X-Files: Trust No One

by Tim Lebbon

  “I’ve got my grades up, and I haven’t had any problems at school all week.” Heather’s attractive brown-haired half-sister smiled in desperation. “My counselor says I’m really starting to fit in. Call and ask her!”

  “No,” her father said, cutting his meat loaf and spearing a piece into the gravy of the mashed potatoes. He was a dark-haired rugged man who looked more like a carpenter than a writer. “You’ll serve your complete sentence. As far as I’m concerned, I was lenient.”

  Heather had no idea what Charity had done, but suspected it had to do with a boy. The child tuned out of the ugly argument that followed, ending with the teen storming away from the table.

  Charity and Daddy hadn’t gotten along at all well since the move to Banewich. But Heather always found her father easy to talk to, and when he came in to her third-floor bedroom to say goodnight, she blurted out to him what she’d been going through at school.

  Her father, sitting on the edge of her bed, said, “Sweetheart, something bad did happen in this house, a long time ago.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not the kind of bedtime story that suits a young girl. All you need to know is that a house is a house—just a structure... wood, cement, plaster. A building doesn’t have any memory of the things that happened inside it, bad or good.”

  But later Heather overheard her father in the hallway, saying to her mother, “If I’d known this stupid town was so steeped in all this superstitious bullshit, I’d never have come here.”

  “Once your book is written,” her mother said, “and the publicity runs its course, we can move anywhere we want.”

  “Too bad—’cause I really do love this stupid place.” Her father chuckled. “And don’t tell anybody, Alice, but I haven’t seen a single sign of ‘evil’ since we got here.”

  “Not counting Charity, of course,” her mother said.

  With her parents’ uneasy laughter lingering in her ears, Heather took a long time to go to sleep, sounds and shadows amplifying in her child’s imagination into disturbing thoughts and images. Finally she dropped off, but—deep into the night—loud creaking noises roused her.

  Heather sat up, rubbed her eyes, got out of bed, and went out into the hallway...

  ...where the walls seemed to bulge and throb, as if the house was breathing!

  Wide-eyed with wonder and fright, the child moved down the hallway, floorboards beneath her feet rippling. At the end of the hall, by the stairs that would take her down to her parents’ room on the second floor, the wall was streaky—dripping, oozing, with a glimmering red liquid... blood?

  With a frightened little yelp, Heather turned and ran in the other direction, toward the only other source of help she could think of: her older sister, whose room was also on the third floor.

  But Charity’s bedroom was empty, covers thrown back, furnishings toppled, the entire room in disarray. Had a struggle taken place?

  On the rumpled bed was a sheet of typing paper pasted with letters cut from magazines and newspapers: HALF MILLION FOR CHARITY! NO COPS! NO FBI!

  The signature, however, was not cut-and-paste, but a red scrawl—apparently in still damp blood: Clayton Geech.

  Heather hurried to get her parents, moving so fast that she almost didn’t notice that the wall that had dripped blood was now clean and dry.

  *****

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  TUESDAY, 1:45 p.m.

  The next afternoon, Fox Mulder was making a presentation to his partner Dana Scully in the cramped X-Files office in the basement of FBI HQ in Washington, D.C. The lights were dim, a slide show about to begin.

  “You’ve heard of Arthur Creed,” Mulder said.

  “Anybody who ever bought a paperback at an airport has,” Scully said. “True-crime specialist, wrote the first Ted Bundy book. But he’s been off the bestseller lists for several years.”

  “Which is why he moved in here.”

  With a click, Mulder displayed a dramatically lit picture of the house on Hickory Hill.

  Scully nodded. “Ostensibly to write a book exploring the history of the house. Mulder, Creed moving into this infamous place is a blatant publicity stunt—People magazine and Entertainment Tonight have already covered it.”

  “I didn’t know you had such cultured tastes in your reading and viewing habits, Scully.”

  “Considering your reading and viewing tastes, Mulder, I wouldn’t—”

  “Do you remember the history of the house?”

  “Only vaguely.”

  “Were you aware there’s already an X-File opened on the ‘House on Hickory Hill’?”

  “No... but I think I’m about to find out.”

  Mulder continued his slide show.

  Some twenty years ago, a family had remodeled the hundreds-of-years-old barn into a lovely home with every modern convenience. In the fall of 1979, around midnight, the father—clergyman Clayton Geech—inexplicably murdered his wife, thirteen-year-old daughter, and young son. Found innocent by reason of insanity, the clergyman lapsed into catatonia, interrupted only by his final act, in the State Hospital for the Criminally Insane: cutting his throat with a shard from a water glass, leaving a note scrawled in his own blood, indicating he’d committed this foul act to protect his loved ones from evil.

  “In the intervening years,” Mulder told his partner, “no family has lasted in the house longer than six months—mysterious sounds in the night, bleeding walls, insect and vermin infestation, unexplained ‘accidents’ have chased every occupant out.”

  “That much I remember from the article,” Scully said. “The house hadn’t been lived in for over ten years, enabling Creed to pick it up for a song.”

  Mulder switched on the lights. “And Creed’s career has already turned around—he’s received a half-million-dollar advance from his publisher on the work-in-progress.”

  “The Banewich Terror,” Scully says, “yes, I remember them talking about it on TV. Mulder, first, this is an obvious publicity stunt from a writer trying to jump-start his career by taking advantage of the public’s interest in this clichéd ‘haunted house’ nonsense. Second, the only crimes involved here are a decades-old solved murder case, and maybe some sort of fraud—”

  “This isn’t just an old X-File, Scully—it’s a fresh kidnapping.”

  She frowned. “Who’s been taken?”

  “Charity Creed—seventeen.” Mulder went to his desk and flipped open that Scully-cited issue of a popular celebrity magazine to the article on Creed. He pointed out the pretty teenage brunette in a smiling family portrait.

  Then Mulder filled Scully in on the details of the kidnapping, and showed her a fax of the cut-and-paste ransom note.

  “The kidnapper is demanding exactly the amount of Creed’s book advance,” Scully noted.

  “That signature, by the way, is in blood.”

  “Mulder, most kidnappers don’t sign their names...”

  “Recognize it?”

  “...Yes.”

  Geech—the long-dead clergyman who killed his family in that house back in ’79.

  “That matches Geech’s blood type, by the way,” Mulder said, pointing to the signature.

  “Does it match anyone else’s blood type in the house?” Scully asked. “The kidnapped girl, for example? We may have a runaway here, trying to raise some money for a new life.”

  “It’s type AB negative—which matches nobody in the Creed household.”

  “Type AB negative is rare, Mulder, but not that rare... and I presume Clayton Geech’s signature is available in reproductions of that suicide note in numerous true-crime books and magazine articles.”

  “That doesn’t explain why our handwriting experts say it’s a perfect match for the late reverend.”

  “Mulder, we don’t usually work kidnapping cases. That’s specialized task-force work....”

  “Skinner has already approved our participation. We’ll be investigating while the kidnap team from the Boston office carries ou
t the operation at the Creed house—actually, they’re already doing that.”

  Though the ransom note had advised not calling the authorities, and specifically mentioned not contacting the FBI, that’s exactly what Creed had done, last night.

  “There’s been no communication from the kidnapper since the initial ransom note,” Mulder said.

  “If we can crack this thing before any ransom exchange goes down,” Scully said, fully on board now, “maybe we can save a girl’s life.”

  “It’s worth trying, don’t you think?”

  *****

  RURAL MASSACHUSETTS

  TUESDAY, 6:45 p.m.

  A plane ride to Massachusetts later, the two agents were tooling in their rental vehicle through the lovely winter landscapes of New England.

  “This is something of a homecoming for you,” Scully pointed out.

  Mulder, driving, said, “I wasn’t raised in this part of Massachusetts.”

  She smiled, just a little. “I’m surprised. Isn’t this witch country?”

  “Scully, anyone with roots in seventeenth century Massachusetts could have any number of witches hanging from the family tree.”

  “Surely you don’t think there was anything truly paranormal about the Salem ‘witches’?”

  Mulder shrugged. “Who knows what really happened back in 1692? The only documentary evidence available is legal records of the day, which do include testimony of paranormal activity.”

  Scully couldn’t let him get away with this. “Mulder, the ‘witchcraft outbreak’ in Massachusetts was a textbook example of massive clinical hysteria, acerbated by a power-hungry clergy, and the spiteful pranks of bored adolescents, gotten out of hand.”

  “Or not.”

  By now, dusk settling, Mulder and Scully were in Banewich, where the town square revealed a picture-book community reveling in its notorious past, a tourist destination with historic homes turned into museums and storefront windows replete with conical hat-wearing, broomstick-riding witches.

  “A shame we missed Halloween,” Scully said wryly.

  “I have a hunch every day in Banewich is Halloween,” her partner noted.

  From its hilltop at the outskirts of Banewich, the Creed residence seemed to dominate the landscape. But as they moved up the driveway to the notorious house, the agents were struck by the modern look of the home—despite its barn-like configuration, the large dwelling did not fit any caricature notion of a haunted house.

  The atmosphere within the house on Hickory Hill was one of charged, electric, barely controlled hysteria, not helped at all by Thomas Hertel, the Yuppie FBI officer leading the operation, who was immediately confrontational.

  “You’re here at my sufferance,” Hertel said, his blond, blandly boyish features managing a scowl. “I know all about you two, and have no desire to share an investigation with the Bureau’s resident Ghostbusters.”

  “We’re just here to lend investigative support,” Scully said. “We won’t get in your way.”

  “Yeah,” Mulder said, “you guys will be doing the important work—manning the phones, keeping the reporters away, watching the yard.”

  Hertel glared at Mulder, who just beamed back at him innocently.

  Keeping her voice low, Scully asked, “Agent Hertel, can I assume you’re exploring the possibility that Mr. Creed himself may have staged this kidnapping?”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To hype his book into the next Amityville Horror.”

  This had clearly not occurred to the Special Agent in Charge, who said brusquely, “We’ll be exploring all possibilities.”

  “I assure you,” a commanding voice said from behind them, “that I had nothing to do with my daughter’s kidnapping.”

  Scully and Mulder turned toward a glowering Arthur Creed, his roughly handsome features stark in a face turned white with rage.

  Holding up a peacekeeping hand, Mulder asked, “I believe you, sir. Might we have a word?”

  With a gesture to Scully that told her to stay behind, Mulder and Creed found a corner.

  “I’m sorry about that, Mr. Creed,” Mulder said.

  He sighed. “No...I am. That woman is right to raise the possibility. You people have to explore every angle. And whatever’s happening, I’m essentially to blame.”

  “Oh?”

  He shook his head glumly. “Bringing my family into this evil house.”

  “Have you witnessed any of these previously reported paranormal activities, since moving in?”

  “That’s the irony of it, Agent Mulder. Just hours before my daughter was kidnapped, I’d remarked to Alice how this house hadn’t lived up to its nasty reputation.”

  Creed said that his wife—who had been urging him for some time to get away from Manhattan and move to a small town—had been behind him one hundred percent, in the move.

  “Alice has been terrific,” Creed said. “Understanding, forgiving...even after all my bad investments and poor career decisions put us in a position of having to go bargain-hunting for a place to live.”

  Creed explained that Alice—the writer’s second wife, his first wife having died of cancer—found the house on the market, noted its odd history, and suggested the notion of both the move and the book to her husband.

  Elsewhere in the house, Scully was talking to Mrs. Creed, who tearfully revealed that her stepdaughter, Charity, the only child of Creed and his late first wife, had a troubled background of drugs and rebellion, and openly despised this small town she’d been “stuck” in.

  “But even with all her problems,” Alice Creed said, with a crinkly smile, “Charity always accepted me as her mother—at least till we moved here.”

  “That marked a change?”

  Alice nodded. “Charity loved living in Manhattan, Agent Scully...but she was running with a ‘druggie’ crowd, and that was one of the reasons we got away from the city. And with my other daughter, Heather, soon to come into her teenage years, too...can you blame me for wanting to get away from that terrible place?”

  “I take it Charity blamed you for the family relocating to Banewich.”

  “Oh yes,” Alice said, sniffling. “She’s become very hostile... but I love her, Agent Scully, couldn’t love her more if she were my own.”

  “Mrs. Creed. This is difficult, but I have to ask. Could Charity be behind this? Could this be something she staged herself?”

  “I wish I could tell you I think she’s capable of that, because it would mean she’s unharmed...but my instinct is that Charity is still a good person, down underneath all the typical teenage disobedience.”

  “Mrs. Creed, do you think my partner and I might talk to your younger daughter, alone?”

  In her bedroom, sitting at her computer desk, the twelve-year-old told Scully and Mulder of finding the ransom note in her sister’s “messed up” room; but there was something stilted about the telling.

  “Did you see anything else that night?” Mulder asked the girl. “Anything strange, or out of the ordinary?”

  “I... I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so? But maybe you did?”

  “Well... I didn’t tell anybody.”

  “Tell us, Heather.”

  “I think I must’ve dreamed it.”

  Scully asked, “What did you dream, dear?”

  And the child told them of the bulging walls, the rippling floor, and the blood on the wall by the stairs.

  Gently, Mulder asked, “Did you dream this, or did it happen? Think carefully now.”

  “I thought it happened...but I must’ve dreamed or maybe imagined it. Maybe because my friends were making fun of me, before.”

  She told them about the after-school taunting.

  And how she’d always hated growing up in Manhattan, that she’d often daydreamed of living in a rural environment, spending time in the school library paging through picture books, leafing through Better Homes and Gardens on rainy weekends.

  “I thought movi
ng to Banewich would be a dream come true,” Heather said. “And it is—a bad one.”

  Next Mulder and Scully had a look at Charity’s bedroom, no longer in disarray, the crime lab specialists having long since finished with the crime scene. Methodically they went through Charity’s belongings, talking as they did.

  “You know, Mulder, Heather’s analysis of what happened is probably correct: she heard stories about the strange house and her imagination plugged in familiar haunting elements from books and movies.”

  “I might buy that, if she’d experienced those things after finding her sister missing.”

  “But don’t you see, Mulder—when Heather discovered that her sister was missing, she snapped out of it. She didn’t see a bleeding wall anymore—just a white one.”

  After they’d completed their search of the teenage girl’s things, Scully said, “You know what’s missing here?”

  “A Harley?” Mulder asked with a smirk, nodding around a room conspicuous with the accouterments of the daughter of a well-off family: computer, CD player and CDs, scads of clothes and shoes.

  “Charity’s personal life,” Scully said. “No letters, no diary, no photos...”

  “You’ve got something, Scully,” Mulder said, frowning, moving to the dresser mirror. “You can see where photos were taped, and removed...”

  “Something else has been removed,” Scully said, noting the empty space in an array of pop star posters. She found the gray-and-yellow corner of a poster otherwise torn away. “You think Charity stopped to take some things with her?”

  “Meaning she either staged this or was in on it?”

  Scully nodded. “Kidnappers don’t usually give their victims time to gather mementos.”

  “There’s another possibility.”

  “Such as?”

  Mulder indicated the dresser mirror. “The kidnapper was in those missing photos.”

  After mulling that a moment, Scully said, “Maybe her parents can tell us what that poster was and who was in those photos.”

  Moments later, Alice and Arthur Creed were standing just inside their missing daughter’s room, both shaking their heads.

  “You’d be surprised how seldom either of us was in here,” Alice said. “Charity demands her privacy, and we’ve always tried to respect that.”