, Usher had expected the sounds to stop dead as soon as the lights came on. They did not. Instead, their source became more obvious. They came from the kitchen. Usher took a breath and looked around for some kind of blunt instrument. Bowing to convention, he pulled a poker from the fireplace, then approached the kitchen door. The door was closed; between the door and the frame, he saw only darkness. The noises had settled into a quiet scraping which he couldn't quite place. Outside, rain continued to fall. Raising the poker, Usher reached out to push open the door and realized that he was still carrying his manuscript in his left hand. He grasped the envelope more firmly, then used the tip of the poker to swing the door open. Blackness. And the scraping sound. Usher went inside and turned on the light. A large pile of dishes had fallen off the counter onto the floor. Pieces of china littered the linoleum, crunching underfoot as Usher stepped forward. Through the soles of his shoes, he felt shards ranging from large isosceles fragments to tiny chunks as sharp as an infant's tooth. The light in the kitchen was flat, yellow. Usher stood and looked. A wine bottle was inching along the kitchen counter. It crept along on its belly, its slender neck probing forward like a snout, slithering its way forward like an earthworm. Usher could read the label on the bottle, could even see himself faintly reflected in the smooth curve of green glass as the bottle hauled itself to the sink, scraping softly against the tile. It paused for a moment, as if catching its breath, then slid forward six more inches. Then it paused again. There was a pile of dishes and silverware in the sink, rinsed but not yet soaped. As Usher watched, the wine bottle attached two plates to itself, touching them with the tip of its cork and fastening them to its back. Then it flapped the plates like wings. Usher felt the gentle breeze on his face, heard the rhythmic sound of clinking china. The bottle flapped its new wings faster and faster until they became a blur, the clinking rising to an insectile buzz. Then it took off. Usher ducked. The bottle flew over his head and began circling the light above, its shadow weaving crazily around the room. After a moment, it stopped, hovering near the ceiling. Usher ventured a look upward. He could see light shining through the glass, the red wine sloshing into a froth against the insides of the bottle as the plates flapped madly. The bottle looped around the light fixture and buzzed across the kitchen. Usher flattened himself against the floor, watched as the bottle landed on top of the refrigerator, knocked over a pile of napkins, then turned and flew out the door to the dining room and was gone. After a few seconds had passed, Usher got to his feet and hefted the poker. His head was swimming. Idly, he kicked a broken plate out of his way and headed after the bottle, his manuscript still tucked under his arm. The next room was dark. Usher turned on the light, saw that the wine bottle was sitting on the dining room table, facing him. Somewhere the bottle had found a corkscrew, which it had attached to its snout like a proboscis. The corkscrew was large and very sharp, a pointed helix of steel as long as a man's index finger. Usher looked at the bottle. The bottle, it seemed, looked back -- -- and flew straight at his head. Usher yelped and fell to the ground. The bottle struck the wall where Usher's forehead had been an instant before, driving the corkscrew half an inch into the plaster. It stuck. The bottle flapped its wings in a frenzy, struggling to free itself. Usher rose on unsteady legs, lifted the poker and swung it just as the bottle managed to pull itself loose. He missed the bottle itself but chipped one of its plates, sending it into a tailspin. The bottle smashed into a china cabinet and fell to the rug, stunned. After a moment, it righted itself and flew towards Usher a second time. Usher swung the poker again and missed: the bottle darted past him, pivoted in mid-air and bore down like a dive-bomber, the tip of the corkscrew gleaming in the light. Usher ran. He turned and sprinted back to the kitchen, almost slipping on the broken dishes, then wheeled towards the kitchen door. He got through, slammed the door behind him. Heard the wine bottle buzzing and knocking against the wood like an angry gadfly. "Well," Usher said, looking into his empty living room. "That was...." On the mantel above the fireplace, a pair of candles suddenly blazed into life. Their flames stretched one, two, then three feet into the air, twisting into serpentine shapes, the wax melting away immediately. Usher felt their heat. He stumbled towards them, eyes wide, the flames shimmering in his pupils. Behind him, the kitchen door burst open. Usher spun. The bottle was coming at him, cracked along one side, dripping red wine like blood. He swung the poker, hit the bottle a glancing blow, then turned. Saw his front door. Without thinking, he ran across the room, grabbed the knob, flung open the door and found himself outside, on his own front porch. He pulled the door shut behind him. Looked up, felt the rain on his face. Then: From inside the house, something pounded against the closed door. Usher turned and looked. THUD: the wood around the hinges splintered. THUD: the door began to cave in. Above it, the house shook on its foundations as something enormous hurled itself against the barrier again and again. Usher staggered back from the door, letting the poker fall from his hands. The rain poured down, soaking him. He ran. He turned away and ran as fast as he could through the storm, manila envelope still clutched in one hand, his ears ringing with the sound of destruction. THUD: the door gave way. Usher heard the hinges explode into fragments, the door smashing against the side of the house as something roared out into the night. He did not look around. He sprinted down the street, blinded by the storm, aware of nothing but the great invisible shape at his back.... Usher fell. He found himself tumbling down some stairs that appeared from out of nowhere, hands scrabbling for some kind of purchase. Finally he landed on hard ground, the wind knocked out of him. Above him: a flat gray ceiling. He lay there for what seemed like a long time, aware of nothing but his own heartbeat and a dull aching pain in his side. A face swam into Usher's field of view: "Hey fella, you all right? You took quite a tumble there." Usher's world cleared. He saw a middle-aged man in a drab uniform bending over him. He recognized the brown tiled walls, the dank smell, the turnstiles a few feet to his right. This was the T station, half a block from his home. He had fallen into the subway. And there was no noise. Nothing coming to get him. Only this station agent, kneeling with a look of concern on his harmless face. It had been a hallucination. A dream. Usher, lying on his back, soaking wet, body throbbing with bruises, began to laugh. He laughed and laughed until his lungs were sore. The station agent frowned, took Usher by the shoulder and shook him gently. "Hey, you sure you're okay, fella? You could've busted your head right open, y'know. Maybe you better walk around a little, to make sure nothing's broken. These slippery steps -- " Suddenly the agent broke off. His eyes grew clouded, as though he were puzzling over an equation that wouldn't quite come together. Usher drew back, startled, as the station agent slumped face down on the floor. The agent twitched once and was still. Usher looked and saw that something had buried itself in the back of the man's head. Something with a carved handle. Reaching out with numb fingers, he gripped the handle, pulled the object out. It was a corkscrew, slick with blood and brains. Usher stood up and looked around. A crowd had gathered, teenagers and old women goggling at him with wide eyes. Usher raised the corkscrew in bewilderment, gestured at the corpse at his feet. "I..." he began, not knowing what he was going to say. "I didn't..." A bulb flashed as someone took his picture. That did it: something inside Usher snapped. Still holding the corkscrew, he fled, pushing his way through the crowd to the turnstiles, heading down to the platform and the trains. Usher ran, not knowing from what, his heart thudding on the right side of his chest -- running, perhaps, from madness.... * * * End of Inversus (1/9) Inversus (2/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * ACT I Boston, Massachusetts Next morning Ethan Usher stared out at Scully from the front page of the Boston Globe, his forehead flaring brilliant in the flashbulb glare, a startled expression on his face, a bloody corkscrew in his left fist. Headline: SUBWAY AGENT KILLED WITH CORKSCREW, SUSPECT FLEES SCENE. Skimming the article, Scully found little that she didn't already know. She coughed. "Any thoughts?" asked Margaret Lime, attentive to the FBI agent's reactions. Scully folded the newspaper, tucked it under her arm. "Looks like a corker of a case," she said. Lime grinned and nodded at the paper. "Not exactly the perfect murder, was it? A tourist snapped that photo just before Usher ran. Since Usher lives just down the street from the T station, identification wasn't too much of a problem." "And when you got to his house...?" "We found it like this." Scully looked around. They stood in Usher's living room, where entropy had clearly been hard at work: the furniture was scattered in disarray, chairs and coffee table overturned, a hole punched into the television's picture tube, sofa cushions scattered and exploded into shreds. The carpet was covered with pieces of crockery and broken china. Soft crunching sounds accompanied lab technicians as they wandered about, taking prints off everything that wasn't pulverized. At her side stood Margaret Lime, a detective from Boston Homicide. Lime was wiry and tan, with the body of a serious rock climber -- Scully noticed the characteristic pattern of callouses across her hands. As Lime talked, she twirled her key ring around one finger, the jingle of metal underlining her words: "From what we can gather," she said, "Usher slipped onto one of the trains without being noticed, then got off at the next stop. We fished the corkscrew out of a garbage bin at the Park Street station. It had his prints all over it, and it matched a bottle opener we found in Usher's kitchen. Looks like they were part of the same set." "And after he got off at Park Street?" "That's anyone's guess. Usher could have transferred onto another line, or caught a bus, or tried to vanish into the city. He won't get far, though. That photo made it into the Globe's early edition, then got picked up by the wire services. It'll probably be CNN's Picture of the Day." A compass dangled from the detective's keychain. Scully found herself staring at the dial. "I'm afraid I still don't understand why I'm here," she said at last. "Your partner didn't explain it to you?" "I haven't seen my partner all day. Where is he?" "Upstairs." "I think I'd better talk to him." Scully headed for the staircase. Halfway there, she felt something sharp beneath her foot. Raising her shoe, she found a piece of green glass. Others were strewn along the floor, the remains of a wine bottle. The wine had soaked into the carpet, making a dark red stain like a Rorschach blot. Scully stepped over it and went upstairs. Mulder was in the bedroom, sitting at the desk, hands laced behind his head. He seemed tired but alert: his eyes, which Scully saw reflected in the mirror above the desk, had an overbrightness that implied a sleepless night or two, and the third button of his shirt had been fastened in the fourth buttonhole. At her entrance, Mulder's eyes flicked up. Without turning around, he said: "Why would a writer put a mirror in front of his desk?" "Henry Miller did," said Scully. Lime entered the room just behind Scully. "And Schiller wrote at a desk full of rotten apples. Writers do all kinds of strange things, sometimes." "Usher was a writer?" Scully asked. "To be more precise, he was a translator. Take a look at this." Mulder pointed to Usher's typewriter. Scully leaned forward, saw that the typewriter was a Hebrew model. A piece of paper was curled around the roller, with four lines typed in Hebrew. "It's a poem, or so it seems," Mulder explained. "Apparently the last thing Usher wrote before he vanished." Scully snapped on a rubber glove, pulled the paper out. Except for the four lines, the rest of the page was blank. "Can you read it?" Mulder stood up from the desk. "No, but I can recognize some things. Lines from famous prayers and sayings, jumbled together. Stuff from Torah school." He took the page from Scully and pointed. "This second line? It's from the Passover Haggadah. It says, 'All who are hungry may come and eat.'" Scully took the page, frowned. "Mulder, how long have you been working on this?" she asked. "Since around five this morning. Why?" "You've got your shirt buttoned wrong." "Ah." He glanced down, fumbled with his shirtfront. "Understand that I was in a bit of a rush to get going after Lime told me what happened." "Tell me what happened, then." Scully slipped the page into an evidence envelope, sealed it. "You phoned and told me to come to Boston. Why? Why are we taking an interest in this case?" "Because there have been others." Lime spoke from the other end of the bedroom. "Two other instances last night, and one more yesterday evening, leaving six people dead. Seven, counting the subway agent." "Instances of what?" "Of this." Lime walked out onto the landing, gestured at the chaos downstairs. "We've had several complaints of violent disturbances over the past few days. When we arrive, we always find the houses trashed, the furniture overturned, the dishes broken, a systematic destruction of the premises for no apparent reason." "And everyone in the house is found slain," said Mulder. "Husbands, wives, killed in their beds. In fact, this is the first time that the owner of the house wasn't murdered outright." "You think there's a connection?" "I can show you the pictures if you like," Lime said, heading downstairs. "The houses were turned upside down. Everything was smashed. As far as we can determine, nothing of any value was stolen, just random devastation." Scully followed the detective. "Maybe the destruction isn't as random as it seems. What if someone came to these houses intending to destroy a specific object? The easiest way to cover it up would be to vandalize everything else, like dumping a body on a battlefield...." "That makes sense," Lime admitted. Mulder had followed them both downstairs. "Yes," he said. "But there's that other thing." "Right," said the detective. Scully saw a significant glance pass between Lime and her partner. Inwardly, she groaned. As usual, she was being kept in the dark. Standing by the stairs, she shivered: the front door had been ripped from its hinges, and nothing stood between her and the chill outside but a few strips of crime scene tape. She felt cold, fed up. She was about to take the bait when something caught her eye. There was a fireplace in one corner of Usher's living room. Scully left the others and went closer. As she approached, she saw two candlesticks sitting on the mantelpiece. In both, some intense heat had melted the candles into oozing puddles, the wax dripping down and hardening into long ropy strands that hung halfway to the floor. * * * Next came the usual slide show. Margaret Lime's cubicle at Boston Homicide was filled with photographs of the detective skiing, hiking and posing on mountaintops. Pride of place was reserved for a shot of Lime standing at a weighing station in Chesapeake Bay, holding up a huge striped bass, its eyes glazed like clouded marbles. On the photo had been written, in felt-tip pen: 46 LB 12 OZ! From her desk drawer, Lime came up with a stack of slides, then found an empty office with a projector. Off with the lights. The projector whirred into life, its beam cutting dust motes. A blur appeared on the opposite wall. While Mulder fiddled with the focus, Lime explained the situation to Scully: "On the night of May 5," Lime said, "a patrol car responded to a report of loud crashing coming from the home of John and Rachel Stroheim, in Somerville. When police arrived, the noises had stopped, but the Stroheims were found dead, their heads crushed. Every room in the house had been torn apart." The slide sprang into focus. Scully winced. Two bodies, badly mangled, lay in the middle of a confused wreckage. The headboard of their bed had been broken in two. A storm of feathers had fallen across the rug, the sheets, and the bloodied bodies themselves. It took Scully a moment to realize that the pillows on the bed had somehow exploded. CLICK. The next slide showed a similar scene, a different couple. "Here we have Bill and Deborah Evans," continued Lime. "We found them last night, about two hours before the business with Usher. Again, their home was demolished. All of the windows were broken. We found five or six kitchen knives stuck into the bedroom wall. A seventh was buried in Deborah Evans' eye socket. Finally, an hour later -- " CLICK. The image of a house on fire. Firefighters and trucks in the foreground, the flames blazing up into the night sky. CLICK. The smoldering ruin, seen from the inside. Scully recognized a third bedroom, the two bodies badly burned. "Finally we have the Richardsons," said Lime. "Firefighters got the call around ten o'clock. Something in the kitchen caught fire, it seems. After they extinguished the blaze, we found Trevor and June Richardson, dead. Even in the ruins, we could tell that their house had been vandalized like the rest." "Did they die in the fire?" Scully asked. "No. The coroner found no evidence of smoke inhalation or asphyxiation. Their necks had been broken." Scully looked at the carnage on the screen. "Jesus." "You haven't heard the best part yet," Mulder said. "These deaths point to a pattern, yes. But the autopsies disclosed something even stranger." "Right." Lime went to the next slide. "When we cut open John Stroheim, we found this." CLICK. The body of John Stroheim appeared on a mortuary slab, chest peeled back in three triangular sections, ribs pruned away to reveal his insides. Scully looked at the heart, the lungs, the coils of the viscera. "What am I supposed to see here?" she asked. "It looks normal to me." "What?" Lime looked up at the screen. "Oh, wait," she said. "The slide's in backwards." Lime got up, pressed a button on the projector to retract the carousel, pulled out the slide and reversed it. CLICK. The photo of Stroheim's insides appeared again, the mirror image of what it had been before. Scully stared. "You've got to be kidding." Mulder grinned, savoring the moment. "What do you know about situs inversus, Scully?" "It's a rare medical condition," Scully said, getting up to examine the picture more closely. "The human body is symmetrical on the outside, but asymmetrical on the inside. Usually the asymmetries follow a set pattern: the heart on the left, the liver on the right, the colon coiling in a certain way. But in rare cases, someone will be born with his or her organs in a reversal of the usual situation. The heart on the right. The liver on the left. A mirror image of a normal body." "Rare cases," Mulder said. "Exactly how rare do you mean?" "Something like one in every 25,000 births," said Scully. "In that case," Lime said, "it's strange that we should find this in John Stroheim. And it's even stranger"-- CLICK onto a different autopsy photo -- "that we should find it in Bill Evans, too. And it's downright ridiculous " -- CLICK onto yet another cadaver -- "that we should find the same condition in Trevor Richardson as well. But that's what we found." "Wait a minute." Scully sat down hard. "You found situs inversus in all of the victims?" "In all of the male victims," Lime corrected. "Their wives, as far as we know, were normal in every physical way. Even so, the odds of this pattern arising by chance are...." "Astronomical," concluded Mulder. Scully felt herself warming to this puzzle. "And Ethan Usher?" Mulder nodded. "We've checked his medical records. Usher was born with situs inversus, too. And now he's missing and wanted for murder." "You think that he has something to do with this?" "I don't know," Mulder said. "But something seems to be stalking, and killing, individuals with situs inversus. And their families. If the figure of one in 25,000 is correct, there are at least forty people with the condition in the greater Boston area. All are potential targets. We need to find them and protect them. To do that, we need to answer two big questions: Where is Ethan Usher? And how did he survive?" * * * Climbing the escalator from the subway up into the vast polished cavern of South Station, Boston's largest train and bus terminal, one emerges beneath a striking work of public art. From the ceiling of the lobby hang several dozen sculpted objects, each about the size of a football, dangling like weights at the end of a plumb line. These pieces, which seem to have been turned upon a lathe, lack any obvious function. In shape, they suggest oil lamps or table legs. They hang from their lengths of wire, swaying imperceptibly in the air-conditioned space, noticed by few, if any, of the thousands who pass daily through the terminal. Ethan Usher spent over a minute staring at those hanging pieces, reminded of something that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Eventually, he shook his head and moved on, the familiar shape of those objects still nagging at the back of his mind for no apparent reason. Most likely, Usher was just exhausted. He had spent most of the night riding the subway, changing at random from train to train, focusing on nothing but the rush of the tunnel and the rumble of the wheels beneath his feet. After the T had closed, he had just wandered around the city, hoping for his head to clear. It had not. Memories of what had happened continued to plague him. And when the early edition of the Boston Globe appeared on the street, with its front page branding him as a murderer, his temperament had not improved. Around 8:00 in the morning, Usher had come to some kind of decision. He needed to get out of Boston as soon as possible. Going to a drugstore, he'd bought a pair of sunglasses; then, once the department stores had opened, he'd purchased a new sweater and shirt and dumped his old clothes in a trash can on Arlington Street. He nearly threw his manuscript in, too, but ultimately decided to hold onto it. With that, he went back into the city. His picture was everywhere. Now he stood in the lobby of South Station, in the murmuring crowd, among coffee shops and flower kiosks. Through the lenses of his sunglasses, everything was dark, evanescent, like the hazy substance of a dream. Usher strode past the newsstands, which were selling his picture at a rapid pace. Another dream element -- the senseless duplication of images. Usher arrived at the ticket line in a cloud of anxiety. He knew that he needed to immerse himself in some kind of labyrinth. Upon reaching the ticket window, he decided to try his luck in the most convoluted labyrinth of all: "Hi," he said. "One coach ticket to New York City, please. The next available train." "Sixty dollars," said the ticket agent. Usher fished out the money and waited for the ticket to print. Eventually he realized that the ticket agent had noticed his sunglasses. "Having any trouble with your eyes, sir?" she asked. "Yes, I've been seeing things," Usher replied. Almost. Then he realized that a flip or clever answer might cause the clerk to remember him. In the end, he mumbled something about eyedrops, took his ticket and left. Stepping out into the main terminal, the manila envelope tucked under his arm, Usher glanced up at the enormous clock on the opposite wall. His train left at 1:15, leaving him with somewhat over two hours to wait. He decided to spend that time in the men's room. The restroom was clean, bright, filled with coughing and rushing water. Someone had left a newspaper, spotted with moisture, next to one of the sinks: Usher's picture, his small doppelganger, looked up at him. Usher flinched, then rolled up the paper and took it with him into the nearest available stall. He bolted the door behind him, sat down on the toilet. Dropped his manuscript onto the floor. Unfolding the newspaper, Usher stared at the photograph. He reread the article for the hundredth time, the details somehow made distant and disconnected by their presence on the page. But he always came back to that photo. The maddening photo of the corkscrew. Without the photo, he might have been able to convince himself that it had all been a fantasy. Even the newspaper article might have been explained away. But Usher couldn't argue with the photograph. What had happened to him last night had been real, at least to some degree. The noises. The wine bottle. The candles flaring into life. And that invisible thing crashing through his front door. Which meant....Well, he didn't want to think about what it meant. Usher reached the last sentence on the front page, then turned to the back of the paper to continue reading the article. It wasn't until he finished the final paragraph, brooding over it once again, that he saw the other headline. It was tucked near the bottom of the right-hand column, and as far as he could remember, it had not been in any of the earlier editions. UNEXPLAINED VANDALISMS LEAVE FOUR DEAD IN BOSTON. Usher read the story. Names, faces leapt out at him. Bill and Deborah Evans. Trevor and June Richardson. A possible connection to an earlier pair of deaths -- the Stroheims. The details were sketchy. The author had coped with the lack of real information by resorting to circumlocution. But as Usher read on, his fear grew. The circumstances were the same. It was happening. Things were crossing over throughout Boston. Usher looked down at the manuscript lying between his feet, its manila envelope spotted with grime from his night's wanderings. His translation. Translation was an act of control, he thought to himself. An act of power. An imposing of one's will upon the reluctant text. In his mind, a horrible hypothesis began to form. Usher scooped up the manuscript, got up. Opened the stall door. Tossed the newspaper into the trash and exited the restroom. He found himself back in the main terminal of the station, manila envelope clutched in his hand. He went to a pay phone, plunked down some coins, then dialed the number of Leah Blume, his editor. The phone rang four times. Then Blume's voice mail came on. Usher almost hung up, but something made him leave a message. At the beep, he said: "Leah, it's me. Listen, I'm sure you've heard about what's happened, but...." Usher groped for words, staring through the window of the terminal at the trains outside. "There's more to this than you can possibly know. I don't even understand it myself. But it has something to do with my translation." He hesitated again. "I just wanted to let you know that I'm all right. Please don't worry. I...." He tried to say the necessary words, but they wouldn't come. He hung up, his heart weary. The click of the receiver settling into the cradle resounded like the drop of an axe. Usher looked up at the clock on the terminal wall. It was 11:15. Two hours until his train. * * * End of Inversus (2/9) Inversus (3/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * The calculation was a simple one. One in 25,000. In a population of a million bodies, you can expect to find at least forty with situs inversus. There are other factors that make incidence in a given area difficult to predict -- some forms are genetic, others random, with the births far from evenly distributed along the map -- but the general principle still holds. Look closely enough, and you'll find a double handful of these cases in any population of considerable size. Scully knew it wouldn't be easy to track them down. Situs inversus results in no visible mark on the surface. Someone's insides may be reversed, and their heart and lungs may be a mirror image of their usual structure, but you'd never know it from their exterior. "It's usually a harmless condition," she explained to Mulder. "People with situs inversus rarely suffer any medical problems because of it. As long as your organs are healthy and intact, their left-right orientation doesn't seem to matter." "So you can't tell at first glance whether someone has this condition," Mulder said. "And yet someone, or something, seems to be targeting them anyway. How does it find them?" "The same way I will," said Scully. "By looking." The place to begin? Medical records. Scully tossed her laptop and a list of hospitals into the front of a rental car and went to work. Driving through the city, she played the radio loud, the thrill of the chase warming her to the core. Officially, one needs a warrant to access private medical files. From experience, however, Scully knew that an FBI badge and a smooth line of patter went a long way. She began with the largest databases she could think of, insurance companies and federal employers, and hit the jackpot twelve times over: her credentials gave her access to a dozen men and women with "situs inversus" in their files. Scully faxed the information to Lime and Mulder, who began contacting each of the names on the list. Then she started on hospitals and HMO's, driving with one hand and dialing numbers with the other. First came the places where Usher and the others had received treatment. Scully cross-checked their doctors, hoping for a connection. Nothing. She went on to the rest of the hospitals, working her way across the city -- -- and was standing at the receptionist's desk at Massachusetts General Hospital, waiting for a printout, when her cell phone buzzed against her hip. Scully pulled the phone out, answered. "Scully." Mulder's voice: "Guess what? Usher left a message at his editor's office. If he calls back, we'll be able to get a trace on his location." "Where does his editor work?" Mulder recited an address in Cambridge. "The Gematria Press. It's a small publishing firm, specializing in books for the Israeli market. Usher did translations for them. This editor he called, Leah Blume? His former wife." Scully raised an eyebrow. "Someone should talk to her, then." "That's what I was thinking." Scully looked at her watch. It was 11:25. "Listen, I'm the closest. I'll fax you these names, then head over to the editor's office." "Good. And just in case Blume phones again, we'll have someone there to trace the call." "Blume? You mean Usher." "Right. Usher. Sorry, I'm a little tired." Mulder hung up. Scully repocketed her phone, felt a tap on her shoulder. She turned. The receptionist stood behind her, holding a stack of papers. "Excuse me? Here's the printout you requested." "Thanks." Scully leafed through the pages. Instead of names and addresses, however, she saw rows of unfamiliar numbers, graphs of triglyceride and glucose levels. She frowned. "Hold on. This isn't what I was asking for." The receptionist looked. "Oh, I gave you the wrong papers. We've been charting the blood sugar of our admitted patients, you see -- there's been a spike in triglyceride and glucose levels over the past week, and we aren't sure why." "I see." Scully handed back the charts, got her situs inversus results in return, then headed out of the hospital. On her way down to the parking lot, she looked at her watch again. It was 11:30. * * * Leah Blume sat at her desk, toying nervously with the telephone cord. Blume was a small, pretty woman, her round face framed by a fuzzy mass of blonde hair. Scully sat across from her, feeling sympathy for the editor's situation, yet aware, as always, of the chasm that had stretched between them as soon as she flashed her badge. "You're looking for an innocent man," Blume insisted. "I know Ethan Usher better than anyone else ever will. He's harmless. He's always been harmless. And he isn't a murderer." "But when you got his message, you called the police." "Of course. What else could I do?" Blume touched the collar of her turtleneck to her lips. Scully saw that the wool around the collar had been worn away by nibbling. "I just want him to be safe, and he'll be safer in police custody than if he were running off on his own." "Why do you say that?" "He's helpless. He's adorable because of it, but he's helpless. Once Ethan gets an idea into his brain, he makes more trouble for himself than anyone else ever could. Most of his life takes place within his own head. That's why our marriage failed. I wanted to understand him, and he wouldn't let me in...." "Excuse me." An FBI technician emerged from the other room, a laptop in one hand, a coil of cable in the other. "Scully, the trace is in place. If your guy calls back, we can pinpoint his location within a second or two." "Thank you." The technician exited. Scully turned to Blume. "Have you got the message that Ethan left?" Blume nodded. "I can play it for you, if you like." The editor punched a few numbers into her phone, then handed Scully the receiver. Scully took it, listened as the message came up on voice mail. The message was short. When it was done, she handed back the phone. "He sounds scared." Blume closed her eyes. "Yeah." "Do you have any idea what he was talking about?" A shake of the head. Scully remembered the Hebrew text in Usher's typewriter. "He mentioned a translation. Was this something he was doing for you?" Blume's eyes opened. "Yes. We commissioned it from him about two months ago. Ethan called me the other night and told me that he was almost finished. He said that he would mail the manuscript to us soon." "What was it?" Scully asked. "What was Ethan translating?" Blume smiled, then reached into one of her desk drawers. Pulled out a book. She slid it across the desk to Scully, face down. Scully reached out, turned it over, looked at the title, and felt her heart do a somersault. It was "Through the Looking-Glass," by Lewis Carroll. Just then, the phone rang. Blume jumped. So did Scully. They sat for a long moment, looking at one another. The phone rang again. Blume reached out, pale, and answered it. "Hello," she said, closing her eyes at the response. "Yes. Hello, Ethan." Scully breathed out, a long exhalation. Her head throbbed. The FBI technician came in from the other room. He was excited. "He's at the train station," he said. * * * Usher stood at the pay phone, gazing out the window at the trains. The hand that gripped the receiver trembled. The connection was poor: Blume sounded like she was underwater. "Ethan, I've been worried," her voice said. "I've seen the newspapers. Are you all right...?" "All things considered, I'm okay." Usher almost smiled at his own words, marveled once more at how even after a courtship, a marriage and a divorce, the sound of Blume's voice always took him by surprise. "I'm just tired. Things have been moving quickly, much too quickly, and I didn't want to leave without making sure that you were safe. " "But why -- " "Listen, just listen to me for a second." Usher paused, scrambling for the right way to put things. "Something is happening. I can't explain it, but something is crossing over. It's as though this translation has done something, opened a doorway between two worlds...." "What are you talking about? Ethan, you aren't making any sense." "I know it sounds mad. But listen." Usher gulped and finally said what had been haunting him for hours. "What if the looking-glass world is a real place? A different level of reality, one which Lewis Carroll somehow described in his books? Leah, what if I did something to make it cross over into our world?" "Ethan...." "Something happened at my house last night. At first I thought it had only happened to me, but then I saw the papers. People are dying because of this, dying all over Boston. I was going to run, but now I know that I need to face this thing, because I've gone through the looking- glass and I can't go back...." On the other end of the line, Blume burst into tears. "Don't talk like this. Come back. You sound like you've lost your mind." "That's another possibility," Usher admitted. "I'd be much happier if that were the case." Blume didn't say anything in return. Usher stood there, listening to her cry. Now that the words were out in the open, now that his suspicions had been aired, he felt weak, empty, even embarrassed. She was right. It sounded insane -- -- and then something else happened. To the left of the phone booth, there was a flower stand. It was stocked with bouquets of roses, daisies, tiger lilies. The flowers were wrapped in plastic, sitting in black vases with signs like Nature's Garden, Fall Bounty, New England Sunset. There were thirty or forty of these vases, each one stuffed with glistening bunches of lilacs, orchids, baby's breath.... As Usher watched, all the flowers turned around to look at him. He saw their stems twist in place, the leaves brushing softly against one another as their blossoms pivoted in his direction. The cellophane of the bouquets crinkled. A thousand flowers all turned at once, staring at him with their stamens and pistils. Closest to him was a pink rose. As he looked on, the rose bowed its drooping head twice, then nodded to the left. Usher turned. Across the lobby, a security guard was headed towards him. Scanning the terminal, he saw two others, both wearing black parkas, slacks and neckties. There was no mistake about it: they were approaching him. And they would be here in under a minute. Usher looked back at the flowers. The rose nodded again. Then the flowers began to wilt, their petals shriveling and falling off before Usher's eyes. "Okay," Usher said. He hung up the phone, cutting off Blume in mid-sob. Glanced across the terminal. The nearest exit, the escalator leading down to the subway, was one hundred yards away. The security guards were almost on top of him. Usher could see their faces now. They were not smiling. "Walk," Usher muttered to himself. He grabbed his manuscript, set out across the lobby. Around him, tourists and couples waiting for the trains milled across the echoing tile. Usher moved past red caps wheeling luggage carts, grandmothers with children in tow. His heart did flip-flips. He kept his eye on the escalator. Seventy yards to go. Were the guards still closing in around him? He chanced a look over his shoulder, couldn't see anything at first, then finally noticed a man in a black parka thirty feet to his left, still approaching, but -- Usher tripped over a luggage cart, colliding with a red cap. He apologized, hopped over the suitcases, saw that only fifty yards stood between him and the escalator. He began to walk more quickly. "Sir? Could you wait a moment, sir?" The query, in a loud voice, came from over his left shoulder. Usher ignored it. Thirty more yards. Blood pounded in his temples. The sound of his footsteps clocking against the floor seemed far away, unimportant, as he abandoned all pretense and broke into a run. "Stop sir!" And the sound of a pistol cocking. Usher froze. "Turn around slowly, sir. And put up your hands." Usher turned. Saw a security guard facing him, gun drawn. The guard was just a kid, really -- he couldn't be more than twenty years old, a ludicrous mustache on his upper lip. But the hole at the end of his gun barrel looked enormous: a perfectly circular, unblinking eye. Usher raised his hands, still clutching his manuscript. "You're making a mistake," he said. "Shut up!" the guard yelled. "Get on your knees. Keep your hands where I can see them!" This movie talk made Usher's head spin. He knelt, his eyes locked with the guard's, his stomach churning. From above came a loud rattling. Usher looked up. Groaned. Directly above him hung the dark sculpted objects, the smooth decorative pieces so suggestive of oil lamps, that he had found so fascinating upon entering the station. Now they swayed violently on their lengths of wire, seesawing like irregular pendulums. The security guard looked up. At that moment, one of the pieces fell from the ceiling. It hit the guard in the middle of the forehead, knocking him down. His pistol went off with a bang, shattering a window. Usher rose. He stood there, still half-kneeling, as the pieces fell all around him, hitting the floor with a series of dull thuds. Even after they fell, he saw, the pieces continued to move -- righting themselves, waddling forward on their circular bases, crowding around the security guard. They began to nuzzle the guard's prone body, crowding in close like a flock of penguins, wobbling unsteadily across the floor. At that moment, Usher knew. As he turned and sprinted down the escalator to the subway, he realized why the objects had seemed so familiar to him, so disturbing, so utterly maddening. They had reminded him of chess pieces. * * * End of Inversus (3/9) Inversus (4/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * ACT II South Station 12:30 p.m. The pungent smell of rotting flowers flooded over Scully as she squatted near the florist's kiosk, kneeling among the fallen petals. Breathing in, she tasted the fragile odor of decay. In their vases, all the flowers seemed to have wilted together, heads drooping down, stems gone brittle and dead. One of the roses had turned almost black. She pulled the rose out of its bouquet, examined it, felt it crumble beneath her fingers. "Curiouser and curiouser," she said. Across the terminal, the area around the escalators had been cordoned off, forcing the crowds to move along the stairs. Mulder and Lime stood scrutinizing the fallen pieces of sculpture that littered the ground. At least a dozen lay on the floor, a few broken, others rolling on one side like dead chessmen. Mulder held one of the objects in his hand, looking at it like the skull of Yorick. As Scully approached, he set it back down on the floor and turned to her. "Curiouser and curiouser," Mulder said. "Yeah," said Scully. Lime had been talking on a cell phone. Now she concluded her call and snapped the phone shut. Looked at the two FBI agents. "That was the hospital. They brought in the security guard, treated him. He'd suffered a mild concussion, that's all. He had quite a story to tell. They aren't sure how seriously to take it." "I say we take it as seriously as possible," said Mulder. "But there's a limit to how much strangeness I can handle," Lime said. "You've heard the tape of Usher's call. Looking-glass creatures? A collision of worlds? Do you give any credence to this?" "I don't know," Mulder said. He accepted a cup of coffee from one of the police officers on the other side of the yellow tape, spilling some of it on the ground with his unsteady fingers. He looked bad, Scully realized. "We know that something is targeting individuals with situs inversus. From what I've seen, I don't think it's Ethan Usher. Maybe it's something else." "Like the Jabberwock?" "Maybe." Scully knelt, picked up one of the fallen pieces. "Let's take this one step at a time," she said, hefting the sculpted object like a paperweight. "It's clear that Usher is running from something." "For good reason," said Lime. "He's wanted for murder." "That's right. But judging from his call to Blume, he's also running because he thinks that something is after him. This may or may not be true. But if we're going to find Usher, we need to think like he does, and figure out where he's headed next. Look." Scully stood and pulled a newspaper clipping from her pocket. Smoothed it out to the photo of Usher with the corkscrew. "What do you see in his hand?" she asked. "A corkscrew," Lime said. "No," said Scully. "I mean, his other hand." Lime looked. The photograph had been cropped at one edge, but one could still make out a flat rectangular object in Usher's other fist. "A manila envelope?" "Right." Scully repocketed the clipping. "According to witnesses, Usher was still carrying that envelope when he eluded security here. My hunch is that it contains his manuscript -- his translation. He's still holding on to it. Why? Because he thinks that his translation is the key to it all." "I still don't understand," said Lime. "Listen," Mulder said. "Usher translated 'Through the Looking-Glass' into Hebrew. When written, Hebrew goes from right to left across the page. It's a looking-glass language. And it's a language with a rich tradition regarding the power of the written word. The ancient kabbalists believed that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet were the tools that God used to create the world. If you combine letters in the right way, you can make things happen." "Is that what you really think?" "It doesn't matter what I think. Experience has taught me not to dismiss anything without due consideration, especially when it has three millennia of received tradition to back it up. There's more." Mulder reached into his jacket pocket, removed a folded strip of fax paper. "I sent the writing in Usher's typewriter to Harvard, hoping for a translation and explanation. Here's what I got." Scully leaned over, saw a four line poem. It read: He who divides between holy and profane All who are hungry may come and eat -- In everything, with everything, of everything, all Celery, to break in half, lettuce, and beans. "It's a mixture of famous Hebrew prayers and sayings," Mulder said. "The first line is from the Havdalah prayer said at the end of the Sabbath. The second is from the Passover Haggadah, as I suspected. The third is a misquotation from grace after meals. And the last line is a nonsense version of the Passover seder." "This is what Usher was typing the night he disappeared?" Lime asked. "Yes. It looks to me like some kind of incantation. I'd guess that Usher was messing with traditional prayers, maybe as part of his translation, maybe as some kind of kabbalistic experiment. But when he pushed his games too far, things began to happen around him." A voice behind them: "That's ridiculous." They all turned. Leah Blume stood beyond the barrier of crime scene tape, a knit cap pulled down almost to her eyebrows, a book in her hand which Scully recognized as "Through the Looking- Glass." Blume ducked beneath the tape, approached Mulder. "You don't know what you're talking about." "What makes you say that?" Mulder asked. "The poem you found wasn't an incantation. It's a passage from the standard Hebrew translation of 'Alice in Wonderland.' It's the song that the Mad Hatter sings. Ethan must have been typing it to amuse himself." "Well...." "And in any case, there have been many other translations of 'Through the Looking-Glass' into Hebrew, none of which resulted in any unexplained phenomena. Why should Ethan's translation be any different?" "Perhaps he hit upon just the right combination of symbols," Mulder said. "The kabbalah teaches that the Torah is like the human body, with its own system of organs and limbs. Each letter matters. The choice of a single word can affect the entire organism, and could mean the difference between a routine translation and a powerful magical tool. Legend has it that the kabbalists used the Hebrew alphabet to summon spirits and angels, to invoke demons, to create life out of nothing...." Blume shook her head. "The kabbalah is a tool for meditation, for coming closer to God. Even if those blasphemous legends were true, they have nothing to do with looking-glass creatures." "Don't be so sure about that," Mulder said. "Ever read the Zohar, the classic work of the kabbalah? It compares one's experience of God to looking at a speculum, a speculum that shines." "In other words," Scully said, "to looking into a mirror." * * * "There is something monstrous about mirrors," said Margaret Lime. Scully nodded. She and Lime stood in the bathroom of John and Rachel Stroheim. Facing them was the mirror, which had been shattered into a spiderweb of lines by some violent impact. A separate reflection of Scully's face looked back from each fragment, the shards multiplying every expression she made into an unbearable infinity of appearances. Blue eyes stared out from every surface. After finishing up at the train station, Lime had suggested that they tour the homes of the previous victims, in hopes of finding some further connection between the killings. While Mulder continued to follow the situs inversus lead, hunting down other people with the condition in the Boston area and taking steps for their safety, Scully and Lime retraced the path of destruction, beginning with the Stroheims. Lime sighed. "You know, I've often wondered whether our spiritual sickness comes from the proliferation of mirrors in the world. I mean it. Look around, and you're confronted by thousands of images of yourself -- in windows, in compacts, in spoons. No wonder this last century was so damned schizophrenic. If you multiply essences, you diminish them." Scully, examining the shards on the ground, remembered a line from Borges: "Mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the number of mankind," Scully quoted. "That's right," agreed Lime. "We can no longer differentiate between the image and the real thing. That's why I love walking or climbing a mountain with no images of myself around, except what I might see by chance in a pool of water. It brings me close to what matters." "I know what you mean." The door of the Stroheims' medicine cabinet, also mirrored, hung from its hinges. Scully reached out and swung the door aside. She saw aspirin, antibiotics, prescription inhalers. A prescription vial on a lower shelf. Scully picked it up. Theophylline, a medication used to treat asthma, in the name of John Stroheim. She put the bottle back, closed the cabinet. Into the bedroom. A large irregular splotch of blood was painted on one wall, just above the bed where the couple had been found. A second mirror hung above the dresser. It, too, had been shattered. Looking around, Lime said: "You don't really believe Usher's story, do you?" "You know what I think," Scully replied. "I'm here to do a job, to solve these murders and keep more people from dying. If I need to dive into someone else's delusion to do so, then so be it." "What about Mulder?" Scully allowed herself the faintest whisper of a smile. "Don't ask me to explain Mulder's methods. Usually, they get results." "We'll see." "Yes," said Scully. "I suppose we will." * * * At their next stop, the home of Bill and Deborah Evans, Scully made a connection. They had been probing the mess downstairs for more than an hour, with Scully feeling more and more like a member of some crazy triage team, picking through the debris of one natural disaster after another. To make things worse, Lime insisted upon telling colorful fishing stories as they worked. "Just the other day, I was up at Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester," the detective said as they stepped into the downstairs bathroom. "It's a beautiful site, covered with shore grass and scrub rose. The fishing is tremendous. I was up on the dunes, and to the northwest you could see the aurora borealis stretching out over the horizon. Those yellows and reds made me glad to be alive. I caught some good bass, too...." "I didn't know that you got an aurora down here," Scully said, peeking inside the medicine cabinet. Lime twirled her keys around one finger. "It only happens occasionally. Something to do with the solar wind. It comes in cycles, and right now I think we're in the middle of -- " "Hold on a minute." Scully frowned. Deja vu washed across her as she ran her eyes along the medicines, moving past the usual things and focusing on the bottom shelf. There were several prescription inhalers there, lined up like toy pistols. And a prescription vial. She read the label. Theophylline. The same medication she'd found in John Stroheim's house. "What is it?" Lime asked. "Some of these medicines are the same. Inhalers, and this prescription medication." Scully held up the vial of theophylline. "It looks like both John Stroheim and Bill Evans were asthmatic, or maybe suffered from lung infections." "Is that important?" "It might be. We're looking for connections, remember? If these people all used the same medication, it might mean something." Lime thought for a moment. "You know, I checked Usher's medical records when the situs inversus thing first came up, and I didn't see anything about asthma or lung problems. The blood tests from the autopsies will be coming in soon, if you want to check for the drug." "It could be a coincidence. But still...." Scully allowed the end of that sentence to dangle. They continued to sift. A moment later, Scully's phone rang, its electronic warble cutting through the silence. It was Mulder. "How's your search going?" "Hard to say at this point. How about you?" "I've managed to track down thirty-one people with situs inversus in the Boston area. All seem happy, healthy, and curious as to why the Bureau has taken so keen an interest in their well-being. I told them to call in case anything unusual happened. Other than that, there isn't much else I can do." "You sound tired." "Well, I am. Want to meet someplace in half an hour? I've got some ideas I want to share." Scully looked at her watch. "All right. Where can I find you?" "There's a coffee shop across the street from the police station. I'll be at the counter." He hung up. Scully pocketed her phone and went back to work, sifting through the rubble piece by piece. * * * End of Inversus (4/9) Inversus (5/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * "Next stop, Suffolk Downs." The mechanized voice of the subway, channeled through speakers and jovial to the point of exaggeration, came over the intercom as the train rolled like an iron behemoth through the tunnels under Boston. A minute later, it reached the Suffolk Downs station. It ground to a halt, creaking, and the doors slid open with a rush of steam. Ethan Usher remained where he was, curled in one corner of the subway car, manuscript on his lap. Behind sunglasses, his eyes were closed. Dozing, he heard the doors slide shut, then braced himself as the train lurched forward. Usher felt safe here. Although he knew, on some level, that the police would be focusing their search on the T stations, he continued to ride the trains. Something about the rough rhythm of the wheels and the mild thunder of the tunnels seemed to cool the pressure on his brain. At the moment, he was on the Blue Line, if only because that color had seemed soothing at the time. "Next stop, Beachmont." Even within his doze, Usher continued to remember. After fleeing from South Station, he had found himself almost drowning in despair. For an instant he had envisioned throwing himself beneath the wheels of the train, ending it all in a cataclysmic collision of iron and bone. As the train rumbled nearer, he had teetered at the edge of the platform, a footstep away from suicide. And yet he had stopped himself. Why? Because there was something out there. Others had died, murdered by the same force that had brought Usher's house to life and driven him onto the street. The looking-glass world was crossing over in more places than one. That made things difficult. If he killed himself, the danger might grow larger and less controlled, with no one left to stop or understand it. His translation had brought something to life, and it was up to him to kill it. The monster. The great enemy. Call it the Jabberwock. At one point, he came close to destroying the manuscript. It would have been easy: get a pack of matches at a drugstore, find a garbage can in some deserted alley, toss in the pages and have a merry bonfire. In fact, he had made it to the third step. Standing over the trash can, he had struck a match, tried to touch it to the edge of his manuscript. He had waited too long; the match burned out; he lit another one. But he could not bring himself to torch the pages. At the time, he had blamed his reluctance on weakness. Now, however, he reflected that this translation might be the only weapon he possessed. Destroying it might have been a horrible mistake. "Next stop, Revere Beach." Straightening up, Usher slid his manuscript from its tattered envelope. He browsed from chapter to chapter, looking for a clue, for something in Alice's adventures that would provide him with a solution. Finally he turned to the most famous poem, to the nonsense syllables which had given him such trouble in their translation, remembering the English original: He took his vorpal sword in hand: Long time the manxome foe he sought -- So rested he by the Tumtum tree, And stood a while in thought. "The manxome foe." Usher mouthed the words. But where was he supposed to find it? Usher put his hand over his right breast. Felt his nervous heartbeat. Ever since childhood, after hearing the phrase "situs inversus" and realizing that he was somehow different from the people he saw on the street, he had felt a certain kinship with the looking-glass world. It had led him to Lewis Carroll's books, to mirrors, even to a better understanding of Hebrew. Now all these inversions came to bear upon one problem. Where should he head? Where could he seek the manxome foe? Where in the world did one find a looking-glass creature? Like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. He looked up at the map of subway stations. The next stop was the end of the line. From there, he could head back and transfer, taking the T to his final destination. Usher slipped his manuscript back into its envelope, waited for the train to stop. And when the voice of the T came over the intercom for the last time, announcing the final stop on the Blue Line, he could only smile. "Next stop, Wonderland." * * * Mulder looked terrible. He sat at the counter of the coffee shop with a mug in his hand, a half-finished slice of sweet potato pie in front of him. Scully slid into the seat at his right, tried for sympathy. "How are you feeling?" He looked up. "These background checks are killing me. I've spent all afternoon talking to people with situs inversus, bullying hospitals into showing me their files, and trying to convince the Boston Police Department to put an extra patrol car on those neighborhoods where at least one resident has inverted insides. Hell, Scully, I'm tired." "I can see that," Scully said gently. Mulder finished his coffee at a gulp. "Maybe I'm getting old. In my glory days, I could go without sleep for weeks, remember?" "I remember." "And now...." "Maybe you should get some rest." "No, I don't think so. I've been doing some research, you see." Mulder beckoned for another cup of coffee, then tapped the stack of books at his side. Scully leaned over to see their spines, glimpsed a few works by Lewis Carroll, a textbook of stereochemistry, a rare English volume of Milo Temesvar's "On the Use of Mirrors in the Game of Chess." Small slips of paper stuck out from the thickness of the pages, marking Mulder's place in each. Scully turned back to her partner. "And what have you concluded?" "I've concluded that our friend Ethan Usher may be onto something." Reaching over, Mulder picked up his copy of "Through the Looking-Glass" and found the passage he needed. "I reread these books years ago, of course, while working on the John Lee Roche case. And when I heard about Usher's connection to Lewis Carroll, one line in particular came to mind." "Which was?" Mulder pointed to the page. "Just before Alice steps through the looking-glass, she wonders whether looking- glass milk is good to drink." He closed the book, looked at his partner with satisfaction. "What do you say, Scully? Is looking-glass milk good to drink?" Scully raised an eyebrow, then looked around for the waitress. "Check, please." "I'm serious." Mulder set the volume aside. "Based upon the physical characteristics of milk, and drawing upon your extensive knowledge of chemistry, would looking-glass milk be good to drink?" Scully thought for a second. "No." "Why not?" "Because lactose is an asymmetric molecule, and our bodies wouldn't be able to digest its mirror-image counterpart." "Exactly. And the same property applies to many other molecules as well. Sugar, for instance." Mulder spooned sugar into his coffee, stirred. "Sugar comes in both right- and left-handed varieties. The right-handed kind, dextrose, is easily digestible; the left-handed kind, levulose, is not. A molecule that exists in two forms which are mirror images of one another is called a stereoisomer." "I know all this." "I know you do," Mulder replied. "I'm just saying it aloud so you can catch my mistakes. Is everything all right so far?" "I suppose." "Good. Now, the odd thing about stereoisomers is that living things react to them in different ways. If I take a mixture of right- and left-handed sugar molecules and dissolve them in water, then add a certain type of bacteria which breaks down the sugar for food, what happens? The bacteria consumes only the right-handed molecules, leaving the left-handed ones untouched. Do you see where I'm heading with this?" "Surprise me," Scully said. "What if the same thing applies to us? Think of the world's population. Most human beings have their heart on the left side, their liver on the left, their other organs arranged in a certain way. But every once in a while, you'll find someone with the reverse of the usual arrangement, someone with situs inversus -- like a single left-handed molecule mixed into a solution of right-handed stereoisomers." "That's a bit of a stretch." "But here's the best part." Mulder swallowed coffee, finished his piece of pie. "If we can imagine that humans are stereoisomers, we can also conceive of a predator that only targets people with situs inversus -- just like the selective bacteria in our sugar solution." Scully interrupted. "Mulder, that doesn't make any sense. Even if such a creature did exist, it would be at a tremendous evolutionary disadvantage. There just aren't enough people with situs inversus to sustain a predator for very long." "That's my final point. In a looking-glass world, we'd all have situs inversus, and our predator would have an abundance of creatures to prey upon. But if Usher is right, and something has crossed over into our plane of reality, it has to deal with a shortage in its food supply. We can't drink looking-glass milk, right? Well, maybe the Jabberwock can only feed upon looking-glass people." There was a pause. Scully glanced over at her partner, saw that he was waiting for her response. She also noticed that he was holding his coffee cup in his left hand. "What time is it, Mulder?" she asked casually. Mulder checked his watch, spilling hot coffee onto himself. "Shit," he said, standing. "Agent Desmond taught me that trick," Scully said mildly. But her partner's exhaustion made her upset. Her voice grew more concerned. "Mulder, you're tired. You don't seem to be thinking straight." "What makes you say that?" Mulder asked, dabbing at his pants with a napkin. Scully sighed, picked up his copy of "Through the Looking- Glass," browsed through it. "As interesting as those speculations are, they don't bring us any closer to finding Usher. Or to putting an end to these killings." "Yeah." Mulder sat down again. "If only I could figure out what Usher was thinking. Put myself in his shoes. See what he sees, go where he goes." "Just don't follow him through the looking-glass." He smiled. "Right." They sat together in silence. Scully leafed through the volume, looking at John Tenniel's famous illustrations. She was examining one particularly striking picture -- a dinner party in which the candles had grown toward the ceiling, the wine bottles flapping around with plates for wings, everything else coming down with a crash -- when Mulder spoke again. "I've got it." His voice was quiet. "I know where Usher is headed." Scully looked at Mulder. His eyes shone with a light due either to inspiration or caffeine, or perhaps both. "Tell me," she said. As he spoke, Mulder became more excited. "Remember what Usher said on the phone? He told Leah Blume that he needed to confront this thing, to face it head on. He's going to get tired of running soon, and when he does, he'll seek out his demons. Hunt them down." "He'll try to slay the Jabberwock." "Exactly. But where will he go? Scully, where do you hunt for a looking-glass creature?" She lifted her hands. "I don't know." "You find a mirror. You find the biggest mirror in all of New England and wait there for your quarry to arrive." Mulder grinned. "Scully, I know where he's going. The source. The biggest looking-glass of them all. He's headed for the Hancock Tower." * * * Around four o'clock, Usher realized that he was famished. When he cast back into his memory for the circumstances of his last meal, he discovered that he hadn't eaten since the previous evening -- a hasty sandwich, devoured over the sink. Now his stomach felt like it was twisting on itself like a Moebius strip. Emerging from the subway at Copley Square, he found a sidewalk restaurant, sat down and ordered a bagel and a cup of tea. While he waited, he arranged his seat so that he could keep an eye on his ultimate target. Looking up at the sky, Usher reflected that it had been hours since he'd been in the open air. His brief time as a fugitive had been a succession of escalators, trains, platforms, terminals, all underground, like Alice translated into a world of industry. His food arrived. The tea was steaming hot; the bagel was sliced on a glass plate, with jam and butter on the side. Usher buttered his bagel, took a delicious bite, then turned his attention to the edifice across the way. The John Hancock Tower stood above the square like an enormous parallelogram, its sides shimmering with the reflected light of the afternoon. Sixty stories high, mirrored on every surface, it gave back an image of Boston as it existed in that other world, a looking-glass city, perfect down to the smallest detail. Ten thousand panes of silvered glass hung between earth and heaven. The largest mirror in the world. It exhilarated and terrified Usher in equal measure. The idea, after all, was remarkable: to build a mirror enormous enough so that an entire city could look at itself, gaining untold amounts of self-awareness in the process. Across from the tower stood the convoluted brown facade of Trinity Church, carved from stone the color of dust, planted in perfect symmetry with its reflected twin across the street. From where Usher was seated, he could see both churches, the real and the unreal. It was a living example of the heresy of Rabbi Ben Abuya, who entered the garden of kabbalah with an imperfect mind and saw two gods instead of one. If the Jabberwock would appear anywhere, it was here. Usher didn't know what form his enemy might take; he wasn't sure what he would do when it arrived. But he knew that the place was fixed. And -- -- something on his plate stirred. Usher looked down. Felt his heart skip a beat. His meal came to life. The halves of his bagel joined themselves along an invisible seam, began to flap themselves like wings. It was a looking-glass insect. "The Bread-and-butter-fly," Usher whispered. Sour fear rose in his throat. The Bread-and-butter-fly began to crawl around his plate, perhaps drawn by the smell of tea. Usher gave a sudden start, reached for his napkin and threw it over his plate. Beneath the napkin, the insect continued to crawl. Usher put his hand on the cloth, felt it squirming hideously beneath his touch. "It always happens," he said softly. "It always happens." Usher looked across at the skyscraper. Felt it. Something was coming soon. * * * End of Inversus (5/9) Inversus (6/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * ACT III Copley Square 4:35 p.m. From the revolving doors leading into the lobby of the Hancock Tower, a man emerged wearing a blue jogging suit. He hesitated for a moment on the sidewalk, looking across the way at the intricate face of Trinity Church, pretending to study the saints and gargoyles carved into the stone. Then the jogger popped headphones onto his ears and began running down the street at an easy pace. Just before turning the corner, he pumped his left fist once, then pointed three times with his index finger, gesturing towards the grassy park in the center of the square. At this signal, a second man stepped from the Visitor's Center at the base of the tower. A moment later, he was followed by a third man; soon after that, a fourth. The men headed to the park across the street and began to spread out, wandering with seeming aimlessness through rows of green benches beneath the blossoming trees. Kids played around them, toddlers chasing their parents along the cobblestone paths, squealing in their small parkas. The sky above was brilliant and blue. The men watched the crowd. One of these men was Mulder. Hands deep in his pockets, he gazed around the park. The square was bounded by the church on one side, a library on the other. To Mulder's right stood a tiled fountain in the shape of half an octagon, its two obelisks framing a view of Boylston Street. In front of the fountain stood two bronze statues -- a tortoise and a hare. To his left, the mirrored prism of the Hancock Tower stood against the sky, suggesting everything, revealing nothing. This was the stage upon which a small but complex drama was now taking place. Looking around the park, Mulder silently pondered the invisible net that was being drawn around the square. To describe this strange web of men, the FBI calls upon various metaphors: a box, a cage, a noose. A trap, intended to catch Ethan Usher. This is how Bureau surveillance works: Three or four men on foot. Another positioned at some high point -- the observation deck of the Hancock Tower, for example -- with a radio and a pair of binoculars. Around the area to be covered, four cars are parked on side streets, one for every possible direction of pursuit. It's called the floating box method. Once in place, it is almost impossible to elude. Now all that remained was to wait. Mulder closed his eyes, rubbed the bridge of his nose, then opened his eyes again. The case was drawing to a close -- he could almost taste it -- but he still felt like a dead man walking. For some reason, his nerves seemed to have been stretched into fine wire, tense and ready to snap. Drinking gallons of coffee didn't seem to help. His mind was wandering. With a start, Mulder realized that he had spent a full minute just watching a couple of kids playing on the bronze tortoise, slipping and laughing across the smooth shell. The tortoise had a silly grin on its face. Behind it, the hare scratched its ear in puzzlement. He heard the jingling of keys. Margaret Lime spoke from behind him. "You know that this is your wildest hunch to date." Mulder rubbed his eyes but didn't turn around. "I've had wilder ones." "From what I can see," the detective continued, "there's no evidence whatsoever that Usher is headed for the Hancock Tower. Listen, I've tried to be accommodating up to this point. You're lucky that I called in the Bureau at all. But there's a limit to everything. This kind of surveillance is expensive." "The FBI will foot the bill." "Well, good. But even so...." "Detective Lime." Mulder spoke softly, still looking across at the fountain. "Take a look behind you, and tell me what you see." Lime turned, humoring him. "The Hancock Tower." "And what do you see reflected there?" Mulder said. "The two of us. Standing in the middle of the park like a couple of assholes." "That's right. We're reflected there. So is everyone else in the park. So is the facade of Trinity Church, and the surrounding buildings, and pedestrians and passing cars, as far as light can reach. It's Boston's looking-glass." Mulder turned to face Lime. "Sooner or later, given his fascination with the looking-glass world, Usher is going to come here. I can't see how he could do otherwise." Lime disagreed. "I don't like your reasoning. If Usher thinks he's being chased by looking-glass creatures, won't he stay as far away from mirrors as he possibly can?" "Maybe, but he's going to confront his fear at some point. When he does, he'll come here. He'll be drawn to the greatest mirror of all, a mirror so large that its existence stands as an ultimatum to the universe it reflects. Usher won't be able to resist that kind of challenge." "How do you know that?" "You tell me," Mulder said. "You're the one who climbs mountains." * * * Sixty stories above the street, a pair of binoculars in one hand, Scully leaned over the railing of the John Hancock Observatory and looked out at the immensity of the Boston metropolis. On a clear day like this, one could see more than eighty miles in all directions. Scully looked straight down, saw the hard-edged roofs of houses stretching for block after block like some crazy growth of crystals; raising her eyes, she took in the crowded skyline, the multiplication of planes and prisms -- skyscrapers, towers, cubes of brick, even the torus of Fenway Park. Finally her gaze came to the ocean, the soft pastels of the horizon rising above the water, the only possible ending to the mad rush of architecture beneath. In her pocket, the police radio crackled. "Epsilon, any activity from your vantage point?" Scully lifted the radio to her lips, clicked it on. "Negative. Keep me posted in any case." She clicked the radio off. Standing next to her, Leah Blume said, "I don't know what they expect you to see from here. The people below us look like ants." "No kidding." The two women stood in the observatory among the crowds of tourists, surrounded by foreign accents and the chatter of children. The room was carpeted in blues and grays, its walls painted a tasteful black. Beyond a plastic barrier that came to the level of Scully's waist, enormous tinted windows stretched from floor to ceiling, yielding a staggering view of New England. But the windows were also mirrors, Scully realized. The windows were transparent from the inside, but on the outside they shimmered in silver -- which meant that everything she saw was being reflected in an invisible mirror before her eyes. She was on the other side of the looking-glass. Scully smiled to herself. Perhaps Usher's paranoia was catching. On the way up to the observatory, she had been almost overwhelmed by the mirrored interior of the Hancock Tower. Images of herself had gazed back from every surface: there had been nothing but mirrored corridors, mirrored pillars, mirrored ceilings, mirrored elevator doors, reflections metastasizing through every inch of space. She raised the binoculars to her eyes, looked down at the square. Through the lenses, she could see people strolling through the park, sitting on benches, the tops of a hundred heads. After a bit of searching, Scully found Mulder standing next to the fountain, talking to Margaret Lime. Even magnified like this, they were little more than dots on the ground. Scully lowered the binoculars. "From this height, we'd be better off stargazing, and finding Usher through astrology." Blume smiled. "You sound like a kabbalist." "Do I?" "According to the kabbalah, the earth is the map and mirror of heaven. We understand the one by looking at the other. In that respect, your partner was right. The kabbalah is an attempt to perceive the mysteries above us through mirrors of greater and lesser clarity." "So the world is a mirror?" "For some kabbalists, yes. For others, it is only someone's dream." Blume did not continue. Scully continued to sweep her binoculars across the area below, observing the actions of the surveillance team, but found most of her attention straying to the woman at her side. Next to her, Blume had begun nibbling her turtleneck again, her shoes kicking softly against the plastic barrier that stood between them and the window. Bringing her along had been Scully's decision. Just before the surveillance team went into action, Scully had called Blume at her office, inviting her to observe the operation. Some of the FBI personnel had objected to this, but Scully had insisted that the editor deserved to be present when her ex-husband was found. Besides, she wanted to know more about Ethan Usher, and Blume was the best person to ask. Now, with the immensity of Boston spreading before them, Scully said: "Tell me something about Ethan." Blume glanced over at her, surprised. "What do you want to know?" "I'm not sure. But I want to have a better idea of the man I'm looking for." Scully lowered the binoculars again. "So far, all I've seen are the ruins of his house and his picture in the paper. Those things can't tell me who he really is. You can." Blume smiled. "Don't be too sure about that. Ethan keeps his secrets to himself. I was married to him for three years, and I know him better than anyone else, but sometimes he still manages to surprise me." "He's surprised a lot of people today." "Yes." Blume fiddled with a coin-operated telescope to her right. "What can I say? Ethan is a writer. There's no harder kind of person to be married to. He may spend all his time at a typewriter, staring into space, but there's no telling what his mind is doing. Writers may communicate for a living, but their lives are intensely private. You never know what really consumes them. Even the kabbalah won't help you with that." "Excuse me?" A young FBI agent approached the two of them, a sheaf of papers in his hands. "Excuse me, Agent Scully?" Scully turned away from Blume. "Yes?" "We've just received the blood results from the first six autopsies." The agent flipped through the pages, reading off names: "John and Rachel Stroheim, Bill and Deborah Evans, Trevor and June Richardson, correct? We thought you might want to take a look at them." "Thanks." Scully held out her binoculars. "Mind taking over for a minute?" "My pleasure." The agent took the binoculars, focused them on the square below. Scully and Blume found two empty chairs away from the windows and sat down. Placing the folder on her lap, Scully opened to the blood results, skipped to the drug analysis. According to the report, traces of the prescription drug theophylline, a bronchodilator often used by asthmatics or people with recurrent lung infections, had been found in the bodies of John Stroheim and Bill Evans, but not in Trevor Richardson or his wife. Scully drummed her fingernails against the page in frustration. The connection she'd been hoping for had failed to materialize. She skimmed the rest of the breakdown, flipping from one report to the next. Most of the results were routine. No blood alcohol in any of the victims. No illegal drugs. No trace of poisoning or sedation. There was one other thing. In all six of the analyses, the medical examiner noted that levels of glucose and triglycerides in the blood had been abnormally high. Scully frowned. Something was digging at the back of her mind. A connection -- a link to something she'd come across earlier that day. But what? "Anything interesting?" Blume asked. Scully closed the folder. "I don't know. I feel like I've got all the pieces of the puzzle, but I don't know how to put them together. I don't even know what the picture on the box is supposed to look like." She walked over to the window, looked down at the gray ribbon of the Charles River. "There are so many strange things about this case, I don't even know where to begin." "Maybe if you talk about it, you'll make the connection you need." "Maybe." Scully stared out the window for a while longer, her fingers tapping against the rail. "I have a question," she finally said. "Did Ethan ever talk about his situs inversus?" "You mean his medical condition? His reversed insides?" Blume smiled. "I remember being a little unnerved when he first told me about it. It seemed so strange. After a while, I came to love it. Sometimes we would be lying together in bed, face to face, and I could feel his heart beating against mine, left against right. Like pressing up against my own reflection." "Did the situs inversus ever cause him any problems?" "No, Ethan found it fascinating. He loved to talk about it, except...." Blume trailed off. "Except what?" "You know, it's strange, but Ethan told me that his situs inversus had made him infertile." Scully froze. The digging at the back of her mind grew stronger, like a small seed trying to force its way to the surface. "You mean that you and Ethan couldn't have children?" "No, we couldn't," Blume said. "It was a sore point throughout our marriage. We tried and tried, but there was something wrong with Ethan's sperm. I can't recall what the doctors said exactly, but it was something about their tails, the sperm tails couldn't move right...." In Scully's mind, the last seed suddenly germinated. Her eyes widened. "Jesus Christ." She turned to Blume. Something in her eyes must have startled the editor, who drew back slightly in her chair: "What...?" "Kartagener Syndrome," said Scully. "Situs inversus, lung infections, male infertility." She almost smacked herself on the forehead. "I must be blind. It's been staring me in the face the entire time. The missing piece...." "What?" "Children." Scully picked up the autopsy report and leafed through it. "The victims in this case were all married, healthy and young -- but none had children. Why not? Because the husbands all had Kartagener Syndrome. It isn't in their medical records, but that has to be it...." "What's Kartagener Syndrome?" asked Blume. Scully pulled out her phone and dialed. "It's a genetic disease. And it's the key to solving this case." * * * End of Inversus (6/9) Inversus (7/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * Mulder and Lime stood beneath the facade of Trinity Church, looking out at the square. Lime was telling Mulder about the aurora borealis. "I saw it last weekend, you know, up at Wingaersheek Beach," the detective said. "Astonishing. Did you know that the Point Barrow Eskimos carried knives to defend themselves against the aurora? They thought it was a sign of battle. When it appeared, it meant that somebody was going to die, but -- " The ring of a cell phone cut Lime off in mid-sentence. Mulder held up a hand for silence, answered: "Mulder." Scully's voice: "I figured it out. I know the link between our victims. Mulder, I think I know why these things are happening." "Hold on. What connection are you talking about?" "It's not just situs inversus. Each of the men who died suffered from a genetic condition known as Kartagener Syndrome. I didn't realize it until now...." "Just a second." Mulder lowered his phone, turned to Lime. "This may take a while." Lime shrugged. "If you need me, I'll be parked on Trinity Street. Just don't talk too long." She left. Mulder put the phone back to his ear. "So, this syndrome. What does it mean?" Scully cleared her throat. "It means that these men had defective cilia in their bodies. You know what cilia are, right? Hair-like structures covering certain kinds of cells, lashing back and forth like whips on the cell membrane." "I know this." "I know you do. I'm just saying it aloud so you can catch my mistakes. Anyway, you'll find cilia in the lungs, sweeping the airway clean, and in the tails of sperm. People with Kartagener Syndrome have a genetic defect that paralyzes their cilia. This leads to three symptoms. First, respiratory problems. The lungs have trouble cleaning themselves, you see? And at least two of our victims suffered from respiratory infections. I know because of the medication they were taking." "All right." "The second symptom is male infertility. Without functional tails, sperm can't swim." "And none of our victims had children," Mulder said, just realizing the fact himself. "Exactly. And the third symptom of Kartagener Syndrome is situs inversus." "Wait a minute. What do defective cilia have to do with situs inversus?" "Good question. The real question is, how does the body tell left from right? It turns out that organ placement is determined by the distribution of proteins in the embryo. These proteins accumulate on one side or another, and their location decides whether the heart is on the right or the left, and where the other organs end up. In normal embryos, specialized cilia guide the proteins from place to place. But if these cilia are defective, the proteins are randomly distributed. Organ arrangement becomes totally unpredictable." "And the result is situs inversus." "Yes, about half the time." "But why wasn't this syndrome listed in anyone's medical records?" "Mulder, the condition wasn't even defined until about twenty years ago. Their doctors probably never made the connection." "Jesus." Mulder found himself standing before the weathered face of Trinity Church. Gargoyles peered down from the eaves; the saints stood in high relief, enhaloed by stone, open books in their hands. He looked across the street, saw himself reflected in the giant mirror of Hancock Tower. Noticed the deep circles under his eyes. "There's more," Scully continued. "This is mostly speculation, but Kartagener Syndrome can also affect the nervous system." In the row of mirrors before him, Mulder saw his mouth moving in reply. "How?" "Cilia are part of a structure called the cytoskeleton -- the framework that gives the cell its shape and transports molecules from place to place. It can also transmit impulses, which means that it might be able to process information. And some scientists believe that the cytoskeleton plays an important part in mental function. Mulder, we're talking about fundamental properties like consciousness and self-awareness, even paranormal powers like ESP and psychokinesis. The power to move objects with one's mind." "So you're saying -- " " -- that it's possible for Kartagener Syndrome to affect these processes in some way that we don't understand. Ethan Usher may be responsible for his own situation." "Let me get this straight." Mulder climbed the steps of the church, strode beneath the overhang. "You're saying that something triggered psychokinetic powers in these people? That they were killed by an uncontrolled burst of violence produced by their own minds? Coming from you, that's a rather wild theory." He paused. "I like it." "I know it's strange," Scully said. "But I find psychokinesis easier to accept than the idea that Usher opened a gate to the looking-glass world. Maybe it's all his own creation, Mulder. Maybe all these things are Usher's fantasies, born from his obsession with Lewis Carroll, made flesh by a psychic power that arises only in people whose nervous system is able to control it." "People with Kartagener Syndrome." "Yes." "But where does that power come from? Why are these things happening all at once?" "I don't know," said Scully. "Something has triggered these psychic events, but I don't know what. There's one more connection that we need to make. If we don't figure it out in time...." "...then we may not be able to stop it." Mulder exhaled. "Well, damn. Even if you're right, Scully, we've only managed to exchange one mystery for another. Until we locate Usher, I -- " He stopped, his vision swimming. Exhaustion rolled over him in a sudden wave. He shook his head to clear it, looked back at the mirrored side of the skyscraper. And saw Usher. In front of Mulder, the entire park was reflected in the Hancock Tower, the mirrors giving back an image of the square in reverse, throngs of looking-glass people strolling beneath the trees. Usher was one of them. Mulder spun, saw Usher standing two hundred yards away, his hands in his pockets, thoughtfully examining the statues of the tortoise and the hare next to the spuming fountain. "Well, heck," Mulder said. He spoke into his phone. "Scully, I've got him." Scully's voice rose. "What?" "Usher. He's standing by the fountain at the other end of the park. See him?" "I don't know, I haven't got the binoculars handy...." "Never mind." Looking at Usher, zeroing in, Mulder tried to think. "Just put out a call on the radio, all right? Tell everybody that I'm going after him alone. Keep them back until I give the word." "Are you sure about this? Mulder, be careful. You're tired, and you -- " "I know." Mulder hung up, eyes on his target. Across the square, Usher seemed unaware that he had been noticed. He was wearing sunglasses. An envelope was in his hands. High above the park, the sky was darkening: to the west, the sunset unfurled in purples and pinks. The wind blew cold. Mulder unsnapped the strap of his holster and moved in. * * * Usher stood next to the two statues, thinking. He reached out and touched the tortoise's smooth bronze shell, felt the coolness against his skin. For the first time in many hours, he felt calm. "Usher." The voice came from behind him. He turned. Facing him was a man he did not recognize. "Yes?" "Usher, my name is Fox Mulder." The man stepped forward. Usher noticed that he seemed tired, his eyes hard to read. "I'd like to talk to you for a moment. Do you mind?" "No, I don't mind." Usher glanced down at the tortoise's shell, saw a shapeless reflection of himself in the dull metal. "I would like to talk to someone. I tried it with Leah, but she didn't seem to understand. Do you have a wristwatch?" he suddenly asked. "Yes," Mulder said. "Something will happen in about ten seconds," said Usher. "Until then, we can talk." Mulder glanced nervously at the time, then looked back at Usher. "How do you know that something is going to happen?" Usher wondered how to answer that question. After reaching the square, he had avoided the park for more than an hour; then, finally, he had seen these statues, and his search had ended. The parallelogram of the Hancock Tower had brought him here only to direct him to his true goal. It had been obvious. Now he said: "It's difficult to explain. Maybe it -- " He broke off. From his right there came a loud creaking sound. "Too late," Usher said simply. The two men turned and looked. Behind the tortoise stood the statue of a hare. It had been designed and cast several years back, Usher remembered, to commemorate the centennial of the Boston Marathon. Ever since the bronze had cooled, the hare had remained in the same position -- rear leg raised to scratch behind one ear, nose almost touching the ground, the creature frozen forever in sad bewilderment. Until now. A creaking came from within the statue. For a moment or two there was nothing but that shriek, soft at first but steadily growing, a sound something like the screech of fingernails against a chalkboard. Usher recognized it. It was the shriek of molecular bonds breaking, metal melting and rehardening on a microscopic scale. On the surface, the rabbit remained frozen -- but the noise continued, welling up from deep inside the statue, rising to an unbearable intensity. Usher wanted to cover his ears, but his arms wouldn't move. He could only stare. Next to him, Mulder stood open-mouthed. Within the statue's core, changes were taking place. One of the rabbit's ears twitched. Usher could see the surface of the bronze stretching, distorting. The din doubled, redoubled, the crystallized chains of atoms screaming in their newfound flexibility. The rabbit raised its head. Usher heard a splintering sound. The bricks that paved the ground beneath the rabbit's right front paw were cracking. The paw moved. It raised itself with arthritic stiffness, its surface rippling beneath the strain, joints flexing and reforming themselves before Usher's eyes. By now, some of the children in the park had noticed what was happening. He saw a little boy, no more than three, tugging on his mother's hand and pointing. The mother saw it, too. Goggled. In an instant, the park grew hushed. Crowds of teenagers, tourists, parents came to halt. No one moved. Everyone stood motionless, watching the statue come to life. After four years of trying, the rabbit finished scratching behind its ear and lowered its right haunch. The metal groaned: the rabbit's leg twisted, bending to touch the ground, the bronze stretching like taffy in three or four places. For a second, all was silent. Usher thought that things might be over, allowed himself to hope that things were over.... And then the rabbit bounded up and away. Its rear legs tensed and it tore itself out of the ground, chips of bricks flying. One of them hit Usher in the face, stinging like a small insect; he touched his hand to his cheek, drew it back bloody. The rabbit jumped and landed in the fountain with a splash. Usher heard the concrete crunch beneath the impact, cratering, splintering beneath the rabbit's weight. Of course. This rabbit was the size of a small calf, and made entirely of bronze. It would leave footprints in the pavement as easily as a hare would leave traces of itself in soft soil. Now it leapt out of the water, hopping easily between the two obelisks at the fountain's edge. As it jumped down onto Boylston Street, its rear legs chipped the concrete rim of the fountain, shards falling away. And it was gone. With that, the spell broke. Dropping his manuscript, Usher followed the rabbit. He jumped into the fountain, splashed towards the edge and climbed over. Threw himself down onto the sidewalk. Looked around desperately. To his left, the rabbit was bounding down Boylston Street with a series of loud crunches, moving beneath the trees, scattering crowds of pigeons. Usher sprinted after it. He could hear the crashings of its paws, saw the small crumbling divots that the leaps left in the ground. The rabbit moved fast. Already it was half a block ahead of him and pulling further away. He could see the lights of the city running along its bronze back as its ran. His lungs heaved cold air. Behind him, Mulder clambered over the edge of the fountain and ran after Usher. He tore the radio from his back pocket, yelled into it: "Emergency! I've got a bronze rabbit heading south on Boylston, suspect in pursuit!" The radio crackled. "What?" "Just get a vehicle down here! I can't keep up with this goddamned thing!" Mulder clicked the radio off and sprinted down the sidewalk, his tie flapping behind him like a flag. Usher was fifty yards ahead of him; the rabbit was a hundred yards further away. Mulder's shoes pounded against the pavement at a fast clip as he ran forward, already light-headed, legs heavy, weaving around groups of startled pedestrians, shouting for people to move. Fifty yards up, Usher was tiring -- his lungs burned. Half a block ahead, the bronze rabbit bounded past clusters of shoppers, sending gift bags and packages flying. People were screaming. Usher ran and ran and realized that he wasn't going to make it. In his head, the blood pounded. His feet slowed, muscles in his legs fluttering with exhaustion, and it was too much, it was just too much.... He reached the corner of Boylston and Clarendon Street. Next to the curb, a Toyota was idling at a red light. Usher didn't even stop to think. He dashed around the front of the car, yanked open the driver's side door. Inside, a woman looked at him: "What the hell?" "I'm sorry," Usher tried to say, but his breath was gone -- he only managed a whisper of air as he reached in and pulled the woman out of the driver's seat. She went sprawling on the asphalt, cursing him and clawing at his face. Usher ignored her, climbed behind the wheel and drove off. Mulder saw what was happening. "Shit!" He drew his pistol, ran with arms and legs pumping. His lungs burned. He slowed down, his fatigue showing. Next to him, a station wagon pulled up. Margaret Lime was at the wheel. "Get in!" Mulder pulled open the door, slid into the passenger's seat. Out of breath, he reholstered his gun, managed to give the order. "Follow that rabbit." "Whatever you say," Lime said, and roared off. Ahead of them, Usher peered through the windshield of his stolen Toyota, straining to see the rabbit. Finally he glimpsed it in the distance, leaping over a parked car. It landed squarely in the middle of the roof, collapsing it in a burst of breaking glass, then hopped on. Usher prepared to follow it. Then, looking just ahead, he swore. Pounded the steering wheel. Traffic was at a standstill. He couldn't get through. Not on the street, anyway. "This is a bad idea," Usher said through clenched teeth, and drove onto the sidewalk. He honked his horn. In front of him, pedestrians dived out of the way, women screaming. He hit a trash can with the edge of the front bumper, sent garbage flying. Gripping the wheel, his knuckles went white. Behind him, in the station wagon, Lime looked ahead and said: "Jesus Christ. You want me to follow him onto the sidewalk?" "Use your best judgment," Mulder said, reaching for his cell phone. He dialed. The phone rang twice. Just as Scully answered, Lime pulled onto the sidewalk, horn blaring, and the phone dropped from Mulder's tired fingers. "Shit," he said, scrambling for it. "I'd buckle your seat belt if I were you," Lime said calmly, steering her way around a group of startled tourists. Mulder straightened up, phone to his ear. "...you there?" Scully's voice was saying. "Yeah, I'm here." Mulder looked ahead. Half a block away, he could see the second car driving along the sidewalk. The distance between Usher and the bronze rabbit was rapidly narrowing. Mulder opened the glove compartment of the car, pulled out the siren, reached up and slapped it onto the roof of the station wagon. It blared. "Mulder, what the hell is going on?" "Why, we're in the middle of an old-fashioned chase scene. Hold on a minute while I give you our bearings." Mulder turned to Lime. "You still have that compass of yours?" "Yeah, it's with my keys." Lime dug her personal key ring out of her pocket, tossed it to Mulder, then swerved to avoid another crowd of people. "Good thing this sidewalk is so wide," she muttered. Mulder looked at the compass, checked it against the line of the rabbit's movements. The chase was heading roughly to the northeast; he read the exact bearing off to Scully. "You got that?" he asked. "Yes," she said. "Is it important?" "It might be." Mulder shifted the phone to his other ear, looked out the windshield. "Oh, shit," he said. "What?" "We're headed for a tunnel. I'm going to lose your signal." In the other car, Usher saw flat yellow light drawing closer as he approached the tunnel. Glancing down, he saw the rabbit scampering only a few feet ahead of his front bumper. The metal of the statue was twisted out of shape, its haunches working back and forth as the bronze pinched and folded itself in strange patterns. The rabbit's ears were trembling. Usher could see his headlights reflecting off the bronze. "I've got you," he said. Usher pressed down on the gas pedal and accelerated forward, closing the gap. The engine roared. Abruptly, the rabbit turned and headed toward the tunnel, feet crunching against the asphalt. Usher followed it, pulling back into the street. Swerving around cars and trucks, he entered the tunnel. The sound of his engine echoed like a maddened voice against the curved walls. The rabbit was two yards ahead of him. He was almost there. He floored it. And then everything stopped. In mid-leap, the rabbit turned back into a hunk of bronze. Usher collided with it, the statue crunching against his front bumper, the car's hood crumpling like an accordion. He slammed on the brakes, skidded, scraped against the wall of the tunnel. Came to a halt at one end of the pedestrian walkway. Usher killed the engine, climbed out of the car. Looked. The statue lay on its side on the ground, still steaming. It had been twisted into an almost unrecognizable shape, but it was only metal. He kicked at it, winced. The metal was hot. There was a smell like something burning. A pistol cocking behind him. "Usher." He turned. Mulder and another woman stood with their guns drawn. Behind them, police cars pulled into the tunnel, sirens flashing. "End of the rabbit hole," said Mulder. * * * End of Inversus (7/9) Inversus (8/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * ACT IV Boston, Massachusetts A moment later Mulder held Usher at gunpoint, his heart still hammering away. Adrenaline. Listening to the echoes of traffic bouncing off the tunnel walls, feeling the yellow light blazing down, he pondered everything he'd seen so far. He thought of the statue coming to life. The wild chase. He thought of the way that everything had crashed to a halt, right here where they stood, in the tunnel. With a click, one more piece fell into place. Next to him, Lime reholstered her pistol, pulled out her cuffs. "Shall I arrest this man, Agent Mulder?" Mulder nodded. Lime walked over to Usher, glanced down at the smoldering hunk of metal at his feet, then looked up at the wanted man's pale, shaken features. "Excuse me, sir. I'd be obliged if you'd hold our your hands for me." Usher cooperated. Deep in his skull, his eyes were empty. Lime handcuffed him and read him his rights, and was about to lead him away when Mulder spoke. "Just a second." "Yes?" Lime was gripping Usher by the back of his collar, one hand clamped to the man's forearm. The FBI agent reholstered his gun. "We can't take him out of this tunnel." "What do you mean?" Lime looked at him quizzically; Usher, too, seemed to stare. Mulder wondered how to explain himself. In the end, he decided to skip it. "My cell phone doesn't work in here," he said. "The signal died as soon as we entered the tunnel. But there's probably a security booth nearby, with a telephone." "Yeah, I saw one on the way in," Lime said. "Can you do me a favor? Put in a call to the Boston field office." Mulder rattled off a number. "Give them our location, and tell them to bring a TEMPEST truck to the tunnel, ready for transport. Did you get all that? We need them to send us a TEMPEST truck." "What's that?" "It's the bottle for this lightning bug," Mulder said, nodding at Usher. "We take him away in any other vehicle, and we run the risk of something happening. Something like this." He pointed at the rabbit statue, which was quietly cooking the concrete beneath it. "As long as we stay in this tunnel, we'll be safe," he continued. Usher finally spoke. "How do you know that?" "Because I know what's kept you alive all this time," Mulder replied. "I know why you didn't die right away, like everyone else did who found themselves involved in this mess." "How about telling me, then?" said Lime. "I'll need someone to make that call first." Lime looked around, spotted an FBI agent standing nearby. "Agent! You heard the man. Call your field office and get him one of those TEMPEST things." "Call Scully, too," Mulder added. "Tell her to stay put until she hears from me." The agent nodded and ran off. Lime turned back to Mulder. "Let's talk," she said. "Before we do that, let's take our prisoner somewhere else." Mulder gestured at the chaos around them. Police had set up orange cones to divert traffic through the tunnel, but what seemed like several hundred police, FBI agents, pedestrians and bystanders were milling about the scene. Lime turned to Usher. "All right. Come with us." They led Usher to the Bureau station wagon, put him in the back seat. Lime slid in after him. Mulder sat in the front, tilted the rear-view mirror so he could see Usher. "How are you doing, Ethan?" he asked. In the mirror, Usher's eyes flicked up at him. "I'm hungry," he said. "And tired." "I'm tired, too. Maybe we can get some coffee and doughnuts here, what do you say?" Mulder grinned at Usher, but he was telling the truth -- he was exhausted. In that respect, catching his quarry hadn't made much of a difference. Closing his eyes, Mulder leaned back in his chair, exhaled cool air, thought about how good a mattress would feel. Lime's voice: "Can we get on with this?" "Yeah." Mulder opened his eyes, saw the ceiling of the station wagon, and began to talk, his mouth seeming to move of its own accord. He explained Scully's theory. He discussed the incidence of Kartagener Syndrome among the victims, suggesting that the violent events had been neurological in origin, and noted that psychokinesis seemed a more rational explanation than a sudden invasion of looking-glass creatures. As he spoke, he felt the two in the back seat squirming uneasily - - Lime at the suggestion that the events might be paranormal, Usher at the idea that they might be a product of his own subconscious. 'That's a lot to swallow all at once," Lime said when Mulder was finished. "True," Mulder replied, sitting up. "On the other hand, Lime, you and I just chased a bronze rabbit for three blocks down a busy city street. Occam's Razor doesn't exactly apply to situations like that." "But you still haven't explained what's causing these things to happen," Usher said. "I know. I'm not totally sure of it myself. But there's one thing we can be certain about, something I didn't figure out until a few minutes ago. These episodes are being triggered by electromagnetic radiation." "What makes you say that?" asked Lime, surprised. "When we drove into the tunnel, two things happened, right? The rabbit turned back into a statue, and my cell phone died. I think there's a connection. Radio waves can't propagate down tunnels if their wavelength is too long. The walls absorb the waves, block them out. I think that whatever causes these visitations is blocked in the same way." Mulder turned around in his seat. "After you fled from your house, you ran into the subway, right?" he asked Usher. "I fell into it, yes." "But it meant that you survived the first onslaught. Then, at South Station, when things began to happen again, you ran into the subway a second time. That may have saved your life. A subway tunnel blocks electromagnetic waves in the same way a tunnel like this one does. As long as you stayed underground, you were protected from radiation -- but when you emerged, you started picking up the signals again." "Signals from what?" Usher asked. "I don't know. It could be anything. Whatever it is, it's all around us, throughout the entire Boston area. It just passes through most of us, and its effects -- if any -- are invisible. But something about Kartagener Syndrome sharpened your sensitivity to that signal, Ethan, and made its effects more pronounced. We're all antennas, but only you've been tuned to the right frequency." Usher looked grim. "Well, lucky me." Lime coughed. "This is pretty spooky stuff, Mulder." "Yes. But you know, it's quite possible for electromagnetic radiation to have effects on human neurobiology. In places where electrical fields are higher than normal, you'll find disrupted sleep patterns, heightened stress responses, changes in neurotransmitters like norepinephrine and acetylcholine, the chemicals that control excitement and depression. Sometimes you'll even see a jump in the suicide rate. And all these effects take place on the cellular level, the level of the cytoskeleton, where Kartagener Syndrome makes itself felt." "All right," said Lime. "I can buy that. But do you really think that electomagnetism is responsible for the things we've seen? For statues coming to life?" Mulder looked out the window, saw a team of FBI agents hauling away the rabbit statue, their hands protected by thick gloves. "That's a good question. The relationship between electromagnetism and psychokinesis, while unproven, suggests that certain wavelengths may increase an individual's ability to access his psychic abilities. After all, it's probable that ESP and psychokinesis are a result of the electromagnetic fields that surround all living organisms. If that's the case, then radio waves should have some kind of effect on these phenomena." "But even if these waves exist, we don't know where they're coming from." "No," Mulder said. "But until we do, we can still protect ourselves from their effects." "How?" Usher asked. "I don't want to stay in this tunnel for the rest of my life." "You won't need to. I've requested a TEMPEST truck from the FBI field office. Usually the Bureau uses it to transport sensitive electrical equipment, but we're going to use it to transport you. Basically, it's an ordinary van that has been turned into a Faraday cage, a box that blocks most forms of electromagnetic radiation. It's covered with wire mesh and electrically grounded. As a result, it will shield you from all but the longest radio waves." "And after it gets here? Where are you taking me?" Mulder yawned and glanced at Lime. "I don't know. Someplace underground?" Lime shrugged, then looked out the window, pointed. "Is that our TEMPEST truck?" Mulder followed her gaze. Near the entrance of the tunnel, a large, well-shielded van with government markings had pulled up. Its rear windows were silvered and covered in mesh. "Looks like our ride is here, Usher," Mulder said. "Let's go." * * * Scully hung up the telephone and turned to Blume. "Ethan's safe," she said, relaying information. "Mulder says they're taking him downtown, to a special cell in the basement of the FBI field office." "The basement?" Blume asked. "Why?" Scully explained her partner's theory about electromagnetism. "If he's right, Ethan will be safest underground, where radio waves can't reach him. We're putting together a Faraday cage as we speak. It should keep him shielded and out of harm." "I don't understand," Blume said. "If this electromagnetic field were spreading throughout the city, shouldn't there be some sign of it? Wouldn't it affect the rest of the population?" "You're right." Scully pondered that point. The two women stood near the gift shop of the John Hancock Observatory, which had been commandeered by the FBI and converted to the headquarters of their surveillance operation. Outside the windows, night had fallen, dark purple and hyacinth bleeding across the sky. To the north, a faint aurora shimmered above the horizon. "Wait a minute." Scully looked around for the autopsy results, spotted the tan folder lying on a chair nearby. She picked up the papers, leafed through them, found the clue she had been looking for. "Here. High levels of glucose and triglycerides were found in the bodies of each of the victims. And, and...." "And...?" Scully finally recalled where she'd seen these figures before. "At one of the hospitals I visited today, I saw a chart of patient blood sugar over the past week. A receptionist told me that there'd been a recent spike in glucose levels for all their admitted patients, and she couldn't understand why. But now I know." "What?" "Elevated levels of blood glucose and triglycerides are associated with exposure to certain wavelengths of radiation. Radio waves can change the body's metabolism, understand? If the figures hold up, it means that we've all been exposed to this thing. You, me, everyone in Boston. If I took a sample of your blood right now, I'd probably find the same elevated levels." "So these waves have been passing through all of us." "Right. And when someone has Kartagener Syndrome, they result in a dramatic form of psychokinesis. For some reason, individuals with that condition are more sensitive to it, more strongly affected." Scully snapped her fingers. "And so is Mulder." "Your partner?" "Yes." Scully set down the folder, went over to the window. Looked out at the unreal city spread beneath her. "I don't know if you've noticed this, but Mulder has been exhausted. He's been that way ever since we arrived in Boston. I think it might have something to do with what we've been discussing." She turned to Blume. "About a year ago, my partner suffered a series of neurological episodes. They left him hospitalized for a time, unable to function. He fully recovered, but it's possible that these episodes had a lasting effect, causing him to react more strongly to the kind of electric field that we're talking about." "But where does the field come from?" Blume insisted. "I don't know. Unless...." Scully looked up suddenly. "There's a possibility that we might be able to trace it." On the opposite wall of the observatory there was an enormous map of Boston and the surrounding area. Scully strode over to it, glancing at something she'd written on the back of her hand. "While he and Lime were chasing the statue, Mulder called and told me their compass bearing. We might be able to use that to locate the source of the signal." "How?" Scully pulled a marker from her pocket, uncapped it. "Radio enthusiasts use a similar principle to trace an unknown broadcast. If you take a loop antenna and rotate it, you'll find that the signal becomes strongest when the antenna is at right angles to its source. That way, you can use the antenna to trace the signal." Scully smiled. "When you do that, it's called a bunny hunt." "Perfect." On the wall map, Scully found their current location. Marked it with a circle. "If Usher's nervous system is acting as some kind of antenna, the same principle should hold true. Which means that the signal will be strongest in one particular direction." "The direction in which the rabbit was headed," said Blume, understanding. "Exactly. If I'm right about this, the rabbit's trail should intersect the source of the signal at some point." Scully rechecked the compass bearing, then drew a line on the map, using her marker to trace a black line northeast across the city. It stretched from Copley Square down through Boston, running through the Public Gardens down to the harbor. Nothing jumped out at her. Scully frowned, decided to continue the line in the opposite direction -- down the Fens, past Brookline, and finally.... Scully froze. Stared. "What?" asked Blume. "What is it?" "Boston Edison." Scully dropped the pen. It fell silently to the carpet. "The line stretches to a power plant. The signal is coming from the power grid." "You mean...." "It's obvious," said Scully, following the trail with her eyes. "In any metropolitan area, the power grid is the single largest radio transmitter. High-voltage lines are like enormous antennas operating in an extremely low- frequency band -- the same frequency as the brain and nervous system. We're constantly surrounded by an ocean of radio waves, but we never realize it." "But why should the power grid suddenly start causing these things?" "Geomagnetic storms," Scully said, on a roll. She turned to the window and pointed to the northern lights outside. "You've been seeing the aurora borealis for days now, right? The power grid can pick up a current from geomagnetic activity like the northern lights. The current flows through transformers, power lines, grounding points, leading to tiny changes in the wavelength of the electrical field -- a couple of angstroms, nothing more. But maybe the changes were enough to affect certain people. People with Kartagener Syndrome...." "Jesus," Blume said, her eyes widening. "We have to do something. We have to tell the power company about this." "Right." Scully grabbed her cell phone, was about to dial when a final thought hit home with staggering force. "Oh God, no," she said. "What?" "Radio waves from the power grid are ELF waves. Long waves. A Faraday cage is useless against them. That truck won't do any good." She dialed Mulder's number. "I need to call Mulder, to warn him...." In her ear, there was a beeping noise. An error message: "We're sorry, the party you have dialed cannot be reached at this time -- " "Shit!" Scully flung her phone across the room. It struck the window of the observatory, bounced off. She looked at Blume. "I can't contact Mulder," she said, miserable. "He's in the TEMPEST truck -- and as long as he's there, a phone call won't be able to reach him." "And Ethan?" asked Blume. "Ethan's still exposed to waves from the power grid. His powers could come back at any moment." Scully despaired. "Mulder's riding with a ticking time bomb, and he doesn't even know it." * * * The rear of the TEMPEST truck was badly furnished, with only a couple of plastic crates for seats. There were shelves lining the inside of the van, intended to hold electrical equipment and other items, but they were bare and sheathed in dustproof plastic. Mulder stood, holding onto one of these shelves for support, as the vehicle made its way through the city. A wall separated the rear of the van from the front, hiding the driver from sight. Usher sat on one of the crates, bouncing every time the van hit a dip in the road. The fact that his hands were bound made it difficult to balance. He looked across at Lime. "Would you mind loosening these cuffs?" Lime glanced up at Mulder, then shrugged. "It's against procedure, but I don't see the harm." She told Usher to hold out his arms, then fished a handcuff key out of her pocket, undid the bracelets. "Thank you." Usher sat back, rubbing his wrists. After a moment, a thoughtful expression crept onto his face. "You know," he said, "there's something I've been wondering. Agent Mulder...?" "Yes?" "You say that these things I've been experiencing, these hauntings, are all coming from my own mind. That I've been creating them myself." "You might say that." Usher fixed him with a stare. "In that case, Mulder, how do I know that you aren't just a figment of my imagination?" Mulder grinned. "I can assure you that I'm not." "Are you so sure about that? In 'Through the Looking- Glass,' Alice sees the Red King snoring in the woods, fast asleep. When she asks about him, she's told that he's dreaming, and that she, Alice herself, is just a part of his dream. In fact, the whole world is part of his dream. And if the Red King left off dreaming about her, where do you suppose she'd be?" Mulder paraphrased from the book: "She'd go out like a candle." "And so would the rest of the world." Usher rocked with the truck, gripping the holes of the crate with his fingers. "We can never be sure that we aren't being dreamed by someone else, can we? Or maybe we're dreaming one another, like a pair of mirrors set face to face, reflecting each other to infinity." "Well," Mulder said, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?" "Yes, if you like," said Usher. They drove on. Mulder was about to ask Usher what had actually taken place at his home yesterday evening when the van came to an abrupt stop. "That's strange," said Lime, looking up. "I wonder -- " Suddenly the van shook. It bounced once, twice. Standing at the front of the vehicle, Mulder almost fell to his knees. He grabbed onto one of the shelves to steady himself, felt the van vibrate around him like a mechanical bull. He looked at Usher. Usher looked back. "What's going on?" Mulder asked. Usher's eyes were wide. "I don't know." A metallic shrieking filled the air. The ceiling of the van crumpled. As Mulder watched, the roof of the van began to pull apart, a seam appearing at the far end of the vehicle, then widening in a howl of rippling aluminum. Chips of paint showered down. The inside bulb shattered in an explosion of sparks, plunging the interior of the van into the darkness. The ceiling peeled back like the top of a sardine can. Mulder, looking up, found himself face to face with the purple sky above. He saw the stars. The van opened like a seed pod. The metal of the roof warped, twisting, spreading wider and wider apart. Next to Mulder, the shelves collapsed with a bang. The floor of the van folded up beneath his feet as the crack in the roof widened, the van tearing itself apart. He looked at Usher, saw sweat beading the other man's brow. "Stop it!" Mulder shouted to make himself heard above the din. "Ethan, stop this!" Usher stared at him desperately. "I wish I could." The roof of the van peeled back entirely. Mulder could feel the night air on his face. Standing alongside him, Lime drew her gun. Aimed it at Usher. "This stops now," Lime said. "You're right," Usher replied. Around them, the shelves splintered outward. Mulder saw a piece of shelving strike Lime in the leg, driving her down. Then something hit the back of Mulder's neck, and he blacked out. * * * End of Inversus (8/9) Inversus (9/9) by LoneGunGuy * * * He was awakened by the sound of coughing. His own. Mulder lay on the sidewalk, looking up. The stars seemed razor-sharp, the sky a monster made of eyes. Somehow he'd been thrown clear of the van. He rose, felt the back of his head, discovered that an enormous lump had risen there. He shook himself awake, didn't quite manage it, then looked around. He was at the side of the road. Ahead of him stood some industrial buildings, a chain-link fence. The TEMPEST truck sat to his right, in ruins. It looked like it had gone through a trash compactor: the windows were broken, the roof peeled away in sections like some strange metallic flower. He staggered over to the driver's window, peered in. The driver was dead, his skull crushed. Mulder groaned. "Mulder." He turned. Margaret Lime was lying in the middle of the road, struggling to rise. He went to her side. "Are you all right?" She looked down at herself. "I think my left leg is broken. Give me a hand, will you?" Lime put an arm around Mulder's shoulders. He helped the detective to her feet, bringing her out of the road. She sat down on the curb, winced. "Looks like I won't be doing any mountain climbing for a while, huh?" She made a face, then pulled a radio from the pocket of her overcoat. "I'll call for backup. You get Usher." "Do you know where he went?" Mulder asked. Lime stared at him like he was crazy. "Take a look behind you, and you tell me." Mulder turned. Behind them towered a gigantic parking structure, four terraced levels of concrete and steel. Beyond it, he could see a huge building with a sloping skylight, a row of red doors leading into a central terminal. It was the Alewife T station. "Call it a hunch, but I think he's probably headed for the subway," Lime said. "Yeah," said Mulder. "All right." He stood, unholstered his pistol and stared at the station across the way. It was enormous. Five floors -- any one of which might conceal his target. He'd have to search them all. The thought made him even more exhausted than before. But at least he had a line he'd been saving up for such an occasion. "Looks like another mad T party," he muttered, and was off. Mulder ran beneath the darkened overhang of the parking garage, moving past concrete pillars and heading down a ramp to the T station itself. He reached the row of swinging doors, pulled one open, went inside. He found himself in the lobby of the Alewife station. Corrugated concrete stretched above him; brown tile rang beneath his feet as he ran past dingy shops and fast food restaurants to the center of the terminal. Fifty feet in, the concrete ceiling gave way to a vast sloping skylight that stretched far above his head, transparent glass panels held in place by a scaffolding of white pipes. Ahead of him, an escalator chugged stupidly downward. The station was all but empty. Somewhere downstairs, a street musician was playing the drums, slapping his palms against an empty five-gallon can. The sound echoed throughout the deserted terminal, a rhythmic thudding that complemented Mulder's own heartbeat. He swore to himself, desperation and fatigue washing over him. Usher could be anywhere. Then he looked down. Noticed something. A newspaper was skidding along the floor of the terminal. Without surprise, Mulder saw that it was a copy of the Boston Globe, complete with Usher's picture on the front page. He put his foot down on the paper, felt it tugging away beneath his shoe, struggling to get free -- and finally realized the crucial point: the air in the terminal was perfectly still. There was no wind to blow the paper along. As far as he could determine, it was moving of its own accord. Mulder lifted his foot, freeing the paper. He followed it. The paper bounced along the tile, skipped lightly on one edge. Finally it rose into the air, flapping like some strange bird of prey. Mulder tracked it with his eyes. It drifted lightly upward, carried on some invisible draft, then disappeared over the ledge of the fourth floor. "Let's go," he said. The escalator was going in the wrong direction, so Mulder took the stairs, running up each flight two steps at a time. Below him, the drummer continued to pound out his nervous rhythm. Mulder grabbed onto that sound, seized it, clutched it to keep himself from collapsing. At the next floor, Mulder found himself facing three escalators, all running down, with no staircase in sight. He looked up at the fourth floor and noticed that one of the big panes in the skylight had been broken. Newspapers, wrappers and other garbage were flying up to the broken pane and being sucked outside. Onto the rooftop. Something told him that they were going to Usher. He ran up the down escalator. At the fourth floor, Mulder jumped off, looked to his right. He stood level with the skylight, which sloped for acres in all directions, both upward and downward. The broken pane was a few feet away from him. There was a narrow terrace on the other side of the glass, covered with gravel. Usher stood there, staring down over the edge of the terrace. Around him, bits of paper and gravel and trash were swirling in a rapid circle, wheeling and spinning in a mad dance. As Mulder watched, more pieces of litter drifted up from ground level and were sucked outside, joining the vortex. The whirlwind kept its distance from the man in the middle; none of the debris touched him. Usher was merely the center of the hurricane. "Usher," said Mulder. "Usher!" Usher did not turn around. Either he was ignoring Mulder, or the rush of the whirlwind on the other side of the glass made it impossible for him to hear. Mulder approached the skylight. Just before he reached the broken pane, the floor ended, terminating with a narrow railing. He looked down. The next floor was thirty feet below. He looked back at the broken pane. If he could get through that opening, he could get out onto the terrace. Clearly, that was what Usher had done. But how the hell had he done it? Above him, a scaffold of white pipes held the skylight in place. Pigeons perched here and there on the gridwork. It was possible, Mulder supposed, to swing onto the scaffolding, hauling himself up and climbing through the broken pane. But to get to the scaffold meant jumping out into empty space and grabbing onto a slippery handhold. One mistake and he would fall, and probably break his neck. In the end, he didn't have much of a choice. Mulder reholstered his gun, looked for the best place to jump, saw a horizontal pipe stretching four feet away. He glanced from side to side, briefly regretting that no one was around to watch, then clambered over the railing and leapt out. For one heart-stopping instant, he hung in the air. Then he found himself hugging the pipe with both arms, his feet dangling into nothingness. He looked down, saw the drop beneath him plunge dizzyingly away. His fingertips tingled with vertigo. "God," Mulder managed. He pulled himself up, clutching the pipe to the left of him, until he managed to stand, his toes dangling over the edge of the scaffold. His heart clocked away, counting off tenths of a second. His head felt like it was bobbing on a string. Balancing on his narrow perch like an acrobat, he climbed over to the ledge just below the broken pane. On the pipe above him, a pigeon cooed and flapped its wings. Mulder stared at it, then swung himself out onto the ledge. He landed with a crunch of gravel. The night air was cold. Usher stood ten yards to his right, surrounded by a maelstrom of paper. Mulder drew his gun but did not point it. His head was swimming from the effort of his climb. "Hello, Ethan." "Hello." Usher did not look up. Mulder eased his way over to the edge of the terrace and looked down. To his left, the skylight continued to slope downward, a dramatic decline of sixty feet to a second gravel rooftop. Further away stood the upper level of the parking structure. It was rimmed with streetlamps, illuminating the entire scene. "Ethan, I'm too tired for this shit," Mulder said. "Let's go home." "I don't know if that's possible anymore." "It's always possible." Mulder extended a hand. "Just come with me, and I'll take you somewhere safe." Usher smiled bitterly. "No offense, Mulder, but that's what you said last time." He glanced over at the FBI agent, saw the gun. "You won't be needing that," he said. An invisible force tore the pistol from Mulder's grip. He gave a start, fell backward. The gun hovered briefly in mid- air, cocked itself and joined the rest of the whirlwind, spinning around Usher like one more component of the carousel. "You wouldn't want to shoot me anyway," said Usher. "Who knows? You might just be a part of my dream. If that were the case, if you killed me, you'd wink out like a candle. So would the rest of the world." Mulder looked through the wall of swirling papers at Usher's face. "I know I'm real," he said. "That's what I thought, too. But we never can tell, can we? For all we know, we might be characters in somebody else's novel. And as soon as the writer stops writing, or the reader stops reading, we'll die." Usher fixed his gaze on Mulder. "This is a looking-glass world. You need to question your most basic assumptions. You need to be ready, because your life can fall apart at the drop of a hat. Like mine did...." The pistol continued to circle Usher, moving faster and faster until it was almost a blur. In the whirlwind, the papers began to whistle. It reminded Mulder of the climactic scene of "Through the Looking-Glass." The final banquet. Candles rise up to the ceiling, and wine bottles fly around like birds. Alice cries out at the confusion and yanks at the tablecloth, sending plates, dishes, guests and candles crashing to the floor. Best to end things with a bang, thought Mulder. In any case, he was too tired to do anything else. The vortex spun ever faster. Behind the whirlwind, Usher's face was dull, empty, like the image in a clouded mirror. Newspapers, wrappers spun around: then the pistol, hanging for the briefest of instants above the edge of the terrace -- Mulder jumped for the gun. He caught it in the middle of his leap, the papers beating against his face like angry birds, the sound of the hurricane rushing through his ears. His fingers closed around the pistol grip. Then he felt himself falling, tumbling down the long slope of the skylight. He rolled, gun in hand, sliding down the glass, trying to slow himself but feeling only slipperiness. Finally he struck the roof below with a tremendous crash. He landed on his back in the gravel, the wind knocked out of him. A moment passed. Mulder caught his breath, then looked up, saw Usher standing in silhouette on the terrace above. He raised his gun, aiming to take Usher down. His finger tensed on the trigger. The man was in his sights. For a split second, Mulder thought about the Red King. If he shot Usher, would both of them wink out of existence? Was the entire world Usher's dream? Of course not. Mulder fired. Usher took the bullet, fell. And the world winked out like a candle. * * * Well, almost. What happened was this: All around Mulder, the lights went out. One by one, the lamps on the parking garage extinguished themselves. The faint shimmer coming through the skylight of the Alewife T station vanished. All was blackness. Darkness. Mulder lay on his back, breathing rapidly, wondering whether he'd just destroyed all of creation by bringing Usher's dream to an close. A familiar sound brought him back to reality. His cell phone rang. He fumbled through his pockets, found it. "Mulder." "Mulder, it's me. Are you all right?" "I'm not sure," he said, relieved to hear Scully's voice. "Did the world end?" "What?" "I'm lying here in darkness. I can't see a damned thing. I don't know what happened." "I can explain. Mulder, the electromagnetic waves that caused Usher's psychokinesis were coming from the power grid. I went to Boston Edison and convinced them to shut off the city's power. You're in the middle of a blackout, that's all." "How the hell did you convince them to turn the power off?" "I explained to them that emissions from the power grid, caused by geomagnetic activity in the atmosphere above, had resulted in an immediate threat to the health and well- being of the population of the Boston metropolitan area. And then I held a gun to someone's head." Mulder laughed, then winced as he stood up, his muscles aching. He was bruised all over from his fall. In his ear, Scully asked: "Did it work?" "I think so," Mulder said, looking around. "Everything here is quiet. The psychokinetic events seem to have ceased. And Usher -- " He broke off. "I don't know how Usher is." He looked up. Above him, there was no sound. No movement. No sign of anyone alive. "Usher?" Mulder called. Silence. "Usher?" * * * Cambridge, Massachusetts Three days later The elevator descended for the space of several seconds, then coasted to a gentle stop. A bell rang, and the doors slid open. Scully stepped out into a windowless hallway, the only light coming from fluorescent fixtures set at intervals along the ceiling. Reaching a security checkpoint, she flashed her ID at the guard, who nodded and buzzed her through the gate. Scully passed several doors, then arrived at her destination. She knocked. Waited. A muffled voice: "Come in." She opened the door and went inside. Ethan Usher sat up on a hospital bed, an IV tube in his arm, an electrocardiogram glowing in green sawtoothed lines to his left. A scattering of books lay on the coverlet: he had been reading. "Hello, Agent Scully," he said. Scully pulled up a chair, sat down. "Hello, Ethan. How are you doing today?" Usher made a noncommittal gesture. "I'm all right, I suppose. It gets dull here sometimes. I read, but I can't seem to write anymore. I don't know if I'll be able to write ever again." "Have you had many visitors?" "Leah was here a few hours ago. Mulder isn't planning to come, is he?" "I don't know," Scully said, surprised. "Mulder got out of the hospital yesterday. He's still a little tired, he says, but it's nothing a few days' rest can't fix. Would you like to see him?" Usher smiled. "Given the way we parted company, I thought he might like to apologize." Scully smiled back. She could see the bandages beneath Usher's hospital gown, the gauze held in place with strips of adhesive tape. Mulder's bullet had passed through Usher's left breast, grazing the lung but doing no permanent damage. He had been lucky. If his organs had been arranged in the usual manner, with the heart on the left side of his chest, the shot most likely would have killed him outright. His situs inversus had saved his life. "So how does it look?" Usher asked after a moment. "How does what look?" "Well, am I going to jail?" Scully weighed her response. "You have a number of felony counts against you. Resisting arrest, grand theft auto. You may get some jail time, possibly a suspended sentence. But they've dropped the murder charge." "Leah told me about that, yes." Usher looked at the four blank walls around him. "So how much longer do I have to stay here? Underground?" "Not for long," Scully said. "That's what I came to tell you. Boston Edison completed its series of tests today. As far as they can determine, geomagnetic activity fell to normal levels two days ago, and all anomalous fields from the power grid have ceased. It's safe for you to be outside again, for now." "But what if it happens again?" "I don't know." She looked away, unable to meet Usher's eyes. Glancing around the room, she noticed that the mirror above the sink had been draped with a piece of cloth, hiding it from view. Scully pointed to it, turned back to Usher. "Did you do that?" "Yes," he said. "Can you blame me?" "No," Scully admitted. "I can't." * * * That evening, Scully covered all the mirrors in her house. She spent the night wandering outside, gazing up at the vast mirror of the sky, wondering if she could see herself in the stars. * * * END End of Inversus (9/9) Send all feedback to lonegunguy@aol.com http://members.aol.com/lonegunguy/x-files.html