X-Files: Trust No One

by Tim Lebbon

  Scully and Mulder stood before an upright freezer chest that had been white once but yellowed with age. A bright orange extension cord fed it electricity. A teenage boy stood with them. In theory he was part of the audience, but he looked too bored and too much like Cope for Scully to believe he was here by chance.

  “After it killed fourteen sheep in one night,” said Cope, “the local men said enough was enough. The old sheriff weren’t doing nothing, so they decided to track down the creature themselves. My Pop and the rest of them spent two days hunting this monster before they cornered it not far from here. It’d just torn up two more cows and left their innards spread across a field.

  “Pop drew down on the monster with that very shotgun,” Cope said, waving his arm up at a cobweb-covered weapon on one of the beams. “Gave it both barrels, right in the face, and it dropped like a stone. After a bit of debate, they decided to drag the body back for a trophy, or maybe to sell it to a science college or something. Pop was never clear on that part of the story. But he was very clear about what happened next.”

  Cope took a step closer. He looked Scully in the eye, then Mulder, and then his gaze slid back to Scully. He ignored the teenager. His voice dropped into a conspiratorial stage whisper.

  “Y’see, two shotgun shells to the face hadn’t killed the Beast of Little Hill, just knocked it out. Skull like an elephant.” He tapped his own forehead for emphasis. “They were just coming in through those very barn doors when it started to wake up. Flexing its claws. Twitching its tail. Pop, he knew they had seconds. He ran over here with one of his friends, Kip Witness, and they dumped everything out of the freezer.”

  Scully glanced at Mulder and mouthed the words “Kip Witness.” She punctuated it with a skeptical eyebrow.

  “The men dragged the monster over and forced it in this very freezer before it could wake up all the way. It took all five of them to hold it shut, and the creature fought the whole time. Pop said it was like trying to keep a grizzly bear in an outhouse. They would’ve lost if they hadn’t got the tow chain wrapped around it.”

  Cope gestured across the barn to a rusted set of links that hung from another beam. A hand-painted sign next to it read THE CHAIN.

  “The creature fought for another twenty minutes or so, but it was getting weaker the whole time.” He placed his hand on the freezer. “Airtight, y’see,” he said with a sage nod.

  Mulder returned the nod. Scully bit her tongue. The teenager scratched his ear.

  “Pop wasn’t going to risk it not being dead again, though. They took the chain off, lay the freezer down, and started pouring water over the thing. It took him the better part of six weeks, doing a bucket a day, but when he was done the Beast was frozen in a block of ice almost a foot thick on every side.”

  He took in a deep breath and placed his hand on the freezer’s handle. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I give you... the Beast of Little Hill!”

  Cope pulled on the handle and lurched forward as the door refused to budge. He tugged again. Then he gave the door a kick, slamming his heel into the edge. The door scraped forward and sprayed flecks of ice across the barn floor. A second kick knocked it loose. The door swung wide and banged open on its hinges.

  A few wisps of cold air rolled out. Scully and Mulder stepped forward. The teenager yawned and glanced out at the yard.

  A block of cloudy ice filled every inch of the freezer. It had cracked some of the plastic panels. One corner was a few dozen shards held in place by the frozen water.

  The thing inside the block was the size of a large dog, a German Shepard or a Great Dane. Scully put its weight at about ninety to a hundred pounds. It seemed hairless, but it was hard to tell through the layers of ice. The dark eyes looked oversized for its skull, but it was possible she was just seeing empty sockets.

  The front limbs were longer, at the very least straighter than the back legs. It gave the figure a somewhat simian stature, but she couldn’t say anything for sure. The ice blurred the creature so much it almost looked like one of Mulder’s Bigfoot pictures.

  “Is your father around?” Mulder asked the farmer. “Is there any chance we could ask him a few questions about that night?”

  “Regrettably, sir,” said Cope, “the good Lord called my father home seven years ago this summer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Scully wondered if the thing in the ice was a goat or maybe a small calf that had been the victim of an over-creative taxidermist. The second leg on her side was close to the surface, and there she could see what looked like small talons.

  She blinked, took a step back, then leaned in again. The ice blurred lines, but if those were the forelegs and those were the hindquarters...

  “It has six legs,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Cope. “And each one’s got a set of claws like one of those Jurassic Park dinosaurs, the velocirippers.”

  Behind them, the teenager shuffled toward the doors. A glare from Cope stopped him.

  Scully tilted her head to try to get a better view through the ice. “What about the... Mr. Witness?”

  “Most of the Witness family moved away when I was in high school,” said Cope. He smiled. “I was sweet on their daughter, Sally, at the time and it broke my heart. I believe they ended up in San Diego.”

  “California?”

  Cope snorted. “Texas. They’ve still got some cousins in town.”

  Mulder’s shoulders perked up inside his coat. “Were any of them part of these events?”

  “Naw. Most of them were just younguns like me at the time.”

  Scully straightened up and took a step back. “Thank you,” she said to Mr. Cope.

  Mulder pulled a business card from his coat. “If you remember anything else about the story, or anyone else does, please give me a call.”

  Cope studied the card. Then his face lit up. “Oh, I getcha. Here to fetch the last of it away, eh?”

  Scully shook her head. “Just passing through,” she said.

  “Y’know,” said the farmer, “I’d be willing to let it go for a couple hundred bucks. In the name of science and all that.”

  The teen craned his head to see the card.

  “Like she said,” Mulder told him, “we’re just passing through.”

  They left Cope and the teen kicking the door shut on the freezer. Mulder gave Scully a hopeful look. “What do you think?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Seriously, Mulder?”

  “Of course.”

  “It’s a fake.”

  “Yeah, that’s what Frohike said, too. He was on the 1987 team.”

  “So if even he thinks it’s a fake, what are we doing here?”

  Their feet crunched through the leaves in the driveway and Mulder glanced up at the afternoon sky. “The interesting thing is,” he said, “there was a series of cattle mutilations in this area back in the fall of 1969.”

  “Mulder...”

  “Not the usual kind, either. These weren’t possible dissections, they were actual mutilations. The sheep and cows were torn apart, like they’d been savaged by wolves or a bear. What do you think could’ve done that?”

  “Do I really need to answer that?”

  “There hasn’t been a wolf sighting in these parts in years, Scully. And even so, wouldn’t the men in the hunting party be able to differentiate between a wolf and ‘something else’?”

  “I suppose that’d depend on how much drinking they’d done that night.” She shook her head. “Mulder, even considering that it’s obscured by over a foot of ice, I’d say that thing looks more like a large dog wearing a Halloween costume than an alien.”

  “You did see that it had an extra set of legs, yes?”

  “And the Fiji mermaid had a tail and scales. It didn’t make it a real mermaid.”

  “Just because we had one case where it wasn’t the Fiji mermaid does not disprove the existence of—”

  “It was a fake, Mulder.”

  He g
ave her another tight smile. A momentary concession. “Okay,” he said, “but wait until you see the other one.”

  She paused with her fingers on the door handle. “There’s another one?”

  ****

  MARSH RESIDENCE

  4:23 p.m.

  Their car rolled to a stop where the long dirt driveway opened up into a small field of gravel. A weather-beaten sign offered a chance to SEE THE ALIEN in six-inch-tall letters that hadn’t been white for years. A farmhouse with a double garage stood on the other side of the gravel circle.

  A large man set down a wheelbarrow filled with melons and lumbered toward their car. A half-breed beagle stood by the wheelbarrow and barked three or four times before he turned back and hushed it. He came to a halt a few yards away and eyed Mulder and Scully through the windshield.

  They stepped out of the car and the man glared at them for a moment. Then he took a few more steps closer and called out to them. “Younses wanna gander at Marvin?”

  “Marvin?”

  “The alien?” The man’s hair was darker than Mulder’s, as black as Cope’s had been white. He had broad shoulders and a broader belly, barely contained by his overalls. Scully noticed he favored his left leg as he walked toward them.

  “Yes, we would,” said Mulder, closing the car door. “Are you Mr. Marsh?”

  “Yessir.”

  “We’re looking into the UFO crash from nineteen-sixty—”

  “Five bucks for five minutes,” Marsh said.

  They waited for a moment. The farmer said nothing else and moved no closer. Mulder glanced at Scully, shrugged, and pulled out his wallet. He thumbed through until he found a five dollar bill and held it out. “Can you tell us how—”

  “Five bucks each,” said Marsh.

  Mulder stared at him for a moment, then glanced over at Scully. She gave a small shake of her head. He sighed and rifled through his wallet for another bill. He held up two fives.

  Marsh lurched forward and snatched them away. “S’way,” he muttered. He spun on his good leg and headed toward the house.

  Mulder looked at Scully and shrugged. They followed him. The dog barked one more time and Marsh silenced it with a wave of his hand.

  The farmer veered off and headed for the garage door farthest from the house. He fumbled in his pocket for a set of keys, twisted the handle, and rolled the door up and away. He glanced over his shoulder at the two FBI agents and lumbered into the garage.

  Two cars filled the other side of the garage, one whole, the other in pieces, both covered with dust. There were shelves stuffed full of boxes and jars. A nearby tool bench displayed components of what might’ve been a lawnmower at one point.

  A freezer chest sat on the floor, its hinges toward the door. It had been ivory to start. Now it was almost yellow. A latch had been bolted onto it, and a heavy padlock over that. On the side facing the door, someone had written ALIEN in what looked like magic marker.

  Marsh fiddled with his key ring, the padlock popped open, and he pushed the lid up. It made Scully think of someone throwing back the lid of a coffin. “Five minutes,” the farmer said. “Startin’ now.”

  Mulder and Scully exchanged another glance and stepped forward.

  The lid cast a shadow over the inside of the freezer chest, but they could see it was as yellowed as the outside. There wasn’t any ice, but it was cold enough that the warm air from outside had filled it with steam. They batted their hands at the clouds until the small space cleared out.

  At first glance the thing at the bottom looked to be the same size as a child. After a moment, Scully realized it was just the slim limbs and fetal pose that gave that impression. Straightened out and standing up, the figure in the chest would’ve been close to seven feet tall.

  It had a large head and long fingers. She couldn’t see any hair on the body anywhere. Its wrinkled skin was driftwood gray.

  It was also, Scully was quite sure, made of plastic.

  “How long have you had it for?” asked Mulder.

  Marsh shrugged. “Uncle Rom found Marvin in the woods after the crash. Said he was plumb near dead.”

  Mulder glanced down into the chest. “It... he was alive?”

  “So he told me.”

  Scully slipped a latex glove from her pocket and snapped it over her hand. She reached down and pressed her fingers against the creature’s shoulder.

  “Hey,” said Marsh. “Youns wanna touch it, s’another five bucks.”

  Mulder sighed and pulled his wallet back out. “Can you make change for a twenty?”

  Marsh pulled two small wads of bills from his pocket and nodded.

  Scully worked her way down the arm, watching how the skin bent and flexed as she pushed against it. Smooth and firm with a slight yield when she pushed hardest. The tiny fingernails felt just like the skin. So did the eyes.

  Mulder took his change. “Did it speak to your uncle before it died?”

  “Naw. Jess hid in the corner of the garage all skeered, made some clicky noise. Coupla days later he curled up an went to sleep. That’s when his skin got all risen-like.”

  “Sorry?” asked Scully. She pushed herself up off the rim of the freezer chest.

  “Risen,” said Marsh. “Uncle Rom said the little guy jess leaked it out. He got all kivvered with wet, then it got all hard.”

  “Would it be possible to speak to your uncle?” asked Mulder. “Maybe ask him a few questions about that night?”

  “Y’can try,” said Marsh. “He remarried, moved t’Florida, and now he’s in a home.” Marsh twirled his finger by his ear. “Ain’t been right in the head for ten years now.”

  Mulder reached into his coat for a card but Scully caught his arm. “Thank you,” she said to Marsh.

  “Younses got another minute an a half,” he said with a glance at his watch.

  “That’s okay,” she said. She walked out of the garage.

  Mulder glanced after her, handed Marsh a card, and took a few quick steps. He caught up with her just outside. “What did you think?”

  “If it’s possible, I think it’s more fake than the last one. The whole thing’s made of plastic.”

  “Or resin.”

  She smiled. “You think it sweated out resin to protect itself like some sort of, what, cocoon?”

  “Good thinking, Scully,” he said with a smile.

  “Even if that were true, Mulder, he’s keeping it in a freezer. The cold would’ve done irreparable damage on a cellular level.”

  “You’re assuming it has a cell structure similar to terrestrial life.”

  “Actually, I’m assuming it’s a plastic Halloween decoration.”

  The beagle barked at them as they passed it. It bounced back and forth, its tail wagging as it barked again. It sounded more playful than angry.

  “You have to admit, though, it’s interesting that two unrelated people in the same town would both claim to have dead aliens in their freezers.”

  “It’s no different than two different shops at Loch Ness both selling stuffed Nessies or similar coffee mugs. It’s a tourist trap.”

  “But when you go to Loch Ness, one of the striking things is how similar all the designs are,” said Mulder. He unlocked the car. “There isn’t anyone claiming the monster has wings or ten flippers or anything.”

  She pulled open the passenger door. “Because they’re all based off the same urban myths that have been passed down over the years, that the monster is a plesiosaur or similar dinosaur that’s survived into the modern age.”

  “So shouldn’t the same thing hold here? Why don’t they have at least two that are very similar?”

  “Maybe that’s all Cope could find. It could be another reason his is buried in ice, to help hide how different it is.”

  Mulder slid into the driver’s seat. “I just find it interesting that after twenty-five years, both of these men are still insisting they have alien bodies, even though they look nothing alike. I’m surprised so many people at MUFON l
ost interest in this place.”

  “Well, Mulder,” she said, “unless you’ve got a third alien to show me, I’m ready to go.”

  “I was hoping to ask around, see if anyone can point out the original crash site.”

  Scully started to talk, then pressed her lips together. “Okay,” she said. “How long do you think you’ll need?”

  He glanced up at the sky. “Well, we’ve only got about ninety minutes of daylight left. And maybe a quick check in with the local historical society after that...”

  ****

  LITTLE HILL MOTEL, ROOM 15

  9:42 p.m.

  Mulder was watching Silk Stalkings and lamenting the motel’s limited cable package when his phone rang. He glanced at the adjoining door to Scully’s room before answering. “Mulder.”

  “This the FBI agent?” asked a voice on the other end. It sounded young.

  “It is. Who am I speaking with?”

  “You gotta come quick. It got my dad.”

  He muted the television. “Who is this?”

  “It’s See-see,” said the voice.

  “Who?”

  “Cecil Cope. You were out in our barn looking at the Beast.”

  The bored teen flashed through Mulder’s mind.

  “It got out,” continued the boy. “It got out and it got my dad.”

  Mulder felt a faint prickle on the back of his neck. He walked over to Scully’s door and tapped twice on it. “Is it still there, Cecil? Are you okay?”

  “My dad, he’s bleeding a lot. He’s out in the barn. His leg’s all messed up.”

  “Is it still there?”

  “I don’t know. I think it ran into the woods. I don’t know.”

  Scully opened the door. She was barefoot and her shirt was untucked. She raised a questioning eyebrow at the phone.

  “Cecil, take care of your dad, but be careful. Stay safe.”

  “Okay.”

  He looked at Scully. “My partner and I can be out there in about twenty minutes.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’ll see you soon.” He hung up the phone.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It sounds like one of the Halloween decorations got loose and tried to kill Abraham Cope.”

  ****