| abstract
| - At 5:04 a.m., a man searches through a littered house in Brick Church, Indiana, looking for money as he passes a bloodied corpse of an elderly man he obliquely refers to, cursing. When the looter hears a scratching noise nearby, he becomes puzzled and follows the sound to find it is coming from inside a locked cellar, where a voice pleads for assistance. Smashing through the door with an ax, the man steps inside the cellar. He is still confused as to who is inside the room until he switches on a light bulb and sees the thin figure of a frail, blond woman, who voices her gratitude as she sits, doubled over, on the ground. When her body apparently goes limp, however, the man approaches, curious to determine if she is okay. She hatefully glares at the man, revealing herself to be a grisly ogress, and he stares back at her, terrified and agape. At 3:20 p.m., the exterior of the same house bustles with activity as FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully arrive, introducing themselves to a sheriff who accompanies them from their car to the house as Mulder mentions that a missing woman has been found after seventeen years, not having aged a day. Inside the house, the sheriff tells the agents that the farmer who lived there, Virgil Candless, has already been taken to the morgue with a crushed skull and that the farmer was initially suspected of having been the victim of a robbery homicide until, as Mulder concludes, the content of the building's basement was officially found. The agents inspect the body of Robin Benty, the woman who had been missing for the past seventeen years and now lies dead in the basement. She is the same blond woman who previously frightened the looter but her facial features now seem like those of a perfectly healthy yet lifeless eighteen-year old, the age she was at when she disappeared. Scully determines that the woman must have died within the past twelve hours and informs Mulder that she has found no visible signs of trauma. The sheriff reveals that fingerprints were found on the ax handle and guesses that they belong to Virgil Candless' killer, a conclusion that Mulder agrees with. As he later drives Scully and himself away from the house, they discuss possible theories, although Mulder is initially reluctant to participate in theorizing until he has learned more about Virgil Candless. Scully suggests that elevated levels of a particular anti-aging hormone could feasibly account for the seemingly unaged condition of the woman's body. In Pecksburg, Indiana at 6:24 pm, the looter screeches his truck to a halt in an alley, where he meets a bald man. Although the truck driver seems eager for something in particular, the bald man refuses to hand it over without sufficient cash. The truck driver threatens that he will simply take it instead, puzzling the bald man, who is then strangled by the truck driver. At 8:01 p.m., Mulder and Scully meet in an examination room where Robin Benty's deceased body now lies. Scully informs Mulder that she has found nothing to indicate the victim's cause of death and Mulder reveals his discovery that the farmer's name was actually Arthur Rakey, not Virgil Candless. According to Mulder, Rakey had been awaiting trial for a series of strangulation murders when he had escaped, by killing a guard, only hours before Robin Benty had last been seen, prior to her disappearance, being helped by an unidentified man with her parked car. Mulder comes to the conclusion that the man was Arthur Rakey and that he had then secretly imprisoned Robin Benty, explaining why she had been in his cellar while he had been living under the guise of a pseudonym. Scully disagrees with Mulder's theory, citing Benty's mysteriously healthy appearance as opposing evidence. At 10:13 p.m., the truck driver enters a grocery store, passing a scantily clad female customer. After he makes a purchase, producing a large wad of cash, the young woman follows him outside and sexually propositions him. At 10:41 p.m., Mulder and Scully are with the sheriff at Franklin County Sheriff's Station. Both the sheriff, who refers to the killed farmer as "Virgil", and Mulder remark that the sudden mellowing that the farmer supposedly underwent seems inexplicable but their conversation is interrupted when the sheriff receives news of another murder. At the scene of the crime, Scully at first suspects that the recent victim's skull was also crushed, like that of Virgil Candless, but the sheriff tells her that the murder was really a strangulation - the victim was the bald man who was killed by the truck driver. Scully notes that the victim's throat was crushed and Mulder immediately realizes that the killer used his bare hands, mystifying Scully as to how he arrived at that determination. The sheriff notifies the agents of the official findings that the killer was probably a particular local drug addict named Terry Wintrid and that the victim had been his dealer. Mulder suspects Wintrid of having been at the farmhouse, making a connection between both the farmer's skull and the dealer's throat having been similarly crushed. Mulder believes that, when Wintrid smashed open the basement door in the farmhouse, he unleashed what the farmer had been keeping imprisoned there for many years. At a motel in Pecksburg, Indiana at 1:11 a.m., Wintrid and the prostitute are lying in a disheveled bed. The woman stands and is reaching into the back pocket of Wintrid's jeans when he catches her. Even though she tries to excuse her behavior by claiming that she was having trouble sleeping, Wintrid slaps her face hard with his bare hand, threatens to kill her if she touches his money again and orders her back to bed. Once again, Mulder talks with Scully as he drives himself and her along a road. He argues that the sudden initiation and cessation of Virgil Candless' murderous impulses supports a theory that the farmer had been possessed by a force of evil that had, following Robin Benty's abduction by the farmer, dwelled in her body in the basement for years. When Scully wonders why Benty did not attack Wintrid, if she had indeed been possessed, Mulder suggests that the force had instead found a better host in Wintrid, leaving Benty to die. Meanwhile, the sheriff answers a call from the prostitute, who warns him about Wintrid having threatened her. Outside the motel, Mulder and Scully quietly rendezvous with the sheriff, who has gathered a team of his deputies there. Mulder offers to enter the building first, with the sheriff's men behind him, and the sheriff grins at Mulder's demonstration of bravado before leaving the agents alone. Mulder explains to Scully that, if he is correct, Wintrid will refuse to surrender until shot dead and the evil force could jump into the body of any one of the deputies without the others knowing. Mulder therefore intends to chemically sedate Wintrid but Scully insists that she accompany Mulder, in case he misses. The agents and deputies force their way into the motel, startling both the prostitute and Wintrid, who takes the prostitute hostage. Despite Mulder's attempt to help Wintrid, the sheriff shoots him dead and the freed prostitute runs to the safety of the sheriff. At FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C. two days later, Scully informs Mulder in his basement office that, according to the prostitute's social worker, she is fine. Scully also mentions that the sheriff's deputies likewise seem normal and that the girl in the basement was found to have had elevated levels of the anti-aging hormone that Scully suggested earlier as a possibility for the girl's unaged appearance. Scully considers that the case may not have actually been an X-file at all, believing that some evidence of the force's progression to a new host would have shown up if it had existed at all. Unbeknown to Scully, however, in the grocery store where the prostitute first met Wintrid, the prostitute now looks at the result of a pregnancy test that is over ninety-nine-point-nine percent accurate and sees that it is positive.
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