From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (1/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:01:30 -0500


(I wrote this fanfic in three days flat. Enjoy, and please e-mail
responses--the entire Writer's Workshop deal--to lonegunguy@aol.com.)

Kabuki 1/10

     To begin with the obvious:

     The walls of the office are covered with blood. It was never an
especially luxurious working space to begin with, Mulder supposes, lying
as it does within the humid maw of Dallas in the midst of a Texas heat
wave, a drab warehouse with vacillating fluorescent light and asbestos
flaking from the ceiling...a plastic-draped mainframe lies in one corner,
across from a squat metal desk bedecked with printouts and tearsheets,
coffee-stained and pitted with rust. Depressing. There are two windows,
both found open at the time of the body's discovery-not surprising,
considering that the mercury hit 100 last Tuesday and has been inching
upward with the tenacity of the proverbial rubber-tree ant.

     There: the metaphor that Mulder was looking for. The room looks as if
a Fahrenheit-challenged thermometer bulb gave up the ghost and exploded.
Tiny droplets dot the walls, a minute freckling of red. It covers
everything. Everywhere he looks is pimpled with lesions of plasma, smeared
on the walls, the desk, the papers, the windowsills, the plastic atop the
computer-but the points of blood are never larger than pinpricks. Strange.


     -Indicative of a high-velocity impact, he thinks, -but why isn't it
arranged in any order, why is it so randomly distributed? 

     No discernible pattern, as if they had been deposited less by
violence than by some regiment of fairies, Tinkerbells with bloody wands,
scattering scarlet dew in random bursts of homicidal dotting.

     Or...     

     "So what do you think?" Scully asks.

     "Hm?" Mulder says distractedly, craning his neck back to examine the
ceiling. An exposed wooden beam stretches above the office, only a few
feet overhead. Squinting, he can see braided marks in the dust that
indicate where the rope was tied, where Ken Kanzaki hung himself. -Or
someone did him the favor, he thinks.

     "Let's test your expertise," his partner says. She points to the
nearest available bit of blood, one out of thousands. "What would you say
caused this blood spatter?"

     "This the Final Jeopardy question? A struggle, I'd assume." He
pauses. "One hell of a struggle."

     She offers him a rare smile. "Nope. You flunk."

     "I await your explanation."

     Scully tells him to examine the droplets more closely. "These aren't
spatters at all," she says. "They're insect droppings. Blackflies had been
feeding on Kanzaki for three days before he was found. The room was
completely filled with them by the time police arrived. The flies landed
around the room, legs bloody and stomachs full, and excreted, leaving
these red dots behind. Sorry to deprive you of your sensational
interpretation."

     So the fairy hypothesis hadn't been so far away after all. "I defer
to your wisdom, O great one. So this was a suicide?"

     "I can't conclusively say so, but there's no overt reason to suspect
otherwise. The ME will probably back me up, although it's impossible to be
certain." She bites her lower lip thoughtfully. "That said, I haven't the
slightest idea why we're here."

     "Join the club." He glances over his shoulder. They are not alone in
the late Mr. Kanzaki's office. Two uniforms stand, arms akimbo, alongside
the yellow crime scene tape, looking down the stairwell that leads to this
second floor office (the ground floor being unkempt and grimy, a reception
area long abandoned to disuse), their batons dangling, one of them chewing
gum. Alongside them slouches Homicide Detective Ron Eastlake, standing in
his shirtsleeves. A muted cigarette ember protrudes from his ebony face-as
thin, black and somber as an Ashanti fertility doll-but he does not appear
to be inhaling the smoke, content to let the shaft dangle from his lips as
he watches the two FBI agents confer.

     "All we know are the facts," Mulder says more quietly. "This is some
kind of retrieval operation. We get sent to Dallas to excavate and search
the office of a reclusive acoustics technician who committed suicide, with
only the vaguest of instructions, delivered in the patented Skinner style:
bring back papers, journals, diagrams, and any quote-unquote 'unusual'
pieces of equipment."

     "Sounds like the beginning of a Fox miniseries to me," Scully says
with less-than-concealed sarcasm. "C'mon, Mulder, you know that these
retrevial assignments are the lifeblood of the American government: if
technology is available, grab it. When a noted scientist dies with no
known heirs..."

     "Yeah, I know, the feds come confiscate his work. Today was our
turn." Mulder stares out the window, looking out on the baking city
beneath, the sidewalk cooking beneath a curtain of blurrily lensed oxygen.
The concrete undulates in the heat. A fly buzzes in, and he sees-or thinks
he sees, anyway-a droplet of blood adhering to one translucent mandible.
He leans head and shoulders out the window, inhaling the thick fresh air,
the copper-and-trichinosis smell of rotting flesh grained deeply into his
nostrils. The room behind him reeks of it.

     "But why is this Kanzaki so important?" he asks, still halfway
outside. "I mean, look at this place. It's hardly your sterile academic
environment."

     "Many of the greatest scientific advances of our time have taken
place in back-alley warehouses."

     "What did the report say he was working on, anyway? Some kind of
medical imagery equipment? Ultrasound? Or some type of sonic therapy? I'm
still not entirely clear on that." He pulls his head in and turns in
Scully's direction, only to find that she has gone across the room to the
metal desk, beginning to sift through the cluttered morass of papers bit
by bit. Eastlake, the detective, sidles over, watching closely, tapping a
bit of cigarette ash into a coffee cup. 

     There are at least several hundred distinct sheets migrating slowly
across the Arctic tundra of Kanzaki's desk: torn from yellow pads or
sketchbooks, graph paper, a dozen half-empty composition binders, all
covered front and back with closely written notes and ink scratchings.
Scully frowns. Most of the papers are the printed equivalent of white
noise, garbage, although it must all be salvaged. She brings up an empty
black briefcase, opens it, gathers up the papers in one hand and sweeps
them into the valise with the other. The desk cleared, a scarred blotter
is exposed, a few penciled notations scratched onto the plastic surface.
After a moment's hesitation, Scully folds the blotter in two and takes it
as well. 

     Mulder strolls up, hefts a loose-leaf stack and leafs through it.
Random notes, some dated, some not, with much mention of bandwidth and
megahertz and frequencies and oscillation. No smoking gun. No visible
reason for federal interest-or for committing suicide, for that matter.
The drawers are opened. More printouts. Boxes of staples. A six-pack of
beer in the lowermost drawer, never to be drunk by the man who bought it,
the man who now lies in an Dallas morgue with a Y-shaped incision tattooed
to his belly. -Or some of the man, anyway, Mulder thinks. -The flies got
most of him.

     Beneath the beer is a leather-bound volume, two inches thick. A
ledger. Mulder opens it and finds many pages of loose, calligraphic
handwriting. "His journal," he says. There are several well-drawn
anatomical diagrams interwoven with the script, most of them on the
cellular level, rendered in blue pencil. Nuclei, mitochondria, proteins,
enzymes-unusual stuff for a man whose profession was acoustics. Mulder
begins to feel a glimmer of curiosity. "This is interesting," he says.
"I'm starting to see why someone wants us to bring this back."

     "He could've copied those drawings out of any high school textbook,"
Scully says, looking over.

     "But I'll bet he didn't." Mulder turns around, the ledger beneath his
arm-neatly sidestepping Eastlake, who stands silently a foot away-and
returns to the window. Sweat is beading on his brow from the heat. "Hell.
This place probably doesn't have air conditioning."

     "It probably does," Scully says. "You don't run a mainframe in 90
degree weather."

     "You're off by ten degrees. And I'm still wondering why Kanzaki
worked all day in this godforsaken warehouse instead of a nice clean
collegiate environment."

     "I'm sure he didn't know you'd be around to complain."

     "I know why he worked here." Eastlake's voice. He speaks for the
first time since their arrival, stepping to where Mulder stands, past the
chalked-off area in the center of the room where the chair Kanzaki was
found above once stood. "It was because of his nephew, Leon."

     "Nephew?" Mulder asks. He vaguely remembers the report: "Is he the
one that disappeared?"

     "Yes, he's missing." Eastlake looks out onto the street, as if Leon
Kanzaki might be passing by at any time. "He shouldn't be gone for long,
though."

     "Why?" Scully asks, although she already suspects the reason; she,
too, has read the report.

     The detective looks at them with unblinking eyes. "Leon Kanzaki
suffered from KMS, Kabuki Make-Up Syndrome. Retardation was mild. His
physical deformities were more severe."

End of Kabuki 1/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki 2/10
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:02:08 -0500


Kabuki 2/10

     "It's a pretty rare disease, isn't it?" says Mulder.

     "Less than seventy known cases of Niikawakuroki Syndrome exist,"
Scully answers. 

     Eastlake nods. "The name refers to the fact that sufferers from the
syndrome tend to facially resemble the makeup of traditional Japanese
theater. Distinctive."

     "I'll bet," Mulder says. "Makes it difficult to blend in."

     "Leon had it okay, from what I've been told. Most who have KMS are
dwarves with skeletal abnormalities. Other than his deformed facial
features and low IQ, Leon was all right, although I hear he also had
cancer."

     "But I don't understand," Scully says. "Is Leon Kanzaki considered a
fugitive?"

     Rolling his eyes, Eastlake rasps, "At the moment, I don't know what
the hell to consider him. Christ, I don't even know what the hell is going
on. All I know is that yesterday I answered a call to find the partially
decomposing corpse of a man later identified as one Ken Kanzaki dangling
by a nylon rope from the beam of his 'office.' I use the term loosely,
given the quality of this neighborhood; he evidently hung by an open
window for three days before anyone across the street happened to glance
over. Then I find that the mentally retarded nephew with whom he lived and
worked is also missing, presumed alive, having apparently left his uncle
swinging like a tether ball from the ceiling." He laughs harshly. "And
finally, to top it all off, that evening I get a call from the FBI, saying
that two federal agents are on their way to clean out my crime scene. Tell
me, what am I supposed to think?"

     "Don't ask us-we just work here." 

     Mulder turns from the window, still grasping the ledger, and begins
to appraise the equipment in the other corner. He grabs a handful of data
cartridges and a case of floppy disks from where they sit on the
mainframe, an assortment of miscellaneous electronic items, pipettes, an
inexpensive microscope, microphones, waveform generators; he seals them
all within a cardboard box. Finally, atop a pile of yellow paint cans, he
uncovers a vinyl case which, when opened, reveals a gray surface uniformly
and thickly studded with small flat pins. "Pretty," he says. He zips the
case back shut and entombs it in another carton. 

     "I have no idea what these gizmos are," he says, taping the box shut,
"but this seems to be the last of them."

     "I would assume that we're done here, then. Thank you, Detective
Eastlake," Scully says, shaking his hand, "for being of such service."

     "A pleasure," he says tiredly, fanning himself. "Drop in anytime."

     They head for the door, Scully with the briefcase, Mulder with the
cartons. One of the uniforms tips his hat as they leave, saying, "I'm sure
they'll find Leon soon. I walked a beat in this neighborhood, knew him
well-a remarkably nice young man." 

     They nod pleasantly and exit the building. The stench of blood will
linger between them for hours.

***

     Sunset. 

     Mulder sits in his hotel room, leafing through Kanzaki's journal.
Dallas heat lies heavily on his shoulders, his arms, every square inch of
exposed skin, ten pounds of saturated humidity pressing above each eyelid;
sweat lingers with nowhere to evaporate. His plane to Washington leaves
tomorrow. Small consolation. The air is melting like molasses.

     The journal, though...

     The first dozen pages contain nothing of value from a governmental
point of view. Mulder takes a scattering of notes, dictates a few lines
into a tape recorder. The entries relate how Ken Kanzaki willingly gave up
most prospects for a settled career in R & D after he unofficially adopted
his mentally challenged nephew Leon, who suffered from an extremely rare
syndrome which distorted his features into near-caricature: elongated,
upturned eyes; broad, depressed nose; pointed, malformed ears the size of
soup ladles; eyebrows high, arched like batwings. But his intelligence was
reasonably high-somewhere above 75-and his disposition never wavered, even
after he was diagnosed with malignancies in his lungs and liver two years
ago. "One of the kindest most exquisite human beings it has ever been my
pleasure to know," Kanzaki wrote. "If only we who abhor these handicapped
individuals could learn to understand that Nature will often compensate
for errors in the soma through grace in the spirit."

     A few pages in the journal are devoted exclusively to Leon, his crude
drawings and shambling upper case letters written in crayon: LEO KANZAKI,
AGE 16...I LIKE MY UNCLE KEN...HE LETS ME HELP HIM AND CLEN HIS EKWIPMENT
AND PUT THINGS AWAY ON THE SHELFS...LEON KANZAKI, AGE 20...I LIKE WALKING
ALON THE RIVER...UNCLE KEN HELPS ME RITE...LEON KANZAKI, AGE 25...The
straggling caps remain the same over the course of a decade. A few
photographs are pasted in along with the writing, photos of a grinning
Asian man, his arm slung around the shoulders of his nephew: evident are
Leon's cleft palate, teeth not meeting properly, eyebrows like inverted
"V's," eyes flat and wide and misshapen but simply happy, harmless...

     One thing, at least, becomes evident from "Uncle Ken's" portion of
the journal: Kanzaki was a man with a ridiculously enforced streak of
optimism. His insistence that he work with Leon as his assistant
(apparently out of altruism to the memory of his brother, who had died of
sarcoma in 1986) led to an existence completely independent of any of the
major research organizations, as Kanzaki toiled for years in that
convoluted shoe box of an office, living there for weeks at a time-police
uncovered a cot and a cabinet concealing several months' worth of dried
apricots and Spam. But what had he been working on? Sparse equipment, even
less organization, no published findings, only one patent-a microscopic
tuning fork with no practical applications-and nothing that would indicate
why the United States Government had ever become interested in him.

     Click: Mulder speaks into the recorder. "After the primarily
autobiographical first pages of Ken Kanzaki's journal, we begin to uncover
some indication as to what he was actually experimenting with....The topic
of his research varies, apparently with dilettantism. There is much talk
early on regarding the use of sound waves to look within the body,
ultrasound and related technologies....Later on, Kanzaki seems to have
become interested in actually using sound to destroy gall stones and other
irritations, breaking them apart with waves of highly intense
vibration..." He pauses and picks up the vinyl-cased object from the
office. Opening it, he examines its pebbled surface carefully and compares
it to a diagram in the journal.

     "Here's something, Scully," he says to the tape recorder,
unconsciously using his partner's name, although she lies only a knock
away in the adjoining room. "I think I've identified that gray piece of
equipment we uncovered. It's a..." He consults the journal, frowning over
technical descriptions. "Well, it appears to be a kind of sonic mirror, an
auditory time machine...This device will take any sound and digitally
reverse it, playing its mirror image back through an output channel. Small
pins in the surface vibrate and are pushed back by sound waves. They feed
the vibrations electronically to a small computer, which automatically
reverses the input and plays it out the other side. If I say 'ominous' to
this machine, it says 'cinema'-perfect auditory reversal." He clicks the
recorder off. "Boy," he says to the empty room. "I'd love to play
'Revolution 9' to this thing."

     The phone rings: "Mulder."

     "Agent Mulder, this is Detective Eastlake."

     "What's up?"

     "I think you should come down here. There's been a murder." Eastlake
pauses; the line buzzes with static. "Leon Kanzaki has been identified as
the killer."

     Checking his watch, Mulder asks, "Are you positive?"

     "Eyewitnesses left little doubt. There aren't too many people who fit
Leon's description."

     "We'll be there. Where are you?" Eastlake names an address. "Isn't
that near the docks?"

     "On the banks of Trinity herself. You'd better get here quick; we
can't keep this crime scene intact for much longer."

     "Why not?"

     "Crowds tend to gather when half the riverfront is strung with
intestines. Get moving." The detective hangs up.

End of Kabuki 2/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (3/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:02:27 -0500


Kabuki 3/10

     Mulder rises, knocks on Scully's door, quickly explaining the
situation. "I have the feeling you'd better reinterpret Kanzaki's death,"
he says, pulling on his holster and jacket. "It's beginning to sound like
Leon killed him."

     "But why?" she asks. She slips out of pumps, into running shoes,
grabbing her keys from the nightstand, and she's out the door ahead of her
partner, walking quickly downstairs through the lobby and onto the street,
still talking: "The report said that Leon wasn't considered a suspect, and
all accounts maintain that he was docile and nonviolent..."

     "Yes, well, all accounts also maintain that he just killed somebody
in some particularly gruesome unspecified manner." Mulder still carries
the ledger that served as Kanzaki's diary, and he flips through it as they
walk and enter their car. "Eastlake sounded pretty convinced by the
witnesses." They buckle up and begin the drive to the docks, Scully behind
the wheel, Mulder examining the journal with the aid of a penlight, the
air conditioner on full blast. 

     Scully glances over. "Mulder, you really shouldn't be reading that,"
she says.

     "What do you mean?" he says, not looking up from the diary. "Skinner
said that, quote, 'under no circumstances are you to peruse any of
Kanzaki's printouts or computer disks.' He didn't say anything about
looking at a journal."

     "I suppose he didn't." Scully drives in silence for a few moments,
looking out onto the darkening Dallas streets, gone a bloody scarlet in
the setting sun. The asphalt looks like a side of uncooked beef. Time
passes in silence. 

     "I'm surprised," she eventually says, moving onto a crowded Dallas
street. "We've been ten blocks from the grassy knoll for the past eight
hours and you haven't so much as mentioned it."

     "Thus violating my paranoiac's code of conduct by not invoking the
specter of the eternal conspiracy theory?"

     "Something like that, yes."

     "Hey, I gave up on JFK speculation three years ago, cold turkey.
Besides, Kanzaki's journal is much more interesting. There are some
beautiful anatomical drawings here." He indicates the open spread of
pages, points to an diagram depicting an assortment of thin tubes bundled
together in a sheath, eight in all. "Okay, Scully, here's your Jeopardy
question: Do you know what this is?"

     Eyes on the road, Scully says, "Describe it."

     "Looks like a bunch of soda straws tied together in a bundle."

     "In an anatomical context? Either nerve fibers or microtubules."

     "Good job-your second guess was right."

     "Microtubules?" She sounds puzzled. "Why would Kanzaki be interested
in cellular biology?"

     "That isn't too hard to figure out; most of his work concentrated on
medical applications." He fills her in on the details, the ultrasound, the
gall stone therapy, the sonic mirror. "But he was fascinated with
microtubules, if this journal is any indication-pages and pages of stuff
on them." Mulder wipes a bead of sweat from the tip of his nose. "I'm a
little rusty on my organelles," he says. "What's the function of these
tubules?"

     Turning onto another road, Scully answers, "Well, they're long, thin
protein structures-a little like soda straws, yes-which partially comprise
the cytoskeleton of all eukaryotic cells. They keep certain organelles in
place, maintain the cellular shape, and facilitate mitosis."

     "So they essentially act as a skeleton for the cell."

     "Yes, as a skeleton and transport system."

     "Interesting. But-listen to this-Kanzaki says that microtubules are
also great conductors of sound waves. 'Physical vibrations propagate along
a microtubule with almost no distortion, moving unchanged through the
cytosol. Sound travels beautifully. It possesses a remarkable coherence;
one microtubule can start neighboring microtubules vibrating in the same
fashion until the entire cell is humming like a forest of tuning forks,
synchronous.' I suppose that this is the link between Kanzaki's other work
and his interest in cellular structure: sound. He was studying how sound
can be transmitted on the cellular level."

     "Great, but that doesn't explain why the government is so interested
in his research. Or why he's dead, for that matter. Or why his nephew is
being accused of murder."

     "Turn right at the next stoplight. We should be at the riverfront
soon." Mulder turns a page, and his eyes widen momentarily. "Damn," he
says.

     "What is it?"

     "Check it out." She looks down. The page Mulder is staring at-and the
next, and the next, and the next-is written in code. Three letter
groupings covering the entire surface of the paper: BHR MPM QRB HNI JWN...
He flips quickly through the rest of the book. "The letters continue for
about ten pages. Then there's another coded area near the end of the
journal." He scans the text. "Looks like a substitution cipher to me-I'll
bet that M equals E, given the overall frequency-but it'll take a while to
solve."

     "Apparently Mr. Kanzaki had something he wished to conceal," she
says, couching her words carefully.

     "Apparently so." 

     Scully stops the car. The dark outlines of moorings stand against the
purple sky, the sound of passing water filling the air; the river Trinity
licks against the rough-hewn roots of the docks. Mulder snaps the book
shut and slides it beneath the front seat, exiting the relative coolness
of the car and stepping into the furnace of the splayed Dallas riverside.
"We're only a few blocks from Kanzaki's office," Mulder says.

     They walk in silence, following the lights. Past the tape, past the
black-and-whites, through the squirming symbiotic crowd of observers:
Eastlake stands alone by the water, gazing out across the river to the
other side of Dallas, lights twinkling warmly in the dancing dark. Without
turning around, he says, "Careful not to slip in the blood."
     Scully looks down and immediately wishes she hadn't.

     The body itself is one thing. The body itself can be ignored with
ease, a dark shape in pinion on the pier, hands apparently nailed there in
horizontal crucifixion. An ink blot, really, nothing more: nothing to be
disturbed by.

     More disturbing is what trails from the body's lower quadrant. The
fact that the victim's abdomen had been cut open, his intestines exposed
and wound upon a winch, slowly drawn out of the abdominal cavity-evidently
while the victim was alive, it might be added, given the amount of blood
on the docks-and left like spent spider-thread along the pier: well, that
kind of thing tends to spoil Scully's appetite.

     "What happened?" Mulder says, vainly attempting to keep a burst of
nonprofessional nausea beneath his gorge from rising. His face is flushed
from the heat, although he feels pale, disgusted. Looking at the loops of
greasy tubing that line the boardwalk, he thinks: -Macrotubules.

     "We haven't the slightest idea," Eastlake says, his cigarette ember
glowing like a eyedropperful of Hell. "This guy on the ground is a
derelict, known only as Sunny Bob; he's been living around the docks for
years. Witnesses say a man fitting Leon Kanzaki's description seized Bob,
nailed him to the wood with a dime-store hammer and some bigassed nails,
sliced him open, took a winch that was lying on the docks, strung him up,
and unraveled him like a spent yo-yo. All within three minutes."

     Mulder's eyes sweep the scene, the starbursts of blood, the body like
a crumpled marionette, strings trailing, leaking down into the river, drop
by coagulating drop. "And no one stopped this from occurring?"

     "Basically, no one felt like interrupting a man who looks like a
minor character in a Bosch painting from performing his appointed rounds.
Christ." Eastlake rubs his eyes with one trembling hand. "It really looks
like Leon killed his uncle, bided his time for three days and killed
again. This was a random murder, no doubt about it. He'll do this again.
And again. And again. I'll bet anything on that." He makes a signal, and a
small group of lab technicians begin to go over the scene, taking
photographs and filling test tubes with blood.
     Scully speaks quaveringly. "You believe that Leon Kanzaki has gone
insane?"

     "Well, ma'am," Eastlake says in exaggerated tones of politeness, "in
my decidedly nonprofessional opinion, when a man kills a close family
member by stringing him up from a beam, and then caps his weekend by
carving up a random drunk like he was crocheting a sampler..."

     "...he's probably insane," Mulder says, finishing the sentence. He
has bent to the ground, visually probing the moist surface of the pier,
blending effortlessly into the company of techies-looking for something,
directing the beam of his flashlight along the dock. "Here we go," he
says, shining the light onto a portion of the bloodstain. Scully looks
within the luminescent circle. A handprint is firmly pressed into the
blood, its features showing up clearly. Along the palm run a series of
strange indentations, lines, ridge patterns. 

     "Those ridges are a common feature of KMS," Scully says. "There's no
doubt about it. Leon killed this man." She glances over at Mulder. "I have
the feeling that we may not be going back to Washington tomorrow."

     He does not respond. The two of them withdraw, watching the
proceedings silently, from a distance. The ME arrives a few minutes later
and begins to bitch about fitting Sunny Bob's remains into a body bag.

End of Kabuki 3/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki 4/10
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:02:38 -0500


Kabuki 4/10

     Back in the car, returning to the hotel, Mulder says: "That murder
reminds me of something."

     He's in the driver's seat. Scully has begun to pore over the coded
portions of the journal, her qualms about examining Kanzaki's papers
momentarily gone, working on a chart of letter frequencies. M is
definitely E; R may be T, although beyond that point any conjectures are
simply that: conjectures. A few minutes ago, she said to Mulder, "I'm
beginning to suspect that this is an keyword cipher, in which the alphabet
is rewritten according to some special word or phrase with nonrepeating
letters. If we can find that word, we can break the code much more
easily-assuming that whatever is written here is somehow important to
explaining what happened to Leon Kanzaki."

     Now, she says, "Reminds you of something? What?"

     "Something strange....It probably doesn't mean anything."

     "Whenever you say that, Mulder, it always turns out to be something
important."

     He adjusts the rearview mirror. "Have you ever heard of Landulf II of
Capua? He was undoubtedly the most evil figure of ninth century Europe."

      "Ninth century? Perhaps I misjudged the importance of this
connection..."

     "No, listen. Landulf II was third man in the kingdom under the reign
of Emperor Louis II, but he spent much of his time in Egypt studying Arab
astrology. Death magic, actually. Then, back in his castle in Sicily, he
carried out human sacrifices and sexual perversions; some believe that he
was possessed by demons. Anyway, among the tortures he practiced was that
of cutting open the stomachs of sacrificial victims and slowly drawing out
the entrails."

     "Yummy."

     "Later on, Adolf Hitler's occult group, the Thule Gesellschaft, is
rumored to have performed similar rites with homeless people plucked off
the streets of Berlin-although their atrocities were supposedly worse.
And, of course, many maintain that Hitler himself was possessed."

     "So you're saying that Leon Kanzaki is being invaded by the same
demons that possessed Hitler and Landulf a thousand years ago?"

     Mulder laughs, turning into the hotel parking lot. "No, the
resemblance just struck me."

     "You have an interesting mind."

     "That's what I've been told." They park the car and go up to their
separate rooms, Mulder again taking possession of the late Kanzaki's
diary. After stripping to shirtsleeves and turning on all available fans,
he reaches for his cell phone and dials a number in the 202 area code.

     The phone rings twice, and there is a click as the connection opens.
"Skinner speaking."

     "This is Agent Mulder."

     "Mulder." He can hear Skinner shift in his seat, focus his attention
on the call. "Have you retrieved Mr. Kanzaki's papers?"

     "Yeah-listen, though, we've had a bit of a complication here in
Dallas..."

     "What's the problem?"

     Mulder fills him in. "Should we stay here to assist the
investigation?"

     There is silence on the other end of the line for a few moments.
Then: "No. You're to return to Washington tomorrow as planned, bringing
the papers with you. Other agents will handle Leon Kanzaki."

     "But I feel that there may be some information in Kanzaki's papers
pertinent to his death, and to the murder of this derelict..."

     "You weren't to read anything."

     "I haven't," Mulder lies. "But I feel that it is important that I
know why the government wants this man's research."

     Skinner sighs, then speaks in a lower tone of voice. "Listen, Agent
Mulder, I know that no matter what I say you'll probably read the papers.
Hell, you probably already have. Fine. That's part of the reason I sent
you to Dallas in the first place, because I can trust you to be nosy." He
lowers his voice another increment. "I'm as curious about those papers-and
about Leon Kanzaki-as you are...and I can't safely read them myself."

     "Somehow I doubt that. I think you already know what they are."

     "I wish I did; I doubt that anyone in the J. Edgar Hoover building
knows. I got the request for the papers from outside. The Pentagon wants
them."

     "The Pentagon?" Surreptitiously, Mulder switches on his tape recorder
and holds it close to the earpiece. "Who wants those papers?"

     He hears Skinner chuckle. "If you think I'm going to name any names
over the phone, you're a bigger idiot than I am."

     "No small feat, sir," he says, disappointed.

     "Thanks, Agent Mulder. Be back here by tomorrow." 

     The connection broken, Mulder sits on his bed, looking intensely at
the journal's illustrations of cellular structure. -Why would the Pentagon
be interested in this? he wonders. -Are they planning to bomb Cuba with
sound waves, to take out Castro like an oversized gall stone?

     Again, he flips through the ledger, past the coded excerpts, the
diary entries, the diagrams. Then, suddenly, a word leaps out at him in
blue script: 

     ONCOGENE.

     He stops short, goes back, stares at the diagrams, flips to the back
of the book, reads ten pages of closely lined notes-and sits up straight.

     Knocking on the intervening door: "Scully!"

     She draws back the deadbolt, opens the door. "What is it?"

     "Listen, I think I know why they want Kanzaki's work," Mulder says,
pulling Scully into his room by the shoulder and closing the door behind
her. He tells her about his call to Skinner, about the Pentagon's
involvement-"I haven't quite cleared up why they specifically would be
interested, but I know what Kanzaki's project was. I know what he was
trying to do."

     "Calm down, Mulder," Scully says, somewhat surprised to see her
partner so enthused. "What's the secret?"

     "I'm not entirely sure-that coded stuff is still a mystery-but I can
safely say that Ken Kanzaki was searching for a treatment for cancer."

     Scully blinks her eyes and says, "That's an impressive aim, but there
are hundreds of amateur oncologists in America attempting to do the same
thing..."

     "But Kanzaki may have actually succeeded! If you can destroy a gall
stone with sound waves, why can't you do the same to a tumor?"

     "Mulder, any burst of sound powerful enough to kill a widespread
malignancy would certainly damage surrounding tissue."

     "When done at gross levels, yes. But consider: how does an opera
singer break a goblet with her voice? They tap the goblet with a rubber
hammer and listen to the note it produces when struck-the natural
oscillation frequency. Then they have the opera singer sing that exact
note loud enough so that the goblet begins to vibrate, more and more
powerfully, until it finally shakes itself to pieces and shatters.
Couldn't the same thing be done with cells and microtubules? Make the
microtubules vibrate at the exact pitch required to destroy the cancerous
cell-the synchronous vibrations might even spread across the plasma
membrane into surrounding cells, effectively destroying an entire tumor!"

     "But that poses the same problem as before: even if this worked, the
sound would still damage normal cells surrounding the point of
malignancy."

     "Scully, you know as well as I do that the nuclei of cancerous cells
are deformed, misshapen, stuffed with ten times the DNA of a normal
nucleus. The nuclear membrane expands, drawn tight like a drumskin, so
that its natural oscillation is different than that of a normal nucleus,
just like stretching a violin string makes it resound at a higher pitch.
The microtubules could be made to vibrate at a frequency that would
destroy the 'bad' nuclei, so to speak, while leaving the normal cells
undamaged. You know that sonic mirror I found? Well, not only does it
reverse sounds, it concentrates them, purifies them, makes them stronger
and more exact-perfect for beginning the microtubule vibration."

     Mulder's partner looks at him with skepticism. "You got all this from
the journal?"

     "Yes. As soon as you understand the underlying motivation of
Kanzaki's work, everything else becomes clear."

     Scully shakes her head. "I don't know, Mulder...it just doesn't seem
possible. And it doesn't explain why Leon Kanzaki is out killing people at
random."

End of Kabuki 4/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (5/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:03:00 -0500


Kabuki 5/10

     "No..." Mulder withdraws momentarily into thought. "In any case,
Skinner said that we're still leaving tomorrow, regardless of the murder.
I gathered that he's sending a separate group of agents to assist with
Leon's capture."

     Brow furrowed, Scully asks, "Why would he do that?"

     "I have a hunch," Mulder says, "that Leon Kanzaki may have been the
first subject of his uncle's experiments-he did have cancer, after all.
And whoever wants these papers is probably also concerned with the effects
of the treatment on its only known patient."

     He smiles grimly.

     "They're gonna want to bring Leon back alive."

***

     In the depths of the night, Dallas broils in its own juices.

     Scully lies in darkness, trying to sleep beneath a single sheet,
perspiring lightly. She stares up to the ceiling, her eyes adjusting to
the dimness, illuminated only by streetlights penetrating through the
blinds of her window; the night's silence is punctuated by bursts of
traffic from the street below, a mechanical lowing of predatory machines.
She turns over her partner's argument in her head, again and again,
examining it for flaws. -It doesn't explain Leon's sudden supposed
insanity, she thinks. -I doubt that the procedure would even work. But,
she admits to herself, -I don't doubt that Kanzaki was working on
something very similar to what Mulder claims...

     Something bothers her. She feels that she is forgetting something
vaguely important, something concerning microtubules...one of their
properties that she had neglected to mention to Mulder...a grain of
uneasiness that digs deep in the corners of her uncertain mind. -What have
I overlooked? Microtubules. Protein structures. Components of the
cytoskeleton. Transmit sound vibrations with the greatest of ease. The
possible medium for a cure for cancer. Kanzaki's obsession. But why does
Leon kill?

     She turns over, an eye on the red digital display alongside her bed.
Almost two o' clock, and jet lag exacerbates her exhaustion. Is it the
heat that renders this night sleepless? Or is it the memory of Sunny Bob,
lying on the Trinity docks with his entrails squooshed into the boards? A
murder which somehow reminded Mulder of ritual sacrifices performed a
millennium ago by a powerful European noble possessed by Satan. -I think
I'll delete that part from my report, she thinks sardonically.

     In the depths of the night-

     A creaking comes from the window. A metallic creaking creeps up from
the street, a drainpipe being bent, a drainpipe being climbed. Scully does
not move, but listens to the creaking, like the voice of a monstrous
cicada; then comes the sound of hollow footsteps, proceeding up the side
of the hotel with autonomic certainty.

     The light from the street is blotted out by a shadow-a human form. A
hand claws up over the windowsill, through the open window, pulling itself
up. Then the other arm. Then the head. The face is briefly in the light,
turned toward traffic below. The eyebrows are pointed, the ears are
deformed, the nose is flat, the eyes are pinched and pulled wide. Leon
Kanzaki enters the room, placing one foot carefully on the drab rug,
swinging the other leg over the sill, standing for a moment framed in the
moonlight, his misshapen body clearly identifiable-then pulling back into
the shadows at the periphery of Scully's bedroom. His breathing is heavy,
clearly audible. He gropes along the wall, feeling for orientation, into
the corner, where he remains motionless and suddenly silent.

     Scully remains frozen. One hand has crept to the nightstand and back,
plucking her holster from where it lies on the endtable-moving a
millimeter at a time, she brings it under the sheet, checks it for
ammunition, cocks it, flinching at the unbearably loud !click! it
makes-she can hear the blood beating rapidly in her eardrums, thinking of
that winch, of Sunny Bob spooled around that cylinder, drawn wide. -A
winch wouldn't be necessary, she thinks, -only some device for slicing
open the skin and pulling them out, nailing to the bedpost...

     There is a small sound-an embarrassingly small sound, a thuck, the
sound of something hitting plaster lightly, an accidental tap.

     As if Leon carried a hammer, and had swung it lightly in one hand, an
inch too close to the wall... 
     
***

     Mulder is awakened by the gunshot. Leaping out of bed, he trips over
his own sheets, knocking his head violently on the bedpost. Groping for
his gun, he shouts Scully's name and staggers to the adjoining
door-locked-and now, voices, from the next room, Scully shrieking,
garbled: "Freeze-hands on your head-drop to your knees, Leon!"

     -Leon?

     And then the second voice, deep, an animalistic bleat that cannot be
erupting from any human throat:

     "I RETURN-THE UNITY OF MIND BURSTS THROUGH THE FILAMENTS THAT LINE MY
MEMBRANE-HEAR ME WELL-I SHALL RETURN AGAIN AND THERE SHALL BE MORE-NOW
TELL ME-TELL ME-WHERE THE KEY LIES-GIVE ME THE MACHINE-"

     Mulder shoots away the lock and bursts into the room, blinking in the
light. Scully sits upright in bed, pistol out, forearms locked, the smell
of cordite thick in the air. And opposite, at the window, a wraith leaps
out onto the street, a shadow moving across the frame of Fox's vision like
a traveling matte.

     He raises his gun-

     But it is already gone, tumbling down into the darkness, colliding
heavily with the cement. He rushes to the window, peers down, sees the
shadow stagger convolutedly out of the light and into the darkness, rapid
footsteps a barely audible echo in the night. There are shouts from other
rooms, a pounding on the door, but Mulder does not allow himself to pay
attention to them, does not allow himself to think; instead, he swings
over the edge of the window and descends to the street, going hand over
hand down the drainpipe, the metal digging into his palms, his arms
aching, gun stuffed into the band of his sweatpants, moving as quickly as
he can. A moment later he falls to the sidewalk, concrete biting into the
skin of his unshod feet. He runs in the direction of the shadow, plunges
into a succession of blind alleys hedged in by walls of brick. The
pavement is littered with trash, broken bottles, and soon his soles are
bleeding. He moves on nonetheless, but the shadow could have taken any
direction, any path in this concrete maze, a minotaur prowling this
labyrinth of city alleyways.

     "Dammit!" he cries, spinning in place, gun still cocked. "Leon!"

     A shadow creeps along the wall behind him-he whirls, raising the
pistol-

     "Don't shoot!" Scully. She steps gingerly through the trash, her coat
sagging across her shoulders. Her gun is in one hand. In the other, a pair
of leather shoes. Mulder sits on a garbage can, slips them on with a
grimace of pain. She touches his forehead. "You're bleeding," she says.

     He winces, trying to smile. "Nothing serious; I just smashed my head
against the wall when I heard the gun shots." Mulder stands up, looks
around the darkness. "I lost him. Leon Kanzaki?"

     She nods. There is a slight tremor in her hands, but she seems
otherwise fine. "He climbed into my bedroom window. He could've gone for
me right away, but he hesitated, as if he wanted something. I didn't want
to kill him, so I only fired a warning shot..."

     "But how could he know where we were?"

     "Mulder, I think that the murder on the docks was bait. He did it to
attract us, to bring us into the open. He probably hid near the murder
scene and followed us to the hotel after we left-he must have been
watching Kanzaki's office to see who came and went, and recognized us."

     "It seems like some fairly complicated reasoning for a man with a 75
IQ."

     Scully looks into Mulder's eyes. "Did you hear him speak?"

     "Yeah," Mulder admits.

     "He didn't sound like a man who was mentally disabled. Psychopathic,
maybe, but his diction and word usage..."

     "Another characteristic of demonic possession: the victim suddenly
seems to become a lot more intelligent-and a lot more, well, evil." He
winces as a drop of blood runs into his right eye. "So, Doc, think I'll
need stitches?"

     "You certainly need something."

     "A psychiatric examination, perhaps?"

End of Kabuki 5/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (6/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:03:17 -0500


Kabuki 6/10

     "I'm not so sure anymore." Scully's voice betrays a hint of
uncertainty. "Possession may not be so far off the mark."

     "You're considering multiple personality disorder?" he asks, as they
begin to walk back to the hotel.

     "It's a possibility. An individual's other personalities are often
much more intelligent-and occasionally, as you say, evil-than his or her
basic mental disposition."

     "But Leon Kanzaki is brain-damaged," Mulder protests. "He's
physiologically incapable of higher thought."

     "Barring demonic possession, I can't imagine another explanation."

     They move past a small crowd that has gathered at the foot of the
hotel steps and manage to return to their room without encountering anyone
else. Silently, they begin to pack, leaving their guns within easy reach.
Mulder calls Eastlake at home; the detective is chagrined at the news.
"Jesus Christ," he says. "I'm coming down there with some
black-and-whites."

     "That isn't necessary."

     "Drop the bravado, will you, Agent Mulder? Leon Kanzaki is obviously
dangerous-you can't find him alone, and he'll be following you. We need
your assistance in putting this killer down."

     "Officially, I'm not supposed to be aiding you in this
investigation."

     "Screw the officials. You're here tonight, right? When does your
plane leave?"

     "In about eight hours."

     "Fine. With any luck, we'll catch Kanzaki within seven. You're
switching hotels, I assume; let me recommend one near my home." He gives
Mulder a series of directions, concluding with, "I'll call ahead and meet
you there."

     "Okay, okay," Mulder says, hanging up without waiting for a response.
He momentarily wavers over calling Skinner, then decides against it,
opting instead to pull together his things, clothing, toiletries-and that
carton of electronic supplies from Kanzaki's office.

     "GIVE ME THE MACHINE," Leon had yelled.

     Barring other possibilities, Mulder thinks he meant the sonic mirror.
-It's essential for the cancer treatment process, he thinks. -But if Leon
wants it so badly, why didn't he just grab it while the body was left
undiscovered for all those days? He could've just gone back to the office
and retrieved the mirror at any time... 

     Mulder removes the sonic mirror from its carton and keeps it in his
left hand as he finishes gathering his things.

     Scully has finished ahead him and they leave the hotel, paying their
bill as quickly as possible, dodging questions with a simple display of
credentials. As they slide into their car, Mulder belatedly realizes that
he has forgotten to bandage his still-sticky forehead-or his feet, for
that matter, still encased within his shoes, which by now are full of
blood. "The hell with it," he mutters under his breath, and turns the
ignition.

     As Scully flips through the journal, looking for evidence that would
back up her own hypothesis-that Kanzaki's cancer treatment somehow warped
Leon into a sociopath with multiple personalities-Mulder drives and
attempts Eastlake's directions to their new hotel to the best of his
ability. "All right," he says. "We can safely assume that Leon Kanzaki is
indeed insane."

     "Yep," Scully snaps, "I'm pretty sure of that."

     "Why?" Mulder wonders. "Was it something in the microtubule
experiments? What effect do microtubules have on thought processes?"

     This brings Scully back to her nagging feeling, the feeling that
she's forgotten something important, something back from when she was
studying medicine. They pass neon signs, lit up like technological
menorahs...streetlights...lit windows, even this late at
night...headlights...power cables...miracles of electricity...

     She snaps her fingers together. "I've got it."

     "What is it?"

     "Microtubules. Each one is made up of thousands of protein molecules,
right? Well, each microtubule protein has a kind of slot along its length,
a slot containing an electron, moving back and forth like a...a..."

     "A canary in a gilded cage?" Mulder offers.

     "Sure. And the electron's position in that slot determines the way
the protein configures itself, and how the microtubule as a whole is
arranged. Got it so far?"

     "More or less, yeah."

     "Now listen: some gaseous anesthetics, like ether or halothane, can
freeze the electron in place. That's essentially how those anesthetics
work: freezing the electron immobilizes the tubule and causes
unconsciousness."

     "So consciousness is somehow a property of that electron. Within the
microtubules."

     "Right. Some people-such as physicist Roger Penrose-"

     "I knew him back at Oxford," Mulder says, smiling.

     "-believe that consciousness is actually a quantum mechanical
property. An electron can exist in several states at once-here and there,
particle and wave, spinning right and left-as long as it remains in
isolation; the moment the electron is disturbed by other subatomic
particles, however, it's forced to 'choose' a given physical state. And
Penrose believes that this process of 'choosing' lies at the root of what
we call consciousness."

     "I'm starting to remember some of this from college," Mulder says
gleefully. "Let me guess: within the microtubule protein, the electron is
isolated from outside forces."

     "Exactly."

     "It's free to explore all of its possible quantum mechanical states
in peace."

     "Exactly." She adds an emphatic nod of her head.

     "And this is the foundation of consciousness."

     "Exactly. Mulder, you win Final Jeopardy."

     "Cool." He grows suddenly serious, looking over at Scully with an
expression of growing realization. "And so, Kanzaki's cancer therapy,
jiggling with the microtubules, messing with their vibrations...this
somehow upset the balance of the electrons in Leon's brain? Upset Leon's
consciousness?"

     "It's quite possible. Let's say that Kanzaki anesthetized Leon with
halothane and used the sonic mirror to affect the microtubular signals.
That might have been enough to permanently affect Leon's mind. Some
scientists have suggested that the microtubule networks might serve as
nervous systems in miniature, transmitting impulses through waves of
sound, a miniature brain existing within every neuron. Upset that system,
and you upset the nature of consciousness." Scully stops, the flush of
intellectual excitement catching up with her. "Theoretically," she adds
with typical caution.

     "So you think that Kanzaki's treatment upset Leon's psyche? Turned
him into a psychopath? Leon killed his uncle by hanging him, left, then
killed another man in a particularly gruesome manner three days later in
order to draw us out into the open, so he could follow us, discover where
we were, and then come kill us and take the equipment necessary to
continue the operation."

     "Or reverse it," Scully says.

     "Obviously, he had been watching the office for days, waiting for
someone to discover the body and remove the equipment-us, in short. But
why didn't he just take the sonic mirror while it was left unattended?"
Mulder shakes his head. "And your theory still doesn't explain what we saw
tonight. Leon. His physical agility, his increased intelligence..."

     Scully looks at him with an odd expression. "You aren't still toying
with that possession theory, aren't you? You are! You really believe it."

     "No, no," he says, "but I don't believe in unnecessarily discarding
alternative hypotheses."

     "The Mulder mantra." Scully sighs. "Never mind. I've long since
ceased to question your intuitive streaks." 

     She settles back into her seat, then-spastically-sits bolt upright.

End of Kabuki 6/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki 7/10
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:03:31 -0500


Kabuki 7/10

     Mulder looks over, concerned. "Wait a moment, wait a moment..."
Scully says, rooting through the briefcase at her feet that bulges with
Kanzaki's papers. She unclasps it and pulls out a large, flat, rectangular
object; Mulder glances at it twice before he recognizes it as the blotter
from Kanzaki's desk, the one that had borne a few penciled words scrawled
onto one corner. Opening the glove compartment, she holds the blotter up
to the light, reading the marks. "There are some words written
here...Japanese, I think. Uranai..."

     "That's the Japanese term for divination, for fortune-telling. I read
an article on it only a few weeks ago."

     "Futomani..."

     "I think that has something to do with the shoulder-blades of a deer,
telling fortunes with them, although I don't quite remember."

     "Tatari..."

     "I don't know what that one is. What are you doing, anyway?"

     "Checking out a hunch." On top of Kanzaki's journal she spreads a
folded piece of lined paper covered with calculations-the fallout of her
attempt to decipher Kanzaki's code, he sees. On it are printed the first
few enciphered groupings:

     BHR MPM QRB HNI JWN

     She mutters, "Uranai repeats letters, but you can simply drop the
second A."

     Mulder vainly attempts to drive while watching her progress. "You
think that those words are the keywords to the code?"

     She has already answered his question. Beneath the first groupings
she has written:

     ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

     URANIBCDEFGHJKLMOPQSTVWXYZ

     Scully checks the first few lines of code, using her makeshift key:
FLB PRP... "Just more nonsense," she says in disappointment.

     "What about futomani? That's a longer word, and it doesn't have
repetitions."

     ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

     FUTOMANIBCDEGHJKLPQRSVWXYZ

     This yields:

     INT ERE STI NGT HAT

     "'Interesting that,'" Scully reads excitedly. "This is the code!"

     "What does the rest of the sentence say?" Mulder asks. "What's so
interesting?"

     "Hold on, hold on." Working laboriously in the poor light, Scully
manages to uncover coherence after another dozen blocks:

     INT ERE STI NGT HAT SMA LLS OUN DSC ANB EGI NTH EPR OCE SSB UTO NLY
LAR GES OUN DSC ANR EVE RSE IT

     "'Interesting, that small sounds can begin the process, but only
large sounds can reverse it,'" Scully reads. 

     Mulder smiles over at his partner. "Good job, pal. How did you know
to check the blotter?"

     "Just my own turn for intuition, I guess. It's a common mnemonic for
business executives to write the combination of their office safe along
the edge of a blotter-why not the keyword to a code?"

     "Good job," he repeats.

     "Thanks, but the plaintext is almost as senseless as the code itself.
What does Kanzaki mean, large sounds, small sounds...?"

     "I suppose he's referring to the microtubule vibrations as the small
sounds, while the large sounds..." He trails off. "Who knows?" 

     He stops the car at the entrance to the hotel Eastlake named, a cubic
sandwich of brick and mortar, five stories of dirty windowpanes and
amber-lit curtains. They are met at the door by three uniforms and
escorted to a drab third-floor room where Eastlake sits on the bed, his
gun on the mattress beside him; he nods, and the officers take up guard
positions outside the front door. "Glad you could make it," he says.

     "Yes, charmed," Mulder says. "So what's the plan?"

     "Plan?" Eastlake affects genuine puzzlement. "The plan, Agent Mulder,
is that the three of us will remain in this room, and wait for Leon
Kanzaki to come to us."

     Mulder grins uncertainly. "Excuse me?"

     "He went for you two before-I see no reason why he shouldn't try to
follow you again. You say that he wants some piece of equipment that you
took from Kanzaki's office. Frankly, I doubt it, but I'm fairly certain
that he is interested in the two of you-or, perhaps, he's simply
interested in Agent Scully."

     Indignant, Scully says, "And what if he tries to pull the same trick
he pulled before? Killing someone else in order to bring us to the scene?"

     Eastlake looks at her levelly. "You must understand that we're doing
everything we can to apprehend Leon through official channels. We're
keeping Kanzaki's office under surveillance twenty-four hours a day.
Police have surrounded your former hotel and are searching the area in
increments of five city blocks, bit by bit, going through every cardboard
box and dumpster and trash can, questioning every wino, interrogating the
whores. But if those attempts fail-and I'm fairly certain they shall-we
can always fall back on you two. Our own bait."

     Mulder, looking out through the windowblinds, asks, "How can Leon
follow us in the first place? I seriously doubt that he's got a car."

     Eastlake shrugs. "He followed you from the docks, didn't he? He'll be
here."

     Scully checks the time, the hands of her watch at zero degree right
angles to each other: three o' clock. She flops onto the other bed, taking
out Kanzaki's journal and flipping it to the coded portion; taking the
key, she begins to slowly translate the entire ten pages, writing her
results on a legal pad, at the rate of a few words a minute. The work is
slow and repetitive, and Mulder does not improve matters, launching off
onto another one of his apparently preprogrammed rants, delivered in a low
tone so as not to concern Eastlake.

     "I just had an idea," he says, speaking softly and excitedly.

     "By all means," Scully says dully, eyes on the page, "enlighten me
with your wisdom."

     "Couldn't the electrons in Leon's microtubules each serve as one half
of an EPR pair?"

     She looks up. "A what?"

     "You know," Mulder says quickly, "the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky
experiment in which it was proven that two particles, once brought
together, can continue to affect each other's properties when taken apart,
'communicating' with each other instantaneously in a process analogous to
telepathy."

     "Oh," Scully says. "That EPR pair."

     "Speculate with me for a second: theoretically, if Leon's
microtubular electrons were disturbed, they might have been able to
reinitiate contact with their long-lost EPR pairs-in effect, putting Leon
in contact with some other being whose electrons were synchronous with his
own."

     "Sounds like you're trying to resurrect your demonic possession
hypothesis."

     "I am, but this has basis in fact! What if all the recorded cases of
demonic possession in the history of mankind-Legion, Loudon, and all the
rest-were actually the result of a human somehow having his or her
microtubules disturbed, thus contacting-or becoming controlled by-the
forces of some other, malevolent entity?"

     "Come again?"

     "Somewhere out there. An entity. An alien. A demon. Something that
can control the electrons-and thus the consciousness-of any organism
linked to it through an EPR relationship. Literal possession through the
laws of physics. Subatomic devils. Quantum dybbuks. Invading and
penetrating any living thing whose microtubules are weakened or left
exposed. The reason that Leon's actions parallel those of Landulf II is
because both of them were affected by similar so-called 'demonic' forces.
What other forces can disturb the microtubules? Couldn't Landulf-or even
Hitler, and Crowley, and all the other known cases of possession-have
somehow disturbed the equilibrium of his own electrons, putting himself in
contract with higher beings through a quantum connection?"

End of Kabuki 7/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (8/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:03:45 -0500


Kabuki 8/10

     "Mulder..."

     "It's possible."

     "Yes, I know it's possible. But listen," she says. "I'm trying to
decode the second set of Kanzaki's ciphers. Futomani doesn't work for it;
neither does that other word-where is it, I wrote it down
somewhere-Uranai. There was a third word on Kanzaki's blotter. Do you
remember what it was?"

     "No...that was the only word I didn't know, remember?"

     "Can you do me a favor? Go down to the car and get the blotter? I
left it on the dashboard."

     "Thus exposing myself to possible death and disembowelment?" He
smiles. "Sure." 

     Over Eastlake's protests, Mulder returns to the car, still brooding
over his own theory. -Dammit, he thinks, it seems right. Scully knows as
well as I do that Leon Kanzaki couldn't have pronounced-much less
uttered-half the things we heard him say in her bedroom...I could feel the
presence of an entity, a malevolent entity. I've seen this kind of thing
before (and so has she-Christ, she's been flung against walls by
poltergeists) but why won't she accept it? I've got an explanation, a
rational one, with the EPR pairs, but she still can't believe that Leon
might have been infested by an alien personality...

     He goes to the car, unlocks it, and pulls out the blotter. There,
just visible in the streetlight: tatari. -She's probably right, though,
about this being the final keyword.

     Mulder slams the door and decides to get his suitcase out of the
trunk. Walking around the far side, he happens to glance down at the
street beneath the car's rear bumper. There are smears of canary yellow
paint on the asphalt. He smiles, thinking: -The legendary Dallas Highway
Dept. strikes again.

     Then, the memory, unbidden, flickers to the surface of his own
microtubules: he'd seen yellow paint today. Yellow paint...where?

     Yellow paint in cans in Kanzaki's office.

     He freezes, then kneels down-slowly, casually, as if he were
examining the muffler-and glances beneath the car. One look is enough to
send the air rushing out of his lungs, the blood rising hotly to his face:
from the bumper is suspended a small can of yellow paint, tied there with
baling wire, a pinprick in the bottom, the paint dribbling out at the rate
of a few drops per second. A fairly good-sized puddle has begun to gather
beneath the chassis. He looks back at the dribbles along the asphalt. Runs
back a few yards, following the line-no, the trail-of slowly-drying canary
pigment around the corner, down the next street, the next, the next...

     "Aw, man," he says.

     Leon has tailed them with the stupidest trick in the book. -This is a
hick-trick, Mulder thinks dazedly. -Louisiana hillbillies do this to each
other's pickup trucks. You don't tie paint cans to FBI agents, to
professionals. Of course not. Professionals are trained to spot this kind
of thing.

     But the fact remained: they hadn't.

     And Leon Kanzaki-Leon of the hammer, of the nails, of the fondness
for winches, of the impossibly powerful voice erupting from a cleft
palate, of the wicked intelligence, of the intestinal fetish, Leon of the
tubules, Leon of the demon-was meanwhile busily following a cheerfully
colored trail of death to the hotel where he planned to peel and core a
pair of FBI agents with his own two hands.

     -We were too busy messing with the code to even look behind the car,
Mulder fumes with growing humiliation. -We were proud of ourselves for
solving that letter frequency problem, for coming up with neat
explanations and hypotheses...but Leon will be here at any moment.

     Gun out, he rushes up to the hotel room, alerts Eastlake and Scully
to his discovery. "Leon can just relax and follow our paint trail at his
leisure," he says, his voice hard and intense, "for miles and miles if
necessary, assuming the paint doesn't run out until then-and we know it
hasn't."

     Eastlake grins broadly. "Perfect. We can just follow the son of a
bitch's paint ourselves. He'll be walking the same trail-we'll be bound to
run into him sooner or later."
The detective notifies the officers at the door of the new development,
and before Scully can count to ten, she, Mulder, Eastlake and the two
uniforms are all back on the street, running in the hot black darkness.
Mulder points out the first droplets, following them like a bloodhound.
The trail moves down the avenue for a dozen yards, turns a corner, another
corner, and proceeds down a busy roadway, the dribbles of paint barely
visible in the beams of the officers' flashlights as the group of five
dodge cars and move down the yellow paint road. They move into ever darker
regions of the sleeping city, the buildings like bleak origami folding
into themselves, jagged rectangular monoliths jutting up into the frozen
sky. Humidity makes the air fat with moisture. The trail continues. And
soon every shape on the edge of Scully's peripheral vision looms
menacingly, wraithlike, in hammer-wielding shades of gray, perceived
motion, flickers of violence, stalking them on all conceivable sides...

     She whispers to Mulder, "How do you feel?"

     He says quietly, "Excited. Scared as hell, but excited."

     The group has begun to move more slowly, more cautiously, pulling
themselves into the shadows. They proceed over the asphalt like natives
passing through the jungle, silent, waiting, hunting a predator that is
also hunting them, eager for blood...guns are unholstered, kept
low...another block passes beneath their feet. Another. 

      Tension unbearable, Mulder asks beneath his breath, "So what did you
find in Kanzaki's journals?"

     Scully hesitates a moment before answering, uneasy, dropping her
voice to the lowest possible register. "Well, it's odd. Strange. According
to the parts I've decoded, Kanzaki seems to have been aware of the
undesirable side effects of his procedure."

     "Such as insanity?"

     "Yes, but he went ahead with the treatment anyway, despite the fact
that he suspected it might...warp Leon."

     "Why would he do that?"

     "I don't know. I try to put myself in his shoes. He's spent years and
years following up this procedure, researching, experimenting, willingly
renouncing an 'ordinary' career in technology and the prestige that might
accompany it solely because of his debt to his dead brother, his
obligation to cure his nephew of cancer. Is he going to give up because he
suspects complications? Certainly not. I can emphasize with his reasoning:
Leon's already mentally challenged, so go ahead, damn the risks, perform
the treatment, mess with Leon's tubules."

     "He just didn't expect that the effects would be as dramatic as they
were. Verging on psychopathy." Mulder chooses his words carefully; he
knows that this is not the time to push his possession hypothesis, so he
treads on well-traveled psychological ground in his speculations.

     The group has now begun to move into a poorer sector of Dallas,
garbage in the streets, the sewers filled with peeling paper flyers.
Eastlake shines a flashlight beam over every homeless citizen that lies in
their path, searching for the telltale signs of KMS, but none are to be
found, just an endless succession of unshaven faces and alcoholic
complexions. The heat has begun to grow, as if they are inching closer to
the exposed beating heart of the city.

     "But there's more," Scully says after a period of silence. "I think
that there may be a way of reversing the effects. Of returning Leon to his
prior state."

     Mulder stops short. "What? A method of reversal? Why didn't you say
so?" The two of them stop walking and stand alone on the sidewalk, the
police ahead of them still following the reverse trail of yellow paint.

     She shakes her head softly from side to side. "I'm not sure what it
is. Kanzaki talks endlessly about small sounds, large sounds, and I think
I'm finally beginning to understand: perhaps certain external auditory
stimuli can reverse the psychopathic tendencies brought about by the
microtubule treatment."

     "Auditory stimuli? You mean that a certain sound or a vibration might
bring Leon back to normal?"

     "Yes. It isn't as farfetched as it sounds. Some external sound might
cause the neurons in Leon's brain to react in a certain way, causing the
miniature nervous systems in each to relay the signals that would correct
the microtubule imbalance. A trigger."

     "Does Kanzaki say what kind of auditory trigger might do the trick?"

     "No...he just claims that it exists. It could be any sound, or any
vibration, not necessarily audible-assuming that the effect is real."

     "A sound..." Mulder muses. "A way to bring Leon back..." 

     He is interrupted by a shout, half a block away: he recognizes the
voice of one of the uniforms, barking something into a police radio, the
voice tinny and dismayed. Eastlake approaches, visibly shaken, saying,
"You'd better take a look at this."
     "What's wrong?"

     "Leon was here. Ahead of us. He's killed again."

End of Kabuki 8/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (9/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:03:58 -0500


Kabuki 9/10

     The concrete flies beneath their feet. There: beneath a cardboard
box, only cursorily hidden, two limbs exposed, a body-still hot, the
features of a young black man wrapped in an overcoat and printed overcoat,
abdomen slit and disemboweled as before. Scully kneels over the body,
feels for a pulse, for breath, finally pulling back one eyelid and shining
a light into the pupil. It contracts. "He's still alive," she says, her
features registering astonishment and shock. 

     The blood rushes out of Mulder's face. "Leon was just here," he
manages to say. "A few seconds ago." He drops to the ground, searching for
blood. A second trail, eerily mirroring the first, this time red instead
of yellow, progresses from where Leon's second-or third-victim lies,
traveling down the sidewalk. -Leon got his hands dirty, Mulder thinks. -I
follow this and I find my demon.

     An officer sees the blood at the same time as Mulder. He's young,
freshfaced, a blond mustache curling uncertainly on his upper lip. He
keeps his eye on the scarlet trail and runs down the street, following the
blood with his flashlight, finger pressing dangerously on trigger. "Hold
it!" Eastlake cries, but the uniform he keeps running, sprinting down the
sidewalk for a dozen yards, then turning the corner into an alley, radio
buzzing. Eastlake and the other officer follow at a slower pace. Mulder
lingers behind until Scully reassures him that she can take care of the
victim herself; she is already soaked with the young black man's blood,
and is vainly attempting to stem the flow of hemorrhage.

     He catches up with Eastlake, and they enter the alley. It's a
cul-de-sac, with a high board fence along the far end-the blood trail ends
there, at the foot of the barricade. 

     Mulder can't see the first officer anywhere in the alley.

     "Oh Jesus," Eastlake says.

     Mulder looks down. The uniform lies on the ground, a moist pool
filling the rivulets of the concrete, spreading out from where he has
fallen. His eyes are half-shut, dreamy, the face peaceful and
introspective. The lower half of his torso is gone.

     -Only five seconds...God...he was only in here for five seconds...

     "A trap!" Mulder yells. "Back out, back out!"

     Leon is nowhere to be seen. Eastlake checks the uniform for signs of
life, while the other officer searches the alley with frantic haste.
Mulder jumps up onto the fence, vaults over-nothing lies behind it, only
empty trash cans and a brick wall, an alcove less than five feet broad,
nowhere to hide. Kanzaki has vanished.

     He climbs back over, back to the alley. Eastlake has summoned
Scully-covered with blood from Leon's other victim, whom she was unable to
save-and she is trying to comfort and calm the officer. 

     "I'm dying," he whispers faintly, lying in a bed of discarded tin
cans.

     She cannot contradict him in good conscience. An ambulance is on its
way, although she fears that the officer's rate of blood loss may be too
extreme to salvage; she fears that the man is indeed very likely to die.
"You're going to be fine," she says. Inside, she is breaking to pieces:
-Two men, she thinks dully. -Two men will have died tonight, under my
care, and I was helpless to save them.

     Whisper: "The man who did this..."

     "Yes, I know."

     "No, listen..." He bites his tongue, sweat beading on his face from
exhaustion, and hands Scully a folded slip of paper. "He put this on my
uniform...it fell off when I tried to turn over..."

     She takes the paper-bloody fingerprints adhering to one edge-and
opens it, recognizing it as a scrap from one of the legal pads on
Kanzaki's desk:

     LEAVE THE MIRROR AT THE OFFICE. CALL OFF SURVEILLANCE.

     The capital letters are smooth, strong, powerful. Mulder leans over
her shoulder, reading silently.

     Scully, applying pressure with all her strength to the officer's
wounds, looks briefly over at her partner. "Well?"

     He shakes his head. "No. That isn't Leon Kanzaki's handwriting." He
straightens up, halfheartedly looking for signs, clues, any indications as
to where Leon might have gone. Kicking cans away from the scene, he says,
"I think we should set our own trap."

     "It's about time, Mulder." The man beneath Scully's administering
fingers coughs suddenly, spewing a gout of blood. She wipes it away with a
trembling hand. She can feel him dying, and-slowly, hesitantly-the life
drains from him like mercury dropping from a thermometer. 

     The sound of sirens becomes faintly audible in the July night. An
ambulance arrives, but there is nothing left to save. They zip the officer
and the unidentified other victim up and wheel them away.

     Mulder remains at a stubborn distance from the two deaths, pacing
along the sidewalk, throwing himself headfirst into a maze of blind
speculation: -Why does Leon want the mirror so badly? To reverse the
procedure? Certainly not...his other self, whether demon or alternate
personality, is the one calling the shots here...besides, Scully says that
it's an audible sound that might undo the effects, not another jolt of
microtubule vibration. Why, then? Why is the mirror so important? It's
only useful to perform more operations, and...

     His eyes widen. "Scully," he says. She is standing apart from the
whirling ambulance lights, having made her statement to the paramedics,
covered head to foot in blood; he goes up to her and asks, "Are you okay?"

     "Fine." Her voice is tense, quiet. "What is it you want?"

     "Listen, I know why Leon wants the mirror. He wants to perform
Kanzaki's procedure on others."

     She nods. "I guessed as much."

     "But really, think about it. Whether you accept my EPR possession
guess or your own multiple personality hypothesis, either way, Leon's
going to want to create more people like him. That sonic mirror, depending
on how you look at it, is either a psychopath-machine...or a gateway to an
invasion. That's why the Pentagon wants it, not as a cancer treatment-that
remains unproven-but as a weapon!"

     "All right, say whatever you want. But what do you suggest we do?
Leon's obviously much more intelligent than his IQ scores would
indicate..."

     "Assuming that Leon is even in control of his actions."

     "...and he's been watching the office well enough to know that
Eastlake's had it under surveillance. We can try to spring a trap from
inside, but he'll be watching the building, counting who goes in and comes
out. He'll know we're there."

     "That's what I'm afraid of. He may be waiting for us to go to the
office just so he can get us on his own territory."

     Scully looks up at him. "Mulder, I have a hunch. It's a long shot,
but it may be our best chance."

     "To do what?"

     "To reverse Leon's condition."

     "And how do you propose we do that?"

     She smiles faintly. "With flies."

End of Kabuki 9/10

===========================================================================

From: lonegunguy@aol.com (LoneGunGuy)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.x-files.creative
Subject: Kabuki (10/10)
Date: 12 Jan 1996 02:04:05 -0500


Kabuki 10/10

     The scene:

     Kanzaki's office. Barren of papers. Still bloody and grimed over with
dust. The mainframe still lies in one corner, its plastic sheeting intact.
There are no more cans of canary yellow paint. The shelves are clean. The
chalked-off area at the center of the room-where Kanzaki's death chair
once stood, now considered by the police to have merely been a feint by
Leon to make his uncle's murder look like a suicide-is still there, but it
is no longer empty. 

     The sonic mirror, zipped neatly back into its vinyl envelope, lies
there on the floorboards.

     Aside from that, there is nothing different about the office. Almost
nothing. From the ceiling dangles a small microphone-at least, it appears
to be a microphone. 

     It is, in fact, a small cellular phone, tied there with a twist of
twine. 

     Mulder sees all this from a hundred yards away, peering into the
office's window with a high-powered telescope from a nearby building-a
store, owned by an Asian couple who sell vegetables and paper talismans,
whose second-story window offers the distinct advantage of having an
unobstructed line of sight to Kanzaki's former working quarters. He does
not maintain his vigil alone: next to him sits a Dallas police sniper, a
rifle with a telescopic sight aimed at the precise point where Leon's
heart would be were he to enter the office. Eastlake and another uniform
occasionally check in to access the situation. It's been nearly three
hours since Scully left the package in the office-backed up by a quartet
of officers, armed to the teeth-and Mulder has not moved from his spot by
the window, the pile of sunflower seed casings at his feet growing by the
minute as he eats and watches, eats and watches. He and the sniper do not
speak; both are focused on that distant window. 

     Thus far, Leon has not made an appearance. 

     -He can't know that I'm watching him, Mulder thinks. -We took
precautions to make sure we weren't followed. He'll be suspicious, yes,
but I think he'll go for the bait, I really think that he will.

     He thinks about Scully's plan. -Ingenious. And it doesn't necessarily
discredit my own hypothesis, that Leon has been possessed by an
EPR-congruent entity, bringing demonic possession into the twentieth
century. Think about it: in the history of mankind, what has been the most
common means of exorcising demons? Loud noises. Drums, maracas... even the
loud sounds of Kabuki theater originally derive from attempts to drive
away evil sprits...

     Leon Kanzaki's form suddenly fills the telescope's field of view.
Misshapen face, those eyes, those eyebrows, almost vampirish, masklike,
the face of a Kabuki dancer. There is no mistake about it. Mulder sees him
kneel to the ground, pick up the package. No time for mistakes: he punches
the REDIAL button on the telephone, gets Scully, speaks one
word-"Flash"-and hangs up, heart thudding. In the telescope lens, Leon
does not react. He begins to move to the door of the office-then stops, 
stands in the center of the room for a moment, head cocked, as if
listening to something...

     There is a loud metallic zip from Mulder's right. The sniper has
fired.
     "Got 'em!" the officer says, grinning.

     "No!" Mulder shouts. "You idiot!" Dropping his bag of seeds, he runs
downstairs, onto the street, and sprints the two hundred yards to
Kanzaki's office. Arriving there out of breath, he sees Scully and
Eastlake going indoors just ahead of him. "He shot Leon," he gasps. "The
goddamned fool shot Leon."

     They rush up to the office. There, in a pool of red, lies Leon
Kanzaki. His blue denim T-shirt, unraveling at the collar, is already
saturated with his own blood...his large, ungraceful hands open and close
uneasily, confusedly, like flower blossoms grown heavy from the
heat...there is a smear of yellow paint on his chin.

     Looking at them, he smiles weakly.

     "I know you," he says to Agent Scully. His voice is normal, weak,
with a childlike lisp. "The Other One tried to hurt you..." He trails off,
gasping. "My heart feels bad. Uncle Ken..."

     "You're back to normal, Leon," Mulder says, kneeling, taking the
dying man's hand, feeling the ridges in his palm. "The Other One is gone."

     Leon Kanzaki nods. "I felt him leave when I heard the buzzing."

     Mulder glances at Scully, who knows, even before she examines Leon's
wound, that there is no chance of the young man surviving for even another
minute. -Another one dead, she thinks. -Another one dead. 

     "You were right," her partner says, placing a comforting hand on her
shoulder.

     She does not answer.

***

Excerpts from the official report of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully:

     Leon Kanzaki died of a bullet wound to the heart, surviving for an
abnormally long period of time-several minutes-following his injury. In
the moments before his death, he spoke with a degree of lucidity that
indicated that the psychopathy which apparently resulted from certain
unorthodox treatments at the hands of his uncle, Ken Kanzaki, had finally
departed.

     Although the reason for Kanzaki's return to sanity cannot be fully
explained, it remains possible that his recovery may have been due to a
lucky guess on the part of an FBI agent.

     It remained an object of question throughout the investigation as to
why Leon Kanzaki did not retrieve his uncle's "sonic mirror"-which he
evidently desired to possess-from the office while the body remained
undiscovered. One possible hypothesis presents itself: flies. Ken
Kanzaki's office became filled with Texas blackflies soon after his death.
The sound of the flies' buzzing, the rhythm of their wings and the
vibrations produced by their flight, may have somehow duplicated the exact
tonal frequency necessary to reverse the psychopathic effects of his
uncle's procedure. Leon, under the effects of the treatment, would have
been acting under control of a separate personality. That personality may
have deliberately avoided the flies in order to maintain control of Leon's
brain. Any attempts to simply block the sound were out of the question:
due to his Kabuki Make-Up Syndrome, Leon Kanzaki's ears were too deformed
to accommodate any earplugs or similar devices. In any case, the
vibrations likely propagated by some non-aural process, and any muffling
would have been groundless.

     With this hypothesis in mind, a recording of frequencies identical to
that which blackflies produce was created digitally and played over a
phone system when Leon Kanzaki entered his uncle's office. Although it is
impossible to say for certain, it may have been this auditory stimulus
that returned Leon to normal in the seconds before his demise.
      
     For now, the four murder cases related to this investigation are
considered closed. All papers of the deceased Mr. Kanzaki, and all
equipment from Mr. Kanzaki's office, have been forwarded to the Pentagon,
Washington DC.

(signed)
Dana Scully
Federal Bureau of Investigation

End of Kabuki 10/10