Chapter Text
It’s been a long time since I rock-and-rolled
It’s been a long time since I did the Stroll
Oooh, let me get back, let me get it back
Let me get it back, baby, where I come from
It’s been a long time, been a long time
Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time
- Led Zeppelin, Rock and Roll
WASHINGTON, D.C. - July 6, Saturday, 1:30 p.m.
From attic crawl space through the sanctuary and tiny office behind the baptismal tank, inside the baptismal tank, Mulder had inched his way around the chapel.
He took his time on the stairway leading to the basement. Rorschach-like blotches on water-stained drywall held his attention, as did the graffiti near the furnace. For a good time, call — The phone number was illegible, but Mulder spent several minutes trying to decipher it.
He had purposefully left the rock room for last. As he had done the first time he examined the basement, Mulder sat down in the middle of the cobblestone floor and simply looked around. Loops of old electrical wiring hung from naked beams that braced the sanctuary floor above. The ancient mortar between fieldstones in the foundation appeared to be discolored and crumbling. More crumbling residue accumulated at the base of the massive boulder at the center of the room.
Mulder got up and went to take a closer look. The area around the rock had been swept clean on his first visit to the basement. He wiped a finger through the crumbles on the floor, then lay flat on his stomach to examine the base of the rock. How had he missed this?
His pocket began to buzz. Mulder wiped his fingers on his trousers and found his phone.
It was Skinner, sounding almost relaxed and genial. “Abernethy is dead. He didn’t wake up after surgery. You’ll never guess what they found in his stomach and intestines.”
“I’m guessing lots of roughage. Dirt and bits of rock?”
The boulder had been carefully chipped away along the bottom edge. Mulder could see a couple of raw scars near the recent residue. The interior of the scars showed a different composition than the rock’s exterior dull, brown-black color. It looked like quartz crystals with iron-oxide inclusions.
“How do you know this stuff? The doctor said there’s this disease —”
“Pica. He was eating his rock. Bree tried to tell us he was adding something to her food and the communion mix.” Mulder dipped his finger into the crumbles then held it to his tongue. No surprise, it tasted like dirt. “I’ll do a little door to door and see how the neighbors feel about Abernethy now that he’s dead — as a rock.”
Skinner ignored the joke. “Can you reach Ms. Webster and Frohike? It should be safe to bring her back?”
“Probably. The newspapers will get the story, and Frohike will see it. He’ll call me.”
Something rumbled under his feet. Truck passing outside? Mulder touched the rock and jerked his hand back. The surface was hot. He rolled away and got to his feet.
“Ah, Skinner … I’m in the chapel basement, and something is happening.”
“Something?”
Dust fell as the structure above his head began to tremble and creak. As Mulder backed away, the boulder flushed with color until it was a uniform iron-red. Heat radiated from it, enough to make him break out in a full-body sweat as he backed toward the stairway.
“It’s the rock. I think it’s getting ready to roll.” Mulder took the stairs two at a time. There was a loud crack, and half the stairway disintegrated behind him.
“Sometimes you really piss me off, Mulder. Can’t you just tell me, in plain English, what’s going on?”
“Call 911. The chapel is coming down.”
Pieces of ceiling plaster fell on Mulder as he ran through the sanctuary. He slipped on wooden flooring that heaved under his feet and nearly fell down the entry stairs. He made it onto the lawn just as two outer walls caved inward.
Smoke curled above the teetering building, followed by party-colored flames erupting from the corner near the furnace. When the porch began to buck, and the lawn started dancing as if some giant Jules Verne tunneling contraption was idling beneath the sod, Mulder left the lawn and went to stand by his car.
It was a smart move.
The vibration in the ground went from idle to full throttle, maybe an 8 on the Richter scale judged by his California experiences. Mulder grabbed the car door to steady himself and watched the one-day-late, daylight Fourth of July display. He didn’t have to wait long for the barrage finale. The remaining upright pieces of the chapel exploded as a glowing, fire-sheathed comet launched into the sky.
Mulder slid into his car just before a rain of dirt, lawn, wood, and stone pelted down with enough force to dent the hood and crack the windshield.
“Mulder? You okay?”
Skinner’s voice seemed distant. Mulder groped around, realizing he’d dropped his phone.
“I’m fine. The chapel won’t recover, though. Abernethy’s rock just left the building … and wherever it’s going, it’s going there fast.”
LAKE MICHIGAN, Saturday, July 6, 2:00 p.m.
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic
— Van Morrison, Into The Mystic
“We need to pull it up as far as we can. Away from the water.”
They slid the boat up the beach a good 30 feet before Bree let go and collapsed in a heap on the sand.
“You all right?” Frohike retrieved Bree’s jeans from the boat and came to sit beside her. “You look as cold as I feel. I could never swim in Lake Michigan.”
Bree waved water-puckered fingers at him, bent over to one side, and vomited what looked like a large quantity of water and stomach acid full of tiny, glittery specks. After a final dry heave, she took her jeans in trembling hands and tried to pull them on.
“Hold still.” Frohike helped get her feet in the holes and start the process.
“Thanks.” She huddled up against him, shivering. “I panicked. We have time to go to the cabin, shower, and find dry clothes before …”
“Before? Did you find something on the bottom?” As he pulled his wet shirt down to cover his belly, Frohike realized his nipples were sticking out almost as far as Bree’s. Dry clothes and a hot shower sounded like heaven.
She laughed, a ragged sound. “I saw something — a connecting doorway, I think, down where dad must have found it. Funny thing is, it looked really familiar.” Her roughened, breaking voice pulled hard at something inside Frohike. Shock, fatigue, and grief changed her usually animated face into a mask. The urge to take her in his arms and comfort her was overwhelming.
“What did it look like?”
Bree pushed the hair from her face and shook her head, spraying him with a cold shower of secondhand lake.
“It looks like a big, brown Rock.”
Frohike unloaded the car while she showered, then took his turn standing under gloriously hot water. When he left the bathroom, Bree stood near the open cabin door, looking toward the lake.
“I’m hungry, but I don’t think there’s time to find food.”
“Almost back to normal. What do you anticipate happening?” Frohike rummaged in his duffel and found three remaining candy bars and a granola bar. Bree took two candy bars.
“Beach,” she said around a mouthful of chocolate. “Tell you there.”
Cloud cover had moved in during shower time. It felt like the wind off the lake had dropped several degrees, and choppy waves changed the color of the water to forbidding gray.
They sat side by side, nearly touching, with a view of the lake and the group of standing stones. Before half his granola bar was gone, Bree took it from his hand.
“Piglet.” Frohike held the last candy bar away from her. “Swallow, then talk.”
She bumped her elbow against his ribs and rubbed her head against his shoulder. “Looking back, I see clues. The place dad grew up, where I was born, where mom and I ended up. Dad’s ability to do what he did — an ability I seem to share, to some extent. Abernethy’s personal history before he became the chapel’s Rev, which indicates he is a pedophile but never a charismatic cult leader.”
Frohike worked it through, frowning. “You think the commonality is the neighborhood around the chapel?”
“Not the neighborhood.” Bree shivered. Her cold fingers twined into his somewhat less cold fingers.
“I did a lot of thinking during my headache hours in bed. Some remembering. I think there are doors everywhere, Fro. Some people, some animals, can crack them with will and desire, but it takes an exceptional mind to open one far enough to actually step through and walk a shadow path.”
Low, black clouds had moved to completely cover the sun. An image from Frohike’s current Tolkien calendar surfaced to momentarily unfocus his gaze. November, Across Gorgoroth complemented both the forbidding lakescape and Bree’s narrative.
“Many paths to tread, through shadows to the edge of night …” Frohike quoted softly.
Another long shiver ran through Bree’s body. She continued, “If you couldn’t do it by will alone, but knew it could be done and went looking for a prefab doorway, natural objects would be a good place to start. Mountains, glaciers, and oceans have linear continuity. They exist long enough to provide anchor points in time and space. Old growth forests, caves, lakes … any number of gates, dumbwaiters, and revolving doors may be found if you know where to look.”
Like Bree, Frohike followed the clues. “You think the door your dad found out there was a rock? And the connection to the chapel rock is —?”
Bree laughed, on the edge of hysteria. “I was tripping balls when I first saw the Rock in the basement. Upon later, sober consideration, I thought the thing was so alien and apart that no interaction could occur. Now, I suspect it saw something in me it had been waiting for: a seven-year-old child’s fragmented memory of the moment she’d seen a missing piece of itself.”
“You said you were on shore when your father disappeared.”
“I never admitted to remembering, but I tried to swim after him, to make him come back. I kept diving. They had to pull me out.” Her fingers tightened, then relaxed. “I think the chapel Rock and the lake rock are pieces of a once larger whole. They were separated somehow. They want to reunite. The chapel Rock is stronger. It sent me to get a GPS fix on its other half. It used my eyes out there. I didn’t like the way it felt.”
There was no way Frohike would be able to write this adventure for publication. If he kept his journalistic aloofness intact, Bree would come off sounding like a lunatic.
Who was he kidding? His aloofness was already compromised.
“So, there are two rocks in two separate locations with hundreds of miles between that want to come together?”
“Yup.” Bree pointed up at the cloud cover. “This should compensate for missed fireworks.”
LAKE MICHIGAN. Saturday, July 6, 3:25 p.m.
I laughed at love ’cause I thought it was funny
You came along and you moved me, honey
I’ve changed my mind, this love is fine
Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire
— Jerry Lee Lewis, Great Balls of Fire
It wasn’t every day he saw an Industrial Light & Magic special effect plummet, whistling, from the sky.
Frohike shaded his eyes with one hand. The spheroid inferno fell toward a spot off the end of the standing stones and hit the water with a concussive vibration. The impact shook the earth and sent a cloud of volcanic-quality steam into the air.
Lake water rose as a budget-sized tsunami swallowed the shore, filled their rowboat with water, then subsided into hissing breakers.
“Together again,” Bree said. “Let’s go …”
She broke off as a long, slow shudder moved through the ground beneath them.
On one long past road trip, Frohike had watched an eruption of Old Faithful. Steam and water had fountained across surface water on the low down, then intensified to greater height before eventually dying away to ominous, impending quiescence. The shit happening on Lake Michigan looked a lot like Old Faithful.
Bree buried her face against his arm. “I think they’re going to relocate.”
He tilted his head back a bit and watched the water dance through half-closed eyes. The object’s exit was less dramatic than its entrance but still jaw-dropping. Far larger coming out than going in, wrapped in swirling vapor instead of fire, it burst from the lake as if catapulted.
“Is it gone?” Bree asked.
“It’s either on a high arc to the south or trying for orbit.”
The air was heavy with the smell of shredded water plants that covered the beach past the normal water line, as well as a slight odor of ozone. Thunder rumbled, long and low.
“It’s going to rain.” Frohike stood, brushing debris and sand off his butt. “Let’s get somewhere warm and dry. We should probably find food before the TV crews get here. And I’m going to break silence and call Mulder.”
Karol’s Kabins, Saturday, July 6, 6 p.m.
They sat on the floor near the wood stove, feeding bits of driftwood into the firebox, eating pre-made sandwiches and chips, drinking hot chocolate they bought in the lodge store. From hot to cold and back again.
Summer in Michigan. If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour.
As Frohike had predicted, a couple of news crews turned up. Briefly. The uniform lowering wet grayness did not make for great photo-moments. After interviewing the lodge owner and a few guests, the local journos had high-tailed it away.
Outside, rain beat against the windows and the cabin’s metal roof. Inside, they were safe and warm. And relaxed.
With the news that Abernethy was dead, the chapel destroyed, and Mulder’s observations that the congregants were no longer mind-controlled hit squads, Bree’s constant defensive nervous tension seemed to dissolve into quiet, thoughtful weariness.
“You want to know my favorite part of the trilogy?” She licked marshmallow from her lips. She had changed into a sweatshirt the color of raspberries and wrapped an old fuzzy blue blanket around her shoulders.
“Eowyn’s masquerade? Her battle with the Witch King?”
“I do love that bit. But my favorite part is when Aragorn and Arwen wed. Long, hard years of unresolved sexual tension handled with a poet’s delicacy. This may not be the exact language, but it was something like — he took her hand in his, and together they went up into the High City. And all the stars flowered.”
Bree set her cup aside and reached for his hand. “When I first read that, I was about 12. It made me feel gooshy inside, to think about why the stars flowered.”
Her fingers were warm now, and strong. Frohike took a deep breath and wondered if he was about to make a tragic, embarrassing mistake. He pulled her closer and put his arm around her shoulders.
Bree nestled into him, resting her head on his chest.
“Mulder says now that Abernethy is dead and your old neighborhood is back to normal, the FBI doesn’t need you any longer for a trial.”
“Yeah. The relocation deal is off.”
“What will you do?”
“Work hard. It will take me longer, but someday I’ll have my bookstore. Maybe I’ll even sing for my supper.” She tipped her head up to look at him and ran her free hand through her hair. “Hey, Fro. I’m hungry.”
Frohike groaned. “I think you’ve eaten everything we bought. The nearest drive-thru is probably at least …”
“Wrong page. I know it wasn’t high poetry.” The corners of her lips and eyes quirked into a decidedly feline smile.
What was the opposite of gooshy? Frohike had a good idea. He took another deep breath and tried to suck in his stomach. “Despite the difference in our ages, you’re an adult. If you say there are stars out tonight …”
It was a good kiss. Surprisingly effortless. When it ended, Bree was sitting on his lap.
“Early to bed, early to rise,” she whispered. “Do you need help getting off the floor, pops?”
“Probably.” Frohike laughed and tightened his arms around her. She was so slight, yet the hip his hand covered was sweetly curved. “Book girl. Cat girl. Pain in my ass girl.”
“No girl am I. You look upon a woman.” She braced her arms against his chest and stood, offering him her hand. “Like I said, not high poetry.”
Frohike took her hand and made it off the floor without grunting. He jotted a mental note to send Mulder a thank you card and tasteful selection from his video library when he got home.
The disappearance of Bree’s clothes would have made time-elapse photography seem poky. She grinned at him, winked, and stretched. “What are you thinking about?”
It took him a moment to find words. Finally, “Poetry. Fantasy, Reality. The place where those things conjoin.”
“Conjoining sounds good. You want help with that zipper?”
“Sure.” Her hair was soft under his chin. She smelled of orange blossom, vanilla, chocolate, and wood smoke. “I was thinking you remind me of a poem.”
His pants fell away.
“Tell me,” she demanded. Her tongue traced cursive letters over his arm, up his neck.
Sensations caused by Bree’s tongue were impairing both his ability to think and ability to speak. “Flowers are easy,” he managed to say.
“Excuse me?” Bree pushed away. She slapped his shoulder lightly. “Easy?”
The bed was wedged in a corner against two log walls. Frohike had given it a trial bounce earlier and found the mattress acceptably firm. He dropped his glasses on the bedside stand and pulled her onto the bed.
“Now you’re on the wrong page. The flowers are easy to paint,” he quoted, working at his own oral calligraphy.“The leaves difficult.”
“Oh, Fro,” Bree said, breathlessly. “I like that. I like that a lot.”
…when he saw her come glimmering in the evening, with stars on her brow and a sweet fragrance about her, he was moved with great wonder … this is the ending …
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King