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  The Falls - Chapter 4 
 by menme  

 

THE FALLS

Chapter 4 - Fall from Grace

Wilson had told him once that love - true love - was the refusal to think
of another person in terms of power.

The forest rushed by as he drove, northern firs caging the lonely highway.
The moon chased him.

The oncologist had been talking about a case he had, a man who refused to
allow his fatally ill wife to go home and die, browbeating her into
fighting to the end instead, but Wilson's words had fallen into him, as
they sat there in his office, still on the third floor back then, a year
before his infarction, and had taken bitter root. Stacy (ah, but he
couldn't think about Stacy now, the night pressing his windshield so
reminiscent of her eyes, the place to which his highway led a vanishing
point, as though once arrived he would cease to exist) - Stacy who near
the end had said All you know of love is power, Greg.

A rest-stop where he might have turned and headed back loomed out of the
night, a gouge of gravel road looping through the trees, and he passed it
going eighty.

Where do you stop fighting for someone and let their will take over, he
had wanted to ask her. Was it love to let someone walk away?

After Cooper's remark he had driven to Snoqualmie Falls, his thoughts as
churned as the mountains of water shooting past the ridge, and had watched
the mist claw upward. Waiting for a sign perhaps, thinking of his hands in
Amalie's hair. Knowing no sign would be forthcoming.

The turnoff that Lubovsky, with grumbling-bear embarrassment, had
described to him shot out of the night, the clapboard church on the
corner, and he braked hard and turned. Another ten miles on a smaller
road, the trees so near their branches seemed to reach for him, the cage
closing in, then he came out onto a large parking lot before a rambling
two-story structure that might once have been a barn. Audis mingled with
junkheaps in the parking spaces. A flickering neon sign over the innocuous
door told him he had found One-Eyed Jack's.

Men came and went without looking at one another. A teenager just exiting
braced his hands on the wall, as if fearful the place would tumble down on
him, and puked beer across his cowhide boots. Inside, the lowlife growing
from the barstools studied him. No casino in sight. He had stopped at an
ATM back in town for some large bills, anticipating a filtering system,
and now he flicked his wad with the fifties at the bartender, who nodded
and directed him straight past the bar to a back door.

The crowd in the casino was a different one, the music unobtrusive.
Chandeliers lit red satin. Croupiers smiled at him. He watched a roulette
wheel turn for awhile, drawing in the scent of good cologne and
desperation, the sweat of men losing too much money, then made out the
floorman, also unobtrusive, who would be the second step in the filtering
system. Flicked his money at him and was accompanied to another door,
which had to be unlocked and revealed a lushly carpeted stairway to the
second floor. He peeled off a fifty and stuffed it in the guy's shirt
pocket. Personal favor time. "I want a redhead," he told him.

The room he was led to was baroque lace, red and gilt dominated by the
obscenely large bed in the center. He stood with his back to the door
waiting, studying a long view of himself in the ornate mirror. He felt the
brass head of his cane, like ice as he leaned on it, his hands cold. His
breathing didn't seem to be working right. He had misunderstood Cooper,
that was it. Some redhead would come in, no resemblance even to Amalie,
and he wouldn't be able to do it with her, a cool five-hundred out the
window, because his balls felt sucked up into his abdomen with the
pressure, disgust presenting as a near-violent spasm, a withdrawal, and
not only there, a tightness further up in his chest. Could a heart shrivel
up and die? Good question, doctor.

Then the door opened and Amalie slipped in (he watched in the mirror,
blinked once), still patting down the sexy-nurse costume she wore,
oblivious to him, white skirt so short it flashed a hint of pantyless
buttocks, a halter top that left the nipples free and pinched upward, pink
and inviting, stupid nurse-cap on hair that fell to her shoulders. A
memory of her bra strap flitted through his mind, as though it mattered
anymore, that bit of white peeking out, so private, how the intimacy had
seemed solely for him, while she had been leaving the hospital in the
evenings to come here and let it all hang out for strangers. No, his heart
wasn't dead - it was beating hard with rage, something inside him already
shouting at her, then she turned and saw him, their eyes meeting in the
mirror. She gasped.

The look she wore - not embarrassment, more a longing to die rather than
know he had seen her like this - left him speechless, because it meant she
cared. Cared what he thought. It meant everything, the reason she was
shaking her head, her hand on her mouth in horror, turning back to the
half-open door, as though having only appeared to him in a mirror she
could make it unhappen if she just left, make him think it was a dream,
then he was spinning, yelled "Stop!" and she froze.

He hobbled to her. Slammed the door with his cane. She wouldn't look at
him, twisting to avoid his eyes, a rabbit in a trap, small half-sobs
saying, "Please, no," that cut below his shouted words.

"What is it, Am? What is wrong with you?" He tried to take her arm, too
much force. "Look at you -" She broke away. The nurse cap fell to the
floor. "You're a doctor, for chrissake!" The words sounded like vomit,
nausea and rage contorting the muscles of his face until it hurt. "You're
an intelligent beautiful woman - what the fuck are you doing here?"

"Just leave me alone! You didn't have to come here, dammit - why couldn't
you have just stayed away?" She sounded like a child. Her eyes fell on
his, tears big, and she leaned back against the door, beating at his hands
that plucked the costume in disgust. "Oh why couldn't you have left things
the way they were?" The were was a wrenched sob.

"Oh right!" So loud he scared himself. They would come for him in a
minute, throw him out bodily when they saw he wasn't there for business.
"I was supposed to take my closet tidbits from you when I could get them,
right? When all I was getting was sloppy seconds! From loggers who'd had
it in you the night before. Goddamn you, Am!" She was shaking with sobs.
"Goddamn you - I should have left town when I had the chance -"

"No," she moaned.

"The guy at the hospital who was rude to you-" he saw in her sudden
grimace that he was right - "he wasn't making those snide remarks because
he'd heard rumors. He'd been here. With you." Revulsion left him weak. He
leaned one hand against the wall. "Jesus Christ." Fools didn't come any
bigger than him. You got suckered in by the ones just fucked-up enough to
hide it, why was that, you got used to lips on yours like it meant
something, the press of a body so sweet against you it makes you want to
cry because you haven't had much good in life. Because it feels so right
for once. "Why?" His voice came out gravelly. She was crying so hard she
couldn't speak, her eyes - so suddenly like Laura Palmer's - saying Please
don't. "It was insane enough to imagine Laura Palmer coming up here. But
you..." Another sob escaped her. "You don't need the money for some coke
habit. You're not fucked up inside like her. What kind of sick thing do
you get out of this, Am? Please, just tell me, I have to know."

She was muttering below her tears. He had to quiet his breathing to hear
her. "I am, I am." So much an echo of what she had said in his apartment
that it froze his blood. "I am sick inside. Oh please I - I think I'm
insane. Oh Greg help me, I think I'm going crazy.

His arms were around her before he knew what was happening. Her crying wet
his shirtfront. Slowly the tears subsided, becoming only breathy hiccups
between which she mumbled things that might have been explanations, "I
don't know" and once, "The pain." Images still raced through his mind, the
same pictures of male hands on her that had plagued him when he thought
she was seeing someone else, but magnified now a hundred times, men who
tore at her clothes or bent her over their laps and spanked her, anything
they wanted to do because they'd paid for the power over her. He tried to
shut them out. Power was something else. He put his mouth near her ear and
rocked her gently. "Talk to me, Am."

They sat on the absurd bed. She hugged herself, cradling her hands under
her arms, and moaned, "Don't look at me."

"I'll look at you if I want to. I paid for it."

She gazed away for moments, until he thought she wouldn't speak. The depth
of their silence funneled the sounds from other rooms to them, a client
going at it, the bed squeaking, muffled laughter. When she spoke, her one
word shocked him. "Power." His chest burned. "Some people think love is
power. I was married to a man like that."

His throat clenched. Maybe he didn't want to know.

"I met Garret in college. We were the perfect couple. From the outside at
least. From the inside, well, there were things that bothered me, but he
was so suave and smart and the sex was...incredible." No, he didn't want
to know. "Then we were married. It was all so perfect. But, after a few
years, the things that bothered me started to - take over. Garret had
always had an arrogant streak, machismo, and suddenly the sex had to
be...demeaning."

He stayed very quiet.

"I was so insanely in love with him still, that I let it slip. I became
someone who would do -" her breath seemed to run out " - anything for him.
He slept with other women. He didn't care if I knew. He hurt me -
physically - in ways that wouldn't show and I let him, I wanted him to
because I thought it would keep him with me." Her eyes, gazing at nothing
across the room, were huge. "I was sick. On the outside this successful,
with-it doctor, and on the inside just...rotting. Loving someone who only
knew that one way to express it." The sounds from the other room had
stilled, the client having shot his wad. "Then I got pregnant."

Her voice was a dull hollow. He had his hand on her arm.

"It was a shock, an accident, but I became obsessed with this stupid
stupid idea it would change everything, that we would suddenly be like
other couples, a family. When she was born, she was so beautiful, you
can't imagine. A beautiful tiny..." A shudder ran beneath her skin. "When
she was three months old I killed her."

The words seemed to come from another place, a corner of the room, so that
he almost looked away. He thought he had heard wrong.

"Garret's fooling around became worse after the birth. I had changed; I
didn't want to play his power games anymore, I was obsessed with thinking
we could be normal. He got farther and farther away from me and it was
killing me. One Saturday afternoon, while the baby was napping." For a
moment it seemed she wouldn't go on. "While the baby was asleep, we had a
fight that ended up in bed. The first time in a long time. It was better -
worse - than it had ever been, and I let him do it all because I was so
happy for that attention. Because it meant he was back with me. It meant I
was the one. I let him hurt me and humiliate me and he lost himself in it,
like some kind of demon was riding him, and I was glad. I remember it
running through my head, He loves me, he loves me, like a mantra. All that
power - it was as though he was sucking it out of me, out of the air
around us." Her whisper was so low, a wind far away in trees, that he had
to watch her lips. "Feeding on hurt. When it was over, we both went to
sleep. Isn't that strange?" She turned to him, barely seeing him through
tears. No, he wanted to say, then realized she was trying to comprehend
the long-gone moment, palpate it as a doctor might a lump, looking for the
malignancy, a moment that had defined her life ever after. "We slept for
hours. When I woke up I remember wondering why the baby wasn't crying.
When I went in...she was dead."

He thought he had never heard words spoken with such sadness. Her head was
bowed, red curls falling, wet with tears, around her face, and he thought
how he had never wanted to see her hair down like that. He leaned his head
into her shoulder. "Oh Am." You didn't kill your child.

"She was...cold." She gave a tortured shrug. "Crib death. That tells you
nothing, you know? It can mean anything. She was born healthy, normal
birth weight. They never found any reason. They just said she must have
been dead for...hours." She paused, locked in horror. "About the time we
were doing it."

"You didn't kill your baby, Am."

"It happened while I was doing those things with Garret. Caught up in
trying to hold onto something that was sick and dying anyway. All caught
up in my own needs."

"It's the survivor complex. Death is incomprehensible, someone has to be
at fault, and so you make it yourself. What about -" - he didn't want to
say the name - "your husband? Wasn't he at fault more than you?"

"He pretended to care for a while, but he didn't. We got divorced three
months later. I quit my job, threw some things in the car and just drove."
So familiar. "The first week, in a motel room, I -" She fumbled at the
white-lace cuff that had replaced her leather armband in the nurse
costume, hiding the scar. "I thought I couldn't go on, but when I made the
first incision...something stopped me." She was lost in memory again.
"Something black in the corner of the room. I walked out, to the motel
office, to get help. The nice kid there, I scared her to death, dripping
blood and shouting at her to call 911. And when that was all over, I just
- drove again."

"And ended up in the woods."

She was looking at him now, challenging. "I went through every available
man in town here the first few years, Greg."

"I know."

"I'm not sure why. I was looking for something. It wasn't love, I had
decided I would never have that because I didn't deserve it. I think I was
hoping for the opposite of love, another Garret maybe, who would make me
feel so bad about myself that I would start living again inside just to
defy it. I was dead, you know. A patient in the clinic told me where she
had got her fingers broken. I think she saw something in my eyes, because
she slipped me Jacques' phone number."

They had come full circle, to the thing he couldn't talk about, all the
questions he wouldn't ask her: how often she drove up, how many times she
had slipped into a room to find - as she had with him - that it was
someone she knew. How she could have kept on. As though awakening from her
story into his, he became aware again of his heart, still thudding with
anger. How she could have kept on once she started seeing him.

"You think I'm sick, don't you?" She was challenging again, and at the
same time pleading. "You want to know why letting men do anything they
want to me would stop the pain? How I could keep coming up here when you
and I -"

His hand hard on her wrist stopped her. "Just don't."

She jerked her hand back. "I want to. I want you to know. How everything
started to - change after I met you." He closed his eyes. "You were the
first man in years to look at me like I was a - a person. Something real."
The word she was looking for was respect, he wanted to tell her. "I was in
denial about you. I thought I had to punish myself for even thinking I
could be happy with someone. I had to keep coming here." He thought of her
look, always surprised after their sex, as though afraid to admit it made
her happy, and the pain burst inside him. No, you didn't have to keep
coming here; something made you.

"I was so scared of you finding out, because I would lose that respect. I
would lose you. When Benny Wright started saying those things in the
hospital - when I thought he was going to say the truth right there in
front of you - I was so scared that the only thing I could do was walk
away. Do you know why I told you to meet me in the operating room right
after that? I thought I could just get you out of my system by doing you,
by being a slut with you like I had with every other man, just get it over
with and I'd stop feeling what I did for you." He couldn't look at her.
"But it didn't work. I fell in love with you. I love you, Greg."

If a heart could hold anger and joy - stunned exploding joy - at the same
time, then her words did it. You could hate someone for hurting you, he
supposed, want to slap them and at the same time yearn to put your arms
around them and crush them right through your skin because their words
mean so much. He felt his hands on the edge of the bed and told himself he
wouldn't move.

"You see now why I - I wanted you of all people not to order me around."
Yes. "Tell me I'm morally bankrupt."

He tried to control his voice. "You're morally bankrupt."

She looked like he'd slapped her, then she looked down, relinquishing the
moment, and fumbled again with the lace cuff. "You know, sometimes I think
maybe I really died in the suicide attempt. That this is hell, this town."

"`The devil made me do it'? There's no Satan that made you do these
things, Am." With his head he indicated the room.

"There is. Something here in these woods. As though there's something evil
in the ground. People used to believe that if God was in heaven, then
Satan was in the earth. I've sensed it here. Like a damp...rot. One that
can rise up and make people sick. I come here to Jack's more often when
there's fog between the trees."

The statement was so odd it chilled him, as odd as every other insane
moment that had happened to him since Ronette's awakening. "And they used
to cut up bodies looking for the soul," he told her. "Never could grab
onto the slippery little bugger, though. Now we have MRIs and it still
beats our pair of aces." She was watching him. "Maybe they should have
looked for the devil inside us." That was where it was, wrapped around
their intestines or behind their hearts. The black place in his brain.
They had come from the ground, mud and clay, and a seed had been
encapsulated in them as they evolved, a bit of root caught twisting at
their cores, dirty and spewing poison. Or growing into a devouring beast,
as it must have in Leland Palmer. Insane thoughts, that left him tired.

"It's in you too," she murmured. It was as though she read his mind. "You
know who murdered Laura, but you do nothing about it. Palmer drugged his
wife so he could rape his daughter at night, had probably been doing it
for years, until it got out of control and he killed his own child. You
have the tox screen that shows the mother was slipped something, but
instead of just talking to the FBI agent, you drug the guy so you can
plant a hypnotic suggestion in him." Her voice was matter-of-fact, as
tired as he felt, no longer challenging. "Make him think in the right
direction. Then you wake up Ronette to question her and you don't even
make sure there are any real witnesses there in case she says something
important." She turned to him. "Don't you see? It's the same...impulse
that drove me here again and again. It's what makes you shy away from what
you know. That keeps that brain of yours from working right."

"That puts me to sleep," he murmured. Lights were going off in his head,
an image of himself kneeling by Cooper's bed as though drugged himself,
Sheila slumping into lethargy as Palmer entered the hospital. A pillow, so
soft as to be intangible, smothering them all. Fog. The log lady had said
it: they all slept too well. "I spoke to Leland Palmer tonight," he told
Amalie. "I think he killed Jacques Renault." The thought that the beast
fogging his senses had kept him from seeing that connection earlier was
frightening.

She was staring. "Jacques Renault is dead? But he only had a shoulder
wound from the raid -"

"Someone tried to make him eat a pillow earlier this evening while the
nurse was out buffing her nails. It had to be Palmer. He must have thought
that if Laura's aberrant lifestyle got out, they might start looking at
him as a suspect. Or maybe Renault knew he was lurking around here after
Laura that night." Another memory startled him. "Amalie - Leland Palmer
was in the Great Northern Hotel the night Cooper was shot. I saw him walk
by a minute before I went up and found Cooper in his room." The lights in
his head hurt. She was leaning into him like a child, part of the
blood-red silk sheet drawn up to cover her breasts. They were as spent as
though they had screwed, he realized.

"Go to Cooper," she whispered.

He looked at the baroque clock on the table by the bed, a porcelain
shepherd and shepherdess doing it doggy-style or, he supposed,
sheep-style. It said two a.m.

"Tomorrow," he told her. "First you're walking out of here and coming to
my place with me. And you're making sure they understand here that you're
never coming back." She seemed to be falling into his gaze. "Right?" For a
moment he thought she wouldn't answer, then something like peace spread
across her face. She nodded. "If you can't tell them, I will."

"Oh no, Greg. You can't let them know why you came here. If you try to
assert some kind of right to me, they'll beat you up." Her voice said
she'd seen it before. "Go out the way you came. I can tell them I'm sick
and leaving early. They'll let me. I'm...valuable. I'll change and get my
car out of the back and meet you."

He would have to let her. Relinquish that power, to gain it back. He took
his hand from her arm and nodded.

Back out through the bar and to his car, firs that made blue-black
skeletons in the moonlight while the lights of Amalie's car following
behind skittered over him like a beacon, then they were on his lumpy
mattress, holding one another, no thoughts of eroticism, bodies falling to
sleep against each other. He cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.
"Say it again," he whispered, almost ashamed. Like a child begging for a
treat.

"I love you."

****

Fog lay heavy on the road in the morning. The police station was a
low-slung building set among firs at the farthest reach of the main road.
Lights were on in the back. It was six a.m. The hotel had told them Cooper
went to work early.

Amalie waited in the car. He was directed by a shocked-hair and painfully
inept deputy to a conference room where Cooper and Truman bent over
documents while a blond secretary took notes. The table held more donuts
than he had ever seen in one place outside a donut shop.

"You expecting the entire Seattle police force?"

Cooper looked up, pleased. "Dr. House. You're up and out early. Could I
interest you in a bear claw?"

"You can take a flying fuck at your donuts." The blond girl's mouth fell
open. "I'm here to tell you something. I want you to listen."

While he spoke, the tension draining from him with the words, Cooper
studied the tox screen of Sarah Palmer he had handed him. He told them of
Laura's odd reaction in the clinic room to the suggestion her mother might
have been drugged and Ronette's hysterical words that could only be
memories of the night of the murder. "Leland Palmer killed his daughter."
Cooper looked at him. "He was abusing her, it got out of hand, maybe when
he found out she worked at One Eyed Jack's, and he waited till she left
there one night and followed her. He was probably all wrapped up in his
little sex slave and couldn't take the jealousy -" The secretary looked
down in dismay.

"Leland's a respected member of this town," Truman spit out.

Cooper's hand on the sheriff's arm told him who was in charge. "Our lead
doesn't point that way, Dr. House."

"What lead - the demon one?" He eyed Truman.

"Why, yes."

He longed to swat the barely interested smile off Cooper's face,
preferably with his cane. "Listen to me. A murder like this, everyone
looks into the family first, everyone in the normal world out there would
suspect the father as a matter of routine, everywhere except in this damn
toontown. So what world are you living in? His wife was being drugged, in
her home, night after night, and I've just shown you proof -"

"But everyone lies, Dr. House." Cooper shrugged. "Sarah Palmer could well
have been lying about having taken it herself. It does not constitute
proof of anything." He laid the tox screen aside.

"Dammit, you're all asleep! You can't be that numb to things around you.
There's something wrong with this town!"

"I would be the first to agree with you."

"But you go off looking for dreams and demons and -"

"Dr. House, there is a demon loose in this town. If he's in Leland Palmer
at present, as you seem to think, we'll find that out. But the demon's
presence permeates the town. How else would you explain Amalie Parker -
possibly the most intelligent woman in a hundred-mile radius - working up
at One-Eyed Jack's? You did go and find her there, didn't you?" Cooper
paused. Truman was pretending not to grin behind a donut he had brought to
his mouth.

Damn you all. His cane was up before he knew it. One swipe across the
table and plates of donuts careened onto the floor, sending sugar glaze
and jelly across the papers and shattering china. They leaped out of the
way, a shout popping from Truman. The girl backed into the corner, eyes
wide.

"Yes, goddamit it, and that has nothing to do with it!"

Cooper's frown lasted less than a second, then he was smiling again. He
dusted sugar from his pants. "Dr. House, I am conducting this case to the
best of my ability. You apparently think I'm missing something."

"Yeah, a brain!" His hand was still tight on his cane.

"Leland's not in town anyway now, should I even want to question him. I've
been told he left last night to stay at Pearl Lake a while, where he grew
up." His rage shriveled inside him, a phrase beating like a bad song in
his head, You're a fool for coming. "Laura's death has been hard on
Leland, Dr. House. He needed a rest. But I wouldn't arrest him anyway.
There's nothing to indicate this is a family matter. There was a very
similar murder down the coast a while back, and now another girl is
missing from town here. It forms a series."

He watched the secretary creep back to her chair near him, avoiding his
gaze as she might that of a rabid Doberman. She started picking up donuts.
Outside the window the dawn was still half dark. Passing car lights
flashed by. He felt tired. "Someone's missing?" he echoed.

"Maddy Ferguson. Laura's cousin from out of town. She stayed with the
Palmers a while after the funeral. She left town here last night, but
never arrived home in Seattle."

"Oh, Leland's really keeping it in the family, isn't he?" No response.
"You said you had leads, Agent Cooper?" Go on and cave, you fool. Go along
with their inane theories.

"In communication with the spirits -" he groaned and it seemed to fuel
Cooper's enthusiasm - "I've been told we have to look for someone named
Bob. This Bob may manifest as a spirit himself or take over and act
through a human, much the way a mara does." Cooper held out a paper from
the table and brushed chocolate glaze from it. It was a police sketch of a
man, gauntly intense, the features blank and yet somehow contorted with
what one might have termed hunger, or sadistic amusement. He looked about
forty. Hair, which the artist had streaked to represent gray, hung to his
shoulders.

He felt his stomach tense. "Where did you get this picture?"

"Both Sarah Palmer and I have had visions about Bob and we worked with the
artist."

"That can't be. I've seen this guy around town." The room froze; in the
silence he could hear his own breath. His heart - that had stilled after
his donut demolition - was racing again. He grasped at the elusive memory.
Night wind in the trees, a car pulling away from a curb. "This guy's not
from a vision. He was here in town..." Agent Cooper's knowing look dawned
on him. All of them were watching him, he realized, as he might have gazed
at a dying patient who was in denial. "No." He banged his cane on the
table. No one jumped. "No, I am not having visions. You'd love to co-opt
me into your insane, supernatural humbug, wouldn't you?" Cooper smiled.
"Well, you can take your mysticism and cram it up your donut-holes - this
guy's real, whoever murdered Laura is real, and it's as simple as that!"

"Then you've had no unusual experiences since this started, Doctor?" The
question, so matter-of-fact, was one he couldn't answer because the images
suddenly flooding his head had slipped down his throat and were
threatening to choke him: his trance at Cooper's bedside, the stupefying
moment in the hospital when the wind-up toy of reality had seemed to wind
down as Palmer entered the lobby. His cane burning his hand. No, it wasn't
that simple, because his brain hadn't been working right from the start, a
cancer in it breaking open and spewing poison, something from the past
buried so deep he hadn't been consciously aware of it, but if that was the
supernatural, then he was the surgeon general. No, it was only himself,
the same way Leland Palmer in some psychotic way was this Bob and probably
had been since a man named Bob had raped him as a child. The incredible
power of memory and experience locked deep in everyone, for good or evil.
Not the supernatural - the subnatural. Depths.

No satan inside. Only us.

He realized he had been staring at the floor for several moments. They
probably thought he was praying. "No," he whispered. He looked up, and
then louder: "No." Cooper seemed pleased. "This is not about the
supernatural." His words rang through the room. "This is about a father
who raped and murdered his own daughter. It's real, it's possible, it
happens in the real world. You want to create an excuse for the guy by
referring to some vague evil that got inside him somehow? Give it a name -
Bob - like you might a pet rock? Go ahead and do it. Call it psychosis or
brutalization - but don't call it the supernatural."

"And where did Bob come from?"

Was there an answer? Bob was created in a cabin at the edge of a lake, in
the act of evil perpetrated on a child... He tried to remember the news
article about Palmer's kidnapping. And if the evil had been in the rapist
to start with, where had that come from? Himself abused perhaps,
twisted... A spiral of violence stretching backward into the past and
forward forever. It made him dizzy.

"These spirits inhabit us," Cooper intoned, "and some call them psychoses
or mental illness. Look at it your way or look at it mine. The effect in
the `real' world is the same. Laura is dead." Humanness leaked through his
voice, a sadness. "Maybe Maddy Ferguson too. We've been told by a spirit
that Bob is inhabiting someone here who is in a house of wood with many
rooms. That that is where we have to look."

"We thought of the Great Northern Hotel," Truman piped up. His eyes
narrowed. "But if you leave out the wood part, that could be the hospital,
couldn't it? Got a lotta rooms."

Cooper threw the sheriff a humoring grimace. Some theory (but they
couldn't mean that) which the FBI agent did not entirely concur in.
"You're new here, Dr. House." (Oh yes they could mean it). "If the
father's the first to be suspected, then the out-of-towner is the next.
You're the man from another place. And you were present at both my
shooting and Renault's murder." His voice was firm but sad. "You do see,
don't you?" He saw that they seemed to recede as his perspective shifted,
hunter and hunted not what he had thought. His breath was fast again. "You
always seem to be where something is happening, doctor, sneaking around to
give unauthorized treatments - to me, to Ronette, our only witness, who
because of you is now in a coma beyond reach. You conveniently find
Jacques Renault and move items, ensuring your fingerprints will be on
everything-"

"He might have still been alive -"

Truman's voice was grim. "Sheila said the monitors had flatlined. There
was no need to disturb the scene."

They blurred in his view and he realized he was shaking his head, in a
jerky movement that was almost a twitch. "Leland Palmer was there too,
both times. I saw him in the hotel before Cooper was shot, and he was at
the hospital last night." His shuddering breath made him sound like a
recording. He wouldn't have believed himself if he were them.

"Which you've amazingly failed to mention so far. Why, even there in the
hospital last night, one would think that item of information would have
come up." Something held me back, confusing me. "You see, do you not,
doctor, that this insistence on Leland Palmer, a man beyond reproach,
could simply mean to us that you are trying to draw attention away from
yourself? That we have to take that into account?" Cooper's gaze was hard.
"My dream did show me a tall man who was really a midget." For a moment he
seemed lost in thought. "A midget spirit crouched down inside him."

"Amalie Parker -" His alibi the night of Laura's death.

"Dr. House, when did you first come to Twin Peaks?"

Another shift in perspective. It was the end of their casual conversation
and the first question in an interrogation. The sudden certainty that they
had been watching and discussing him for some time.

You're being controlled, he wanted to scream at them. Don't you see that?
And yes, if it meant he had to believe in spirits - though he would have
called it lethargy, the evil inherent in them trusting Palmer's
white-washed facade and automatically distrusting the stranger - then it
meant the spirit of the place was misdirecting them. The magician's trick,
make sure they concentrate on the wrong hand, the wrong suspect, while the
culprit vanishes.

If they suspected him, it meant they were without any will or knowledge at
all.

They were so still, the three facing him, they might have been a tableau.
Puppets had no will. They played the roles assigned them. He had to take
control. "Doesn't matter when I came here," he answered Cooper's question
very slowly and clearly. "Because I'm leaving now." He had begun to back
up. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the door. "I'm walking out of
here. I hope you understand that."

The only movement in the room was Cooper's head tilting, the bird-like
frown.

More than puppets. The buzzing in his head made it hard to think, their
sudden quiet, even the sounds from the road beyond the window hushed. He
had the sudden insane thought that they did not exist outside of him, that
once he walked out, they would freeze in their positions, like a paused
tape, as they already seemed to be doing. Winding down. Add solipsism to
your symptoms of insanity, doctor. "Yes, a hospital has a lot of rooms,"
he heard himself saying. No response. His backward steps had reached the
door. He turned and caned his way, trying not to think, or to think only
of reaching Amalie, past gray halls and doors (had he come that far into
the station?) until he stood on the front steps, the light thickening
overhead into day that looked as if it might turn stormy, a normal
overcast morning in the real world.

Amalie was not in the car.

****

The treetops swayed with a rhythm she knew.

She stood at the edge of the forest and watched them. Her heart had almost
stopped. The moment she had slipped through the door at Jack's, already
burying her own identity deep inside, where it would be safe from
degradation, as she always did, until it was over - and then seeing him,
the shape in the mirror so unmistakable...she had known then what it was
to have a heart simply stop dead because it couldn't go on. What it meant
to not want it to go on, because it would be easier to die than to face
him. A feeling she hadn't known for years, not since she had stood over a
crib and shaken a tiny shoulder in horror. Knowing the irretrievable
slipping away.

He had stood shouting at her for so long, or it had seemed so long, the
shock on his face like a scalpel, words stabbing, while she had wanted him
to take her in his arms and say he understood, that it had become another,
more perfect punishment. He was purging her, drawing the poison. And it
had all come out.

She felt new. Saying `I love you', she had seen the look on his face
before he could hide it, happiness gushing like an orgasm, blue eyes wide
and soft, and she had known they were in a new world. One where the spell
of evil on her was broken. One where he forgave her.

The forest before her rustled. It had beckoned as she sat waiting in the
car, thinking about him, the fact that he would stay with her after all,
and she had got out and walked the fifty yards to the forest's dark edge.

Watching the trees sway in the rising wind.

She saw Greg come out of the police station and stop at the sight of the
empty car, his mouth open. She had never seen him frightened before. He
hobbled to the passenger side and pressed his hands against the window.
I'm right here, she wanted to call. I'm not going away.

"Greg -"

He spun. Relief flooded his face, and then a wary gaze beyond her to the
vast black wall of fir behind her, as though he thought it might swallow
her up, so odd it made her feel like one of those heroines in an old
horror flick, always too dumb to grasp the warning of the monster creeping
up behind them, the mummy or the werewolf; in a moment a horrendous hand
would descend on her shoulder. She turned. Nothing was there.

He seemed to collect himself and hobbled to her. "A storm's coming," she
told him, as though it explained why she had left the car. Wind blew a
strand of her hair loose and he tucked it back for her. He seemed
agitated. They stood for a moment watching the woods. "Sometimes, when
I've been driving back from Jack's -" she felt him tense - "I've seen
lights in the trees, where no road could be."

"Smugglers. Canadian drug runners." She waited for him to go on. "They
didn't believe me." The rising wind threatened to drown his voice.
Whatever had happened in the police station had not been good. "They - let
me know they suspect me instead."

She stared. "That's insane."

"Of course it's insane."

"But I could tell them that we... I'll go in now and tell them."

"No." His hand on her arm stopped her. "Why would they trust you? You're a
hooker." The casual way he said the word hurt. She couldn't look at him.
"Cooper already thinks you're some kind of schizo. And it wouldn't matter
anyway. There's something...wrong with them. They're drugged, like all the
rest of the town. It's in the donuts or the pie or the coffee." Or the
ground. She remembered their conversation from the night before. No, he
wouldn't accept that, he had to have a material explanation. "I said to
Krumberg once that it was encephalitis lethargica, but it's something
worse." He was shaking his head. "Are other places like this?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"I was in my glass tower of a hospital so long, Am. I don't know what the
real world's like anymore. Do they ignore evil like this in other places?
Is it so hard for people to combat it?" He seemed to be asking himself.
There was no answer.

A gust of wind shook them hard and bent the firs. "Come away from the
trees," he told her. Superstitious after all. They weren't going to eat
me, she almost said.

They sat in the car and watched the light-dawning day darken again with
storm clouds. "Most people are broken in some way, Greg."

"I know that."

"You and I are...more broken than most. It's why we ended up in this
broken town." She thought of his infarction, as he had told her about it,
the girlfriend who had left him when he needed her. But there was
something else. "When that boy - your patient - died, Greg..." She didn't
know how to express it. "You lost all your confidence. Everything you
believed about yourself. You need to believe in yourself again. If you
think you're right about Leland Palmer, don't let them change your mind."
Don't let this place change you.

He stared at her for so long that she had to reach out and touch his face,
as though to smooth the doubt away, and it seemed to decide him. He
started the car and drove. She didn't ask. The road out of town was
deserted and they hit the highway without seeing a car. The first drops of
rain spattered the windshield. It didn't matter where they were going,
only that they shared this space, silent beside each other and sealed from
the world outside. She watched his hands on the wheel, still tense. "It's
all about children, isn't it?" she murmured. He covered his surprise.
"About the children who died while we were supposed to be taking care of
them." For him, she suspected, it was more than his patient in Princeton,
something much older, so deep it was as buried as death, but she wouldn't
say that; they weren't that far and might never be. She remembered his
incoherent ramblings after she had woken him from his trance at Cooper's
bed. Child sacrifice, he had said. Yes, that was it. Children sacrificed
to adult problems, offered up, and abandoned. "Her name was Jade," she
said. From the weight of his hands on the wheel, she knew he was listening
hard. "She was so beautiful. I don't know why I was so...in love." Why the
grief goes on. "She wasn't really a person yet, with a personality and
all. She was just. Beautiful."

A turn-off rose before them and he pulled over and looked at the sign. It
said Pearl Lake. "That's where Leland's gone," he told her. "I don't know
what I plan to do. Confront him, bring him back. But I want to go there."
It sounded insane. She would go where he went. She nodded.

They looked at each other for a long time, as if to acknowledge just how
insane they really were, then he started the car back up and took the
turn-off.

****

End of Chapter 4 - Reviews are always welcome !! The next chapter is the
last...

  
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the
ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House
(and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property
of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I
am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive
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nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the
show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.