Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(14)

Then he stalked away, humming an ominous theme song. The sisters watched him go.

Melissa said, “He’s completely bonkers.”

“Uh-huh,” said Dana.

“He’ll probably be a zillionaire one of these days, though.”

“Uh-huh.”

They went upstairs and stopped at the end of the short hallway where their rooms were. A small window looked out on the street, and Melissa peered through it and grunted.

“Did you see that on the way in?”

Dana looked and saw a pair of workmen in the process of fixing a sign above the big double doors of the old church. Melissa parted the curtain to get a better look at what it said.

“‘Church of the Pure Light,’” she read. “Sounds like some hippies are moving in. Cool.” She let the curtain fall. “Hey, want to come in my room and hang for a bit? We could bully Mom into letting us get Chinese delivered and watch some bad TV.”

“I have homework.”

“The beauty of bad TV is that you can do homework and not miss much. Besides, you look like you need some downtime. You’ve got weird bug eyes.”

“Just tired.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dana thought about it. “Well, maybe. Today’s been a nightmare. I guess I do kind of need to turn my head off for a while.”

“Good,” said Melissa. “And because it was my idea, I get to pick the first show.”





CHAPTER 13

The Observation Room

11:03 P.M.

“He’s really in gear tonight,” said Malcolm Gerlach.

The other man in the small room, a technician named Danny, said nothing but made a small sound of agreement. The room was dark, lit only by the pale glow from a dozen small color TV screens. Each screen showed a live video feed from a different part of town, and on the screens, small dramas were playing out. It was clear that none of the subjects knew they were being surveilled. That was part of the process. They had learned the hard way that direct observation often created psychological reactions that limited performance. Science required precision, and it required an atmosphere of sterility.

They watched.

On one screen, a boy of twelve sat on the floor of his bathroom, arms wrapped around his head, tears and snot smearing his face, chest heaving as he sobbed, feet hammering the floor in panic. In front of him was a wet hand towel. Every once in a while the boy raised his head and stared at it with such ferocity that it was like he was trying to punch it with his gaze.

“Move,” he snarled, but there was a note of pleading in his voice. Of desperation and fear.

The towel did not move.

Most of the time.

On another screen, a seventeen-year-old girl lay on her bed. She was dressed in thick snow pants, a parka, and lamb’s-wool mittens. Her body gave a sharp spasmodic twitch with every fifth heartbeat. The lights in the room were off, but the hidden camera was filtered for thermal imaging, and it caught the steamy plumes of each breath. A meter on the camera recorded the temperature. When the girl had put on the coat, it was sixty-nine degrees. Now the meter read twenty-one. There was another spasm and the meter dropped to twenty.

On a third screen, a blond girl sat on the floor of her bedroom staring into a full-length wall mirror. She wore striped pajamas and had her hair in pigtails.

The image in the mirror showed a little boy of exactly the same body mass, but his hair was black, his skin pale brown. When the girl smiled, he smiled. When she blinked, he blinked. When she bowed her head and wept, so did he.

The men in the room exchanged a look. Yesterday it had been a Chinese girl in the mirror. Last week it had been an adult male with Russian features.

On the fourth screen, a teenage boy sat at his desk doing calculus homework. He worked with a slide rule and a pocket calculator. Books and papers were spread all around him, and he was writing furiously.

The camera was angled to show his eyes. They were totally black. No pupils, no irises, no sclera. Pure, bottomless black. He was not looking at the paper but instead stared straight ahead, looking at nothing. His pen moved quickly as he filled up page after page after page in a small, neat hand. Some of it was calculus—the experts in the Syndicate were positive of that much. The rest, though? It was probably math of some kind, but not any form of mathematics known to man. Every now and then strange symbols would appear in the middle of the numbers and formulae. Those symbols were known to all the experts in the organization, and had been ever since the first ship crashed at Roswell.

On the fifth screen, two teenagers were making out on a rug beside an empty bed. They had their clothes on, but their wrangling was going in an obvious direction. They were so completely lost in their kissing and groping that neither of them noticed what was happening in the room. They never saw the pictures of the girl’s mother turn, shifting subtly on the shelves. They never saw the milky-white film form over the framed picture of Jesus on the wall. They never saw the crucifix glow as it heated and began to melt.

They never saw any of that, but the camera recorded it all.

Gerlach bent forward to study what was happening on the sixth screen.

A teenage boy lay tossing and turning in the clutches of an unbreakable nightmare. His bedroom was empty except for five items. The bed on which he lay, a dresser that was patched with duct tape, an old chair, a heavy metal crucifix that had been bolted to the ceiling above the bed, and a folding knife with a locking blade. The boy turned and writhed inside the nightmare, speaking in some language unknown to the two men who watched. They had forwarded tapes of everything the boy said to the language experts working for the Syndicate. The preliminary reports from those experts were deeply disturbing. They believed that when he was caught up in a certain kind of dream, the boy spoke in whole sentences, but the components of those sentences were made of words from several sources. Only a few words had been translated, and they were from a dialect of the ancient Aramaic language. Not merely a dead language, but specifically the dialect spoken in the region of Galilee, which differed in significant ways from the more commonly used dialect spoken in Jerusalem. The Syndicate linguists believed that the dialect used by the sleeping boy was the specific version of Aramaic that would have been used by Jesus and his disciples.