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campylobacter
TITLE - Crucified Toad (3/5 Chapters)
AUTHOR - campylobacter
EMAIL - campyspornshack at gmail d o t com
RATING - PG-13 (language)
GOSSAMER CATEGORY - T (Adventure)
SPOILERS - Little Green Men
KEYWORDS - Pre-XF
SUMMARY - 10-year-old Scully shows a 12-year-old boy her secret hideout. Who is he, and why is he so mysterious? I challenged myself to write Mulder & Sully meeting as kids, yet preserve future canon.
TIMELINE - set on Sunday, June 16, 1974; Father's Day
EPISODES - Space, Little Green Men, One Breath, Piper Maru, Christmas Carol
SEQUEL - The Pilot episode of The X-Files is the sequel.
DISCLAIMER - My cat eats lawyers.
FINISHED SIZE - 38k / 6397 words
CHAPTER 3: A Big Coffin
Mr. Wharton Oddbottom soon found himself in the care of a kindly gent who placed him in a new, strange pond. Unfortunately, Mr. Oddbottom's mouth still would not open, and he found no way to avail himself of the multitude of bugly morsels placed before him. His hunger unabated, Mr. Oddbottom languished, and once again he went to sleep -- this time, never to wake.
. . .
Dana and the boy stopped beside another branching tunnel that sloped upward. The air issuing from its darkness smelled staler and damper. The boy shined the beam on a single chalked glyph that appeared to be the letters "P" and "L", merged.
"Pluto?"
Dana was impressed that he knew a planetary symbol. "Yep. It's the name of the tunnel. You wanna go first?"
"It looks a little smaller. Will we both fit when we get there?"
"Sure. It opens up wider. Go ahead."
When they reached the end, a small, boxy stone chamber accommodated them enough for the boy to extend his long legs across the room and to sit up straight without hunching his head and shoulders as he had in the tunnels.
"It sure feels good to stretch," he said, making popping noises with his neck.
"How tall are you?" asked Dana, lighting a candle from her secret stash.
"Five-eight-and-three-fourths, last I measured. If I grow some more this summer, I might play forward on my basketball team."
"You're shorter than my big brother. Want some M&Ms?" She passed him a brown bag of candy.
"Thanks." He shook out a handful. "This place seems like it really was built to be a hideout. Or a big coffin. I wonder who made it and what it was for? It's not draining anything. And it's not concrete, like the rest of the pipes. It looks like it's carved from solid stone."
"Maybe the workers made it for equipment, and then ran out of money. My dad complains about that kind of stuff happening all the time. I like these tunnels 'cuz my big brother is claustrophobic, my sister thinks they're poop sewers, and my little brother is afraid." She placed her chin on the lens of the flashlight, attempting to transfigure her face into eerie shadow. "I told him there's a giant, blind toad in these pipes, hunting for eyes, and if you're really quiet, you can hear it hopping around."
The boy scoffed. "What kind of wuss would want to believe such a stupid story?"
Without warning, the candle went out; complete darkness drowned them in a swift, rising tide.
"Holy crap. I can't see," squeaked the boy, coughing on what he was eating.
Dana held her breath, trying not to laugh, because it was she who had extinguished both flashlight and candle. This was the first time she had ever been in the chamber without light; however, it seemed a different place in complete darkness, hostile and unfamiliar. Her eyes held the blazing afterimage of the flashlight's beam, a fading kaleidoscope of swirling, menacing phantasms.
"Missy? Missy, this is not funny. Where's the flashlight?" She heard him fumbling noisily toward her. One of his groping hands grazed her knee. "C'mon. Quit screwin' around."
She was on the verge of yelling "Boo!" when a strange, loud noise clattered in the tunnel.
"Oh crud," she whispered, frantically flailing out to contact the other kid for assurance. "Did you hear that?"
They sat without moving in the darkness, listening. The gritty, crunching sound receded down the tunnel, as if a heavy, round object were clumsily rolling down the concrete tube. Dana swallowed and tried to listen past her pounding heart.
"Aw, dang. Crap. Shit," she groaned. "That was my Magic 8 Ball. You must've knocked it into Tunnel Pluto. It's gonna keep rolling down Tunnel Neptune until it reaches Tunnel Uranus."
"'Tunnel your anus'? When it rolls into Uranus, I hope it cracks open and poisons you with its toxic blue liquid."
Dana turned on the flashlight with shaking fingers. Light chased away most of the darkness, but somehow, the shadows seemed heavier than before. The boy was sulking sourly against the opposite wall.
"Sorry I scared you," she said. "But I got scared, too. I promise not to do it again."
"There's something wrong with this place," he muttered, as if he had not heard her. "There's no reason for anyone to build it. It's just creepy. This room and the connecting tunnel are older than the other tunnels. It just doesn't make sense."
Dana nervously re-lit the candle. It was one of those clear, tall glasses filled with garishly-colored wax that her mom had bought to light at the altars in church. The brightness that it cast added an immediately comforting glow to the chamber. Dana lit another candle: a small, squat votive that reeked of fake strawberry. The shadows in the chamber became less threatening.
"How much junk have you dragged in here?" he asked, finally noticing the contents of the room in the brighter light.
"This old music box, because my radio didn't get any stations here," answered Dana. "Five, no, seven candles. Matches, chalk, pen, pencil, M&Ms, that 8 Ball, a book bag, and those books." She pointed to a stack in the corner next to him. "That's what I was going to show you."
The boy leafed through the pile. "What a load of kid stuff," he complained. "Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret? Girl crap. Ripley's Believe It or Not #9? That's old; I've got all of them up to number twenty. The Dunwich Horror--"
"That's not kid stuff," interrupted Dana.
"Yeah, whatever." A magazine caught his attention. "Hey! Hand me the flashlight." Although the language in which it was published was Italian, the photographs required no translation.
Dana smiled triumphantly as she passed him the light. "I'm gonna be a porno girl when I grow up."
The boy ignored her, and became engrossed in flipping through the pages. "This shows way more than Playboy magazine does," he mused, staring at the naked women spreading their legs and showing off their painted fingernails. He looked as though he had never seen anything of its kind.
"But I tell everyone that I wanna be a science teacher," she continued. They call me 'Dana-Braina' and 'Shorty', she thought, but they never call me pretty.
His eyes never left the pages. "Teachers are boring and they don't make any money. I'm gonna be something exciting, like a pro basketball player or an astronaut."
"You gotta have good grades to be an astronaut."
"I do. And all my classes are advanced." He continued to stare at a photo of a grinning woman wearing nothing but a man's necktie. Dana saw that it was the page on which she had added a moustache, gap-teeth, and the phrase I EAT POO CHUNKS.
"So maybe you could be a doctor instead," suggested Dana. "And help others."
"Help others? Who cares? I wanna distinguish myself." He finally turned the page.
"Being a doctor is distinguished."
"There are jillions of doctors in the world, but only a few people ever get to go into space," he said, squinting at a blonde with black pubic hair, penciled-in devil horns, and happy faces on her breasts, the nipples serving as noses. "I wanna fly in a spaceship someday."
"That's probably not as fun as it sounds," Dana mumbled, peeved that the boy wouldn't comment on her enhancements to the magazine.
He didn't reply, and kept flipping pages. He never said a word about the photo she had accurately labeled with the proper terms OUTER LABIA, CLITORIS, and PERINEUM.
Dana became bored after a few more minutes. "I stole that magazine from my brother. He whacked off with it."
The boy dropped the magazine as if it had suddenly caught fire. "The brother who you wrote 'GAY!!!!! GAY GAY GAY!!!!!!!' about?"
"Huh?" Dana failed to connect his reference to her old graffiti.
"Never mind. Got any more candy?"
"Yeah, but if you eat any more, you'll get thirsty, and I don't have anything here to drink."
"You just don't wanna share."
"I can do what I want. It's my fort."
"Don't your parents ever worry about letting you play alone like a sewer rat?"
"Do military guys kidnap kids?"
The boy closed his eyes and turned his head away. "Sure. Whatever. I'm splitting." He started crawling toward the tunnel. "You and your unholy fort deserve each other."
"Hey! Gimme back my flashlight, you dork!" Dana lunged for the boy, who didn't bother putting up a fight. In a few seconds, he had left the chamber and began fumbling his way down the chilly darkness of Tunnel Pluto. Dana clutched her flashlight, which began to dim from prolonged usage, and listened to the slap of his palms and the drag of his shoes as he crawled away.
To be continued in Chapter 4 of 5: By Unwelcome Degrees (publishing Tuesday 22 June 2010)
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