The X-Files Origins--Devil's Advocate

by Jonathan Maberry

  “No,” she agreed, “but maybe we should go to the library. They’ll have books on how other religious people died. How did Moses die or Daniel or any of them?”

  “That’s good,” he said, nodding. “But I just thought of something. The crown of thorns and the spear in his side were all how Jesus died, right? Well, Maisie’s family is Jewish.”

  “So was Jesus,” countered Dana. “But I don’t think that matters. It’s probably more important what’s going on in the head of the killer.”

  “The angel,” he said, and she heard the skepticism in his voice.

  “Look,” she said impatiently, “we both know that he’s not an angel. He’s a psychopath, a mass murderer or whatever.”

  “You see him as an angel in your dreams, though,” said Ethan. He flapped his arms and then sat down heavily on the other chair. “This is bizarre. We’re talking about angels, psychopaths, and the possibility of a series of murders made to look like religious deaths. Are we imagining all of this?”

  “Unfortunately,” said Dana, “I don’t think so. And that scares the heck out of me.”

  He looked at her, and for a moment there was almost a shadow of a smile on his face. Not a happy smile, though. “Dana … we’re fifteen.”

  “I know. But we’re not dumb kids. You’re smart, I’m smart, everyone in the science club is way smart.”

  “Sure, but Jerry, Tisa, and Sylvia are no more detectives than we are.”

  “I know.”

  “We shouldn’t even be doing this.”

  Dana looked down at the papers in her lap. “I didn’t ask to have those dreams, Ethan,” she said softly. “I didn’t ask to see Maisie. I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “Hey, I—”

  She raised her head and fixed him with a hard, inflexible stare. “But for whatever reason, this is happening to me. Me. I don’t know why, but I have to believe there is a point to all this.”

  “Why? You didn’t know any of them. What makes you so special?”

  He stopped as if he realized how his last question sounded, in both tone and meaning. “Wait—”

  “Forget it,” she said as she stood up.

  “Hey, I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. I have to go, though.”

  “Want me to walk you home?” he asked awkwardly, but Dana shook her head.

  “I’m not going home,” she said as she stood. “I’m going to the library.”

  Ethan stood, too. “Let me put this stuff away.”

  “You don’t have to come with me,” she said.

  He grinned. “Yeah, I do.”

  CHAPTER 37

  Abigail Smith Public Library

  4:19 P.M.

  The Smith Library—informally known as the Abby to everyone—was one of the few things Dana genuinely liked about the town.

  It was oddly large for so small a town, the result of a huge bequest in the will of a rich novelist who had lived all her life in the area. The building had once been Abigail Smith’s estate, but the huge tract of land on which it once sat was now the town of Craiger. Her mansion had been converted into a library and was one of the largest buildings in town, second only to the combined city hall and public works complex. There were rooms upon rooms of books, and a good-sized staff employed by Smith’s estate. It had become the local custom, Dana learned, for families to donate the personal libraries of family members who passed, and so the Abby’s collection swelled. The building and wings headed in all directions, and they had filled two subbasements as well as an attic that, in a move of pure inspiration, had been given over to the Abby’s collection of classic and modern horror fiction. Next to Beyond Beyond, Dana and Melissa spent most of their time swimming in oceans of words and thoughts, of poetry and prose, of ideas ancient and new.

  Ethan knew the layout of the old place better than she did, though, and he led her downstairs to a series of rooms crammed with nonfiction books.

  “In here,” he said, pointing to a row marked WORLD RELIGION.

  There were a lot of books, and the index cards did not list any with helpful titles. Nothing that said: Weird Religious Deaths. Nothing like The How-To Book of Mass Murder.

  It was going to take time, and these were not topics they could tap the librarians for help with, especially the hatchet-faced woman who oversaw the basement collections and who everyone referred to as the Wicked Witch. It was Melissa’s theory that the Wicked Witch had been assigned to the cellars to keep her from scaring away most of the public. And although Dana thought that was uncharitable, she had to admit that the librarian lacked only the green skin and pointy hat to make her a good choice for a remake of The Wizard of Oz.

  So, they worked through the card catalog by themselves. Dana found what she was looking for in less than twenty minutes. There was a book called Saints and Angels: A Comprehensive Guide, which had a very detailed index.

  “There,” she said, tapping an entry. Ethan bent close to read it.

  “‘Martyrs, pages 172 to 201.’ Jeez,” he muttered. “You really can find anything in a library. Wonder if I can find the nose to my old Mr. Potato Head. Lost it when I was eight.”

  Dana flipped to the indicated pages. “I’ll go through these,” she said. “Why don’t you see what you can find about that 5-HT2A receptor agonist stuff?”

  “On it,” he said, and vanished into the rows of biology and chemistry.

  Dana sat down on a leather couch, pulled out her notes with the drawings she’d made of the wounds on each of the victims, and was glad that it was drawings and not photos she had to work with. Knowing that her sketches represented the deaths of people about her own age was bad enough.

  The book, however, was not a comfort. It was filled with illustrations in black and white and color of woodcuts, sculptures, and paintings dating back hundreds of years. Apparently every artist in history had spent a good chunk of their time creating art about horrible deaths of important people. And there were a lot of martyrs. Hundreds of them. Thousands, according to the footnotes, when one took into account other religions, but Dana confined her search to the troubled and bloody history of the spread of Christianity. Persecution was a theme. Torture and public execution were bizarrely common, even after Christianity became the dominant religion, and a lot of the martyrs had been killed by other Christians. She already knew that, but it still made her furious. She always felt the message of Jesus’s teachings was peaceful and beautiful.

  When she realized her mind was wandering down the wrong side road and that her anger was rising, Dana stopped, closed her eyes, took several long yoga breaths, and realigned her focus.

  “Martyrs,” she murmured aloud.

  A few more minutes of reading made her realize that the topic was too big, so she backed up and decided to tackle the subject in sections. Since Maisie had been killed with the wounds of Jesus, she looked at the ways in which the twelve apostles died. It was a starting place. And it was the right place to start.

  She dug a bunch of change out of her pocket and took the book over to the photocopy machine across the room. She made sure no one was watching her as she copied artwork of dead apostles.

  CHAPTER 38

  Craiger, Maryland

  4:51 P.M.

  Gerlach sat slumped in the passenger side of the black sedan, watching the front of the Abby from beneath the down-tilted brim of his hat. It was bright out, and he wore sunglasses to shield his pale blue eyes. His jaws flexed and bunched as he chewed gum.

  “These kids have half a day off from school and they go to a library?” mused his driver.

  Gerlach merely grunted.

  The driver added, “You think they maybe went in the front and slipped out the back?”

  The agent frowned. “Why would they? They don’t know we’re surveilling them.”

  “Maybe they do. She’s supposed to have some gifts, right? Maybe she’s sensed us or something.”

  Gerlach grunted again and sat up. “Why don’t you go and
find out?”

  “Me?”

  “You. I don’t want her to see me.”

  The driver smirked. “Why not? I thought you said your face wasn’t memorable.”

  Gerlach turned slowly to study the man. “How would you like a very memorable facial scar?”

  “I—” The driver stopped himself from responding.

  Gerlach smiled. “Go find out what those kids are up to. Now.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Abigail Smith Public Library

  4:56 P.M.

  “Ethan!” cried Dana.

  His head popped out from behind the chemistry shelf, looking alarmed. “What’s wrong? I’m still looking.”

  “I found it,” she said urgently.

  He hurried over, perched on the edge of the couch, and leaned in. Dana took him through it all.

  “Look,” she said, fighting to keep disgust and excitement out of her voice. “Every single one of them died in some way close to how Jesus or one of the apostles died.” She turned over a drawing and placed it on a page in the book that described the death of James, son of Zebedee, also known as James the Greater. “Jeffrey Watanabe was decapitated. So was James.”

  “Right,” said Ethan, looking at the entry. “But this says that James the Greater was killed with a sword.”

  “He was. The Romans cut his head off.”

  “Oh.”

  She turned over the page for Jennifer Hoffer. “She was impaled on the steering column of her car. Thomas—Doubting Thomas—the one who needed to touch Jesus’s wounds before he believed that he’d risen, was run through with a spear.”

  Ethan said nothing.

  The next was Connie Lucas. “She was thrown from her car down a rocky slope, and the coroner’s report said that she died from blunt force trauma resulting from multiple impacts with the rocky terrain. James, son of Alphaeus, known as James the Less, was beaten and then stoned to death.”

  Ethan swallowed hard.

  “We already know about Maisie,” said Dana. “Chuck Riley had the same crucifixion wounds, but he was found hanging upside down from his overturned car. When he was about to be executed, Saint Peter asked that he be crucified upside down because he didn’t think he was worthy to die in exactly the same way as Jesus.”

  “We can’t be right about this,” said Ethan in a small, sick voice.

  They went through it over and over again, with Ethan trying to knock it all down with logic. However, it was that very logical approach that reinforced Dana’s theory. Finally they sat on opposite ends of the couch, staring at each other. A big clock on the wall above them sliced cold seconds off and let them drop to the floor.

  “We … we have to tell someone,” said Ethan.

  “Who?” asked Dana.

  “My uncle.”

  “How do we explain how we know?”

  Ethan looked bleak. “We tell the truth, I guess. Which means I get grounded until I’m in my forties.”

  “Crap,” sighed Dana, and then she brightened. “We could tell Two-Suit and … wait … No, he’ll want to know how we know. Same if we tell the narcs at school or Mr. Sternholtz.”

  “Or anyone,” said Ethan.

  “No matter who we tell, we’re going to have to explain how we know. It’s all going to come back to the fact that you broke into your uncle’s desk. Which means he’ll probably get in trouble at work.”

  “He could lose his job.” Ethan got up and walked a few steps away, then turned. “What choice do we have, though, Dana? If we don’t tell someone, then the killer gets to keep on doing this. If it’s us or someone’s life, we have to do what’s right. We can’t be cowards. I don’t want to live like that. Sneaking around and snooping is one thing, but I won’t be responsible for letting someone else die.”

  Dana looked down at her hands, at her fingers twisting and knotting together in her lap. She could hear her father’s voice in her head; it was easy to imagine his anger and his disappointment. Telling him about this might snap that fragile line that tethered her to him. She twisted around and looked at the clock.

  “Beyond Beyond is open,” she said. “Let’s go over there. We can have tea and talk about it.”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s okay, you go on without me. I’m not much in the mood for an astral journey or a cup of stinkweed tea.”

  “It’s not like that,” protested Dana, though she knew it pretty much was like that. “We should go talk to Corinda. And my sister is probably there, too. I need to tell them all this stuff.”

  Ethan looked at his watch. “I … can’t,” he said. “I have a mountain of homework.”

  “Are you serious?”

  He looked wretched. “Yes, I am. I’ve got a paper to write for history that I should have started three days ago. If I don’t hand it in tomorrow, I could drop to an A-minus. Besides…”

  “What?”

  “This ESP stuff can’t put a criminal behind bars. I mean, I know that it’s a thing, but you can’t measure it or rely on it the way you can with hard science.” Ethan looked uncomfortable. “I don’t even know what to think about this, Dana. This is all so much, y’know? Mass murders and religious cults and psychic visions? It’s … it’s…” He stopped and shook his head.

  “Believe me, Ethan, I understand. I’m weirded out, too. More than you because this is happening to me.”

  “Hey, I know, and I didn’t mean to say that you were…”

  He fished for the right word and couldn’t come up with it. Dana smiled and touched his arm. “No, I get it. It’s cool. I mean, it’s not cool, but we’re cool.”

  He looked relieved. “Listen, I believe you even if I don’t understand it.”

  Dana said, “Hmmm. That actually gives me an idea. I need to go ask someone who might understand this stuff.”

  “Who?” asked Ethan.

  She did not explain. Dana folded the drawings and took a step toward the stairs, but Ethan caught her arm.

  “Look, Dana, if you’re pissed at me,” he said gently, “I’m sorry.”

  She gave him a small smile. “I’m not mad. Not at you, anyway. I’m scared about this stuff, and I’m absolutely furious that someone is doing this. I’m confused, and I hate being confused. There has to be an answer, and you said it—we don’t really know what we’re doing. We can’t go to anyone in authority with this because, first, you’ll be grounded forever for showing this stuff to me. Second, your uncle Frank could lose his job. And third, they’d never believe us. You know I’m right.”

  “Okay, but who can we talk to?”

  “Not ‘we,’ Ethan. Me. I have a friend who might be able to look places no one else can. Maybe she can lead us to the evidence you want.”

  He paused. “Who?”

  “Corinda Howell. She owns—”

  “Beyond Beyond,” he finished for her. “She’s that nutty psychic lady, right?” Ethan stood his ground for five seconds. Then he sighed, nodded, and stepped aside. “Call me?” he asked. “Let me know what she says?”

  Dana paused, nodded. “Sure.”

  She lingered at the foot of the stairs. Both of them started to say something, stopped. The moment held and then stretched, and Dana felt that something was supposed to happen, but she didn’t know what it was. Ethan seemed to think so, too, but his smile was turning into a plastic mask that looked as awkward as her own face felt. Was he starting to lean forward a little?

  “Um … see you,” she said, stepping back nervously.

  “Sure. Um,” he murmured. “Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  She stood there a moment longer and then turned and hurried up the stairs, certain that her face was bright red. A man in a black suit was coming down the steps and stood aside to let her pass. She barely registered him.

  Had that almost been a kiss?

  Yes.

  Maybe.

  She didn’t know.

  If it was, she’d screwed it up.

  “Idiot,” she told herself.

 
; She thought about Ethan’s smile for blocks and blocks.

  CHAPTER 40

  Craiger, Maryland

  5:31 P.M.

  Clouds covered the sky, and it was already getting dark. The streetlights came on early, and Dana kept to the lighted side of Main Street, avoiding the open black mouths of alleys. A homeless man was squatting in one alleyway under a shelter made of moldy cardboard, rags, and splintered boards. He held out a cup, and although in daylight Dana would have stopped and given him some coins, tonight she said, “I’m sorry,” and hurried on. The man yelled something as she passed, and she was half a block away before her mind translated it from his wine-soaked guttural.

  “God protect you.”

  It stopped her and she turned, looking back. The man sat with his face in his hands, rocking forward and back.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Then she turned and hurried toward the lighted storefront two blocks away that was Beyond Beyond.

  A few cars went up and down the street, and Dana only glanced at them. She did not see the black sedan parked on the shadowy side of the street. She did not see the two men who watched her.

  CHAPTER 41

  Beyond Beyond

  5:53 P.M.

  Corinda was there but busy at the checkout with people buying the latest astrology book by a New York Times–bestselling author.

  Dana got to the store too late to catch Melissa, who had gone into the advanced yoga class already. It made her anxious, because she needed to tell everything to her sister. Every single detail.

  She was too nervous to sit and drink tea, so she wandered around the shop, killing time and fidgeting.

  “¿Qué pasa, mai?” said a voice, and she spun so fast that she knocked a statue of the Hindu god Ganesha off a table. Angelo ducked and caught the statue before it hit the floor. It was an incredible feat, and Dana gaped.

  “Wow!” she said.

  Angelo straightened, hefting the small stone statue in his hand, then placed it neatly and carefully in its spot. He adjusted two other statues that had been knocked askew.

  “They’re expensive,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to see you have to buy it, ’cause they have that whole ‘you break it, you bought it’ thing going on.”