Story 195: "Every Sparrow Falling" by Alloway

[wendelah1]

What a nice response we got to "Oak Leaves in October." It's good to remember that there is more to this fandom than just the canon ship.

"Every Sparrow Falling" is a case file that is also an x-file. This is Mulder and Scully doing what they do best, investigating the paranormal. It's been some time since I last read this, but I remember being scared out of my wits. There is no summary from the author so here's the one from Raiders of the Lost Fanfic, Maybe Amanda's old rec site: "Casefile, paranormal, religion, madness. And hot dogs, peanuts, and Cracker Jack."

For Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, it began with a sparrow.

More precisely, with a flock of sparrows. Or, as Agent Mulder had put it, a *fall* of sparrows.

"Clever turns of phrase aside, I imagine this must have been quite painful," Scully murmured, hunkered down by the body. The dead man was sprawled out peacefully, save for the bloodied mats of hair and the bird feet dangling out of his skull. Scully surmised she'd find the rest of the bird buried within. "Looks like it fell beak first, but still...given the impact, the rate of speed had to have been tremendous."

"Indicating a long fall from a high point of origin," Mulder agreed. "Consistent with the recent evidence of lights in the clouds, odd humming noises--"

"Mulder--" she protested.

"Come on, Scully, this isn't the first unexplainable 'deadly rain' recorded," he argued. "You've seen the reports. Hell, you've *written* the reports."

She nodded. "Frogs, rocks, crickets, seas of blood, and the inexorable sacrifice of the first-born..." she trailed off. Mulder was first; Samantha had been second-child. "No, Mulder," she said. "This rain is man-made. Or at least sent by aliens with terrible penmanship."

"What?"

Latex-sheathed fingers plucked one of the birds from its chosen spot of ground. "It's been stuffed," she said. "Hardened with a shellac-like coating. And Mulder--the writing is a dead giveaway." She rotated the bird to face him. Ignoring the blind, dead eyes, he focused his attention on the scrap of fabric sewn to the sparrow's chest.

"Wife beating," Mulder read. Scully could almost hear the gears grind as Mulder shifted from alien-chaser to manhunter. "Scully, pass the gloves."

Read "Every Sparrow Falling", then come tell us what you think.

The link is to IOHO's archive, but if their bandwidth runs out, you can also read it on her old site via the Wayback Machine or at Gossamer.

Comments

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

I need to do a plot reconstruction, for my own benefit if nothing else. If the plot does not strike you as the least bit baffling, then you may as well skip this bit.


Okay, so strange Maria Nicholson and her autistic son Stephen used to fling sparrows - sparrows carrying messages of the sins of the world - up into the air, because it was Maria’s idea that if god saw them he would get rid of these sins.

And then Maria got Gathered by the orange and disappeared.

Years later, adult Stephen built a flying machine so that he could take sparrows up to god, like he did with his mother. Except one of Stephen’s sparrows accidentally hit a man in the head and killed him, thus bringing Mulder and Scully into town to investigate.

Stephen’s statement about Clovis Hill sent Mulder and Scully out looking for the existence of such a place, and what they found was the starved and stranded remains of what was once a whole colony (plague, really) of orange. The orange reached out to Mulder, but he shook it off. Mostly.

All the weird stuff Mulder and Scully found at Clovis Hill had basically vanished the next day, but Mulder put this strange incident together with a letter he’d gotten from James LeBlanc, from another state entirely, who had since committed suicide.

They question James’ brother, Harris, and figure out that his memories have been altered around what happened to his brother. Harris and James were actually on some kind of secret squad that was trying to eradicate the orange. Except that James was sympathetic to the orange’s zombie people, and was letting them go. That was a major fuck up on his part, and eventually he went on a solo suicide mission, trying to right his wrong.

While Scully works on recovering Harris’ true memories (as above), Mulder goes to investigate Theadra, the girl James was supposedly trying to woo shortly before he died. But when he gets there Theadra puts the orange’s version of the whammy on him, and buries him in the orange’s special pit for sucking the humanity out of people.

Scully gets James to call in his special team of “Sparrows” to fight or cleanse or weed-whack the orange, or whatever it is they do to it. She digs up Mulder, who seems okay, even though James tells her the orange will have already leeched the humanity out of him.

Except the orange has gotten to him, and now he is likely on the road to becoming either insane or murderous.

[wendelah1]

This is a very good synopsis.

I'm not sure if "autistic" is how I'd characterize Stephen but maybe that's what Alloway had in mind.

Except the orange has gotten to him, and now he is likely on the road to becoming either insane or murderous.

I think the ending is more ambiguous than that, but those are two of the possibilities. I always wondered if Alloway had a sequel in mind and just didn't write it, or if she really meant the ending to stand. I wish she was around so we could ask her.