Disclaimers: Not mine, no profit made, no harm intended. 1013 owns Mulder. The house, and the informant, are both mine, not that I much want to keep either.... Written for the twelfth X-Files Lyric Wheel, the Horrible Wheel.

Cognitive Dissonance
(a.k.a., Is It Not Enough?)

"It's a friendly town."

Fox Mulder kept from jumping with an effort. He turned, with the exaggerated slowness of the truly surprised, to see who had managed to sneak up on him this time. And with a thoroughness usually reserved for Scully, no less.

The man beside him was... mostly in shadow; by some trick of the street lamp, every feature seemed to flicker just slightly out of focus. Mulder frowned, shifted a little, trying for a better angle. But before he could get so much as a word out, the man was speaking again.

"Well. All right. Except for the one night where the knives dwell, and in the dark of the sun on the sixthousandsixhundredninetysecond day is the only place that--," he paused, then blinked, slowly, once. "But you don't want to hear about that."

The... was it a man? He thought it was a man, but... Mulder shifted, again, out of the path of the scant light. Found it didn't help. Opened his mouth to ask, and once more got overridden before he'd quite formed the question.

"We'll start from the end. Which isn't the beginning, not in this Sometime. There's another, a Sometime where the moon stopped shining for good and the lords all came down to earth to play gods; but that's a long time away, and not very next door, so we won't relate how you died there and he didn't, and how you danced on his grave so that he could dance at your wedding. You wouldn't be very interested, anyway."

Mulder raised an eyebrow, formulated and discarded several responses. Then wondered why he'd bothered, as the man -- if it was a man -- he still couldn't seem to get a good look at him -- just blithely spoke over him as soon as he'd opened his mouth.

"But it's a friendly town, for the most part. It really is."

This time, Mulder waited. When no farther oddities were forthcoming, he thought it might be safe to speak, at last. Unfortunately, about the only thing he seemed to be coming up with to say was the highly uninspiring, not to mention unoriginal, "Is it."

Well. At least it wasn't any less informative than the other... creature's ramblings.

A firm nod -- about the only thing about the other man's appearance that was firm, it seemed to Mulder, including, still, whether or not actually was a man. Or even a member of homo sapiens, for that matter. Although sanity wasn't actually in question, either, he didn't think.

Whatever it was, it apparently wanted indications of some sort before it would continue. Mulder seriously considered just heading back to the motel, finding Scully, reporting in, and getting some sleep. Scully wouldn't thank him; but she'd thank him less if he called in in an hour, too. Least of all if he 'forgot' to report in and just showed up at the car for the next morning's farm visits.

Besides which, it looked like fog, his shoes were leaking mud from the fields they'd tramped through that day looking for Kersh's damned fertiliser, he'd been chased by a cow, and he really was just too damned tired to decipher nonsense tonight, even for the sake of an illicit X-File...

But on the other hand, if somewhere in the nonsense was solid information about just what in hell had occurred across the road....

Something like a smile passed over the vagueness of the other's face, and Mulder inwardly sighed. Then again, what had made him think he was actually going to get a choice?

"Except for the old story, and the simple one: from a house comes the sound of an infant crying."

That caught his attention. Mulder looked across the road, at the house he'd been studying before he'd been accosted. "You know what happened there?"

No answer, not until he'd looked back at the... person in the shadows beside him. "People hurry past, they avert their eyes, and they think it is because they cannot hear anything at all. But actually it is because they think they cannot. Problem is, there isn't a baby there. New things open doors, you see, and the house, ah, the house it like its doors very firmly closed. It's safer, that way. No one can see through its doors."

Mulder sighed, looked back at the house again. "So you don't know what happened."

The voice changed. Became younger, or the other gender, or switched register; which it did rather depended on which it had been to start with. And without visual confirmation of the other's status to function as base, Mulder found it impossible to tell.

"They wouldn't give us my father's body. So we fashioned a simulacrum, dowsed with rosemary and dandelions and wrapped with old used twine that had been kept in treble layered socks for three years and eight hours, and not a second more, but maybe a second less; because that was what we had on hand. And we added a drop of water to a pitcher of oil and grass, to keep him dead, and a pinch of cayenne, as well, for flavour, and because he always hated it, and he was supposed to stay dead. And we soaked it, and it soaked us back, very uncooperative; and then we set it on fire and threw it in the most mystical place in the house. It crackled crazily and almost escaped, but we smothered it in thyme, to go with the rosemary, and ginger, because it smells good; and it stayed bound in the shower for hours before it would finally let us bury it."

Mulder blinked. Why did the crackpots all insist on telling their stories to him? What had he done to which misbegotten deity to deserve this? Perhaps he should investigate himself as an X-File; personal magnetic fields and their degrees of attraction for loonies of all depths and varieties... hmm, and add in the inverse increase in strength of the field with his own level of 'fed-up', and he shouldn't forget to calculate the effect of the ache in his joints under the ice in the air...

"You're not listening!"

The voice was that of a peevish toddler, this time, complete with an ear-splitting wail; Mulder jumped, barely stopped himself reaching for his gun. "Er."

The face next to him contained a calm completely at odds with the plaint of a moment earlier, and Mulder sighed. "Look, can you tell me what happened or not? It's been a long day, and tomorrow's going to be just as long. And I'm afraid my partner won't entirely appreciate a description of funeral rites, no matter how thorough or offbeat, as a valid excuse for keeping her awake."

A blank stare. "They died." At least the voice was back to normal again. Or at least, to what presumably passed for normal, for this... person.

And that much, the reports had been clear on. Very clear on. How they'd died, on the other hand... actually, they'd been pretty clear on that, as well: several pages that could be summed up as 'massive trauma due to something damnably heavy dropping on them.' Say, Mulder mused, something roughly as heavy as a house... Except, of course, nothing that heavy could have been gotten back out again and left the house intact in its wake.

"Except, of course, the house."

Mulder threw a suspicious glance at the other... man, but the figure was peering fixedly across the street at the peaceful seeming house, and barely seemed aware of his own presence. Mulder sighed, again. "The house?"

"It's not dead."

Very bland, that, and Mulder frowned. "Is it alive?"

A pause, and then, "Not to you. This chain of death has so many faces, and your eyes are wounded: who knows what you might see? It wouldn't open to you." There was an impression of a shrug, and a last fading comment as the fog rolled in, swallowing the shadowy figure: "Even in the friendliest town, the nasty things live."

And then he... she... it was gone, leaving not even a hole in the fog to mark the vagaries of its presence. Leaving nothing, in fact, except the niggling irritation that somewhere, if only Mulder could somehow sort out the truth from the insanity, he'd been told something important.

All in all, it seemed like a good night to try out that primal scream therapy email Frohike had forwarded him... and possibly check the crime-scene report again, to see if there had been any scorch-marks in the shower or soot on the ceiling.

For all the solution that information would provide him... Hell of it was, he was almost sure that the answer was in there. Somewhere.

He really doubted more sleep would help him find it, though.

~~~ the end ~~~

Notes:

Erm. Yes. Er. Anybody else ever wonder how many answers to X-Files got missed 'cause they came via the insane, and even Mulder just couldn't filter the noise?

Thanks to Rhi for the title, and lyrics, courtesy of Val, were:

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