"There is an ancient Indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it.  My people have come to trust memory over history.  Memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth.  Beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise.  Their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth." -- Albert Holstein, "The Blessing Way"

Places and objects hold memories, too, above and beyond computers, and palm pilots and data disks.  The rings in a tree trunk tell a story; so do ice cores, fossil records, or trash heaps.  Places remember events, too:  the graffiti on a bridge, the memorial plaques scattered along buildings, roads, and wharves, the ghosts in old theaters or haunted houses, the echoing cannon fire of battlefields, or the cold spots and odd voices in old cemeteries.

In my experience, a skeptic about hauntings is a man who hasn't yet found the place that vibrates at the correct frequency to match his spirit.  But for all our years on this planet, and all our research, the spirit may be the greatest mystery left to be explored, and the people who insist on combining religion and science are as much the reason for that as the people who insist that some things science, or religion, should not investigate.

Possibly for as long as we've been men, we've wondered:  does the spirit live on when the body dies?  Theology has its differing opinions, and science has stood mute on the subject (other than the law of conservation of energy, which has never been applied to bioelectrical systems), but there seems to be no mistaking death.  As the senator so famously said about another subject, we may not know how to define it, but we know it when we see it.  Small children recognize the difference between sleep and the final sleep instinctively; pets know it as quickly; but no one's ever identified, or quantified, that subtle difference between life and its lack.

Do the most intense emotions, the welling of bioelectric impulses in the brain, somehow find a medium that can record them?  I don't know.  What I do know is that items can store impressions from sheer exposure and repetition, but death and destruction are usually involved when places remember.  Maybe that's because you can't have a dead remnant of life without both life and death.  Maybe it's because emotions usually run high around death and if the earth's electromagnetic field can act as a recorder, you still need sounds that were loud enough to begin with to get a good recording.  Or perhaps, in much the way fog requires both moisture and a temperature differential, the change from life to death is a necessary condition to achieve a 'recording.'

What I know for certain is that there are places where the very ground seems to play back previous events to a degree that can be easily documented even for skeptics... and that other places, which should be haunted if there's any justice in the world, have no record of any kind, for 'psychics' or the rest of us.

Hauntings always seem to involve spirits, though.  Not simply animate objects, but... people.  I've heard of ghosts in the machine, but no one's ever called the FBI -- or the Weekly World News -- to report a haunted typewriter, much less a spirit in a laptop, or a demon lose on the Internet.

No bodies were found in the ashes of my basement office, only the char and the draft-stirred wreckages of years of FBI files.  The flames were only hot enough to destroy papers -- not even hot enough to melt any of the metallic stored evidence, although the heat turned the plastic evidence bags into a fine coating on everything that survived the fire.  A body, however, would have been the last, necessary piece to force me out of the FBI and into a courtroom, and would have left me nothing to lose.  My enemies aren't sure enough of where I've been, or what I've seen, and I think they're far too sure that my memory is both photographic and that I could prove that to a court's satisfaction.

That uncertainty on the Consortium's part explains why they've let me work here on the weekends, trying to piece together fragments of files between protective sheets of glass.  What I can't explain -- to my satisfaction or anyone else's -- is who is haunting my basement, or how many former people.  If they were all people.

If my arsonists ever find out what's going on, though, I'll know.  I'll find out when I come in one morning to the lingering smell of burnt incense from an exorcism... or a dead priest on the floor, if my ghost(s) decide to strike back.  I suspect it would be the latter.

If impressions linger in places and sometimes on objects... what happens when you first assemble a mass of objects from crime scenes, and then subject them to more energy in the form of heat?  When gold necklaces, steel handcuffs, silk ties, and love letters sealed with a kiss or (in some of my worse cases) blood are allowed to sit together, only to burn or nearly melt?  When reports written by hardened cops who managed to be horrified anyway are seared to ash and ghosts of letters that vanish as you touch them?  When items taken by a serial killer, or a mass murderer, or an arsonist who loved his accelerants and the pretty edges flame added to a building, all go up in smoke that eddies, trapped in one small room?

As far as I can tell, what you get is a lot of pissed-off ghosts -- or faded copies of the original recordings -- who want their comfortable homes back and their stories left on the record.

I've barely managed to salvage one report in one hundred by putting paper between glass and re-typing those words I can read... but every morning I come in and there's another X-File recreated in my word processor or emailed to me from my own account.  The case file references are complete; the words and phrasings match what I remember.  Even the cross-referencing numbers are correct, sometimes going back past the X-Files into the U's, from the earliest years when the Bureau filed these occurrences as 'Unexplained.'

Thanks to my memory, I've always carried the X-Files inside myself but perhaps that's not the only place they cast a shadow.  There are ghosts in the machine, in my machine.  Perhaps the events in those innocuous manila folders were so extreme, so strongly felt by the victims and the witnesses, that the associated emotions permeated paper and fabric and metal and refuse to leave, even now.

Or perhaps Albert's right, and the truth is a fire that burns up more brightly when men try to douse memory's flames.

I don't know.  I read the reports each morning, looking for places where my memory disputes the text on my screen.  When I don't find it (and I haven't yet), I print the reports out.  On the weekends, when I'm not supposed to be in the basement but I'm not on the clock, either, I hunt for any lingering evidence that should be filed with that report.  The X-Files are slowly accumulating again, as is my reputation for tenacity and sleep deprivation.

The Gunmen hide copies of each newly re-completed file for me in cyberspace as I finish or verify it.  I don't ask where they're hiding the data, and they don't ask how I'm typing them up so quickly.  Instead, they invite me over for pizza and beer occasionally, as if to make sure I'm resting occasionally.  Sometimes I say yes, if only so they won't start tracking my whereabouts and looking into something I suspect should be left alone... for now.

The myths are all clear on one detail:  you don't look.  Psyche and Eros, the cobbler and the leprechauns -- this is a gift horse.  I'll check the reports for errors rather than make Troy's mistake, but I won't look for the source while they're still helping me.

I can wonder, though, as long as I don't act on it yet.  Most days, though, I wouldn't even care to lay odds, let alone a bet.

Perhaps my enemies have a spy who's feeding me data.  It wouldn't be the first time, but the data's been correct so far.

Perhaps my predecessor had a widow who thinks his work should go on.  If he did, Bureau files have no record, but the stories in the X-Files can make a man cautious about what he lets into bureaucratic documents.

And perhaps the files were, and are, haunted.  It would explain the chill in the basement that was never this pronounced before.  And, as before, maintenance hasn't been able to do anything about it.

You can't fight fire with fire.  This time, the fire burnt the official record... but it's unleashed an unofficial record.  It may even have given me new allies.

The Consortium thinks I've lost my ammunition.

I think I'll let them think that.

~ ~ ~ finis ~ ~ ~

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