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smallest shipping crate for a coffin. Maybe this was the box that Brownie had seen. | brought the flashlight over and set it up high on the wall so it would throw as broad a beam as possible. Then | set to work on the crate. The top was already loose. | was right - this one had just been opened. | jimmied the top back and forth, continuing to loosen the nails that had been pried up with a nail claw, until | felt them come out of the wood. Then | worked along the sides of the five-or-so-foot box until the top was loose all the way around. Not knowing which end of the box was the front, | picked up the top and slid it off to the edge. Then | lowered the flashlight, looked inside, and my stomach rolled right up into my throat and | almost became sick right then and there. Whatever they'd crated this way, it was a coffin, but not like any coffin I'd seen before. The contents, enclosed in a thick glass container, were submerged in a thick light blue liquid, almost as heavy as a gelling solution of diesel fuel. But the object was floating, actually suspended, and not sitting on the bottom with a fluid overtop, and it was soft and shiny as the underbelly of a fish. At first | thought it was a dead child they were shipping somewhere. But this was no child. It was a four-foot human shaped figure with arms, bizarre-looking four-fingered hands - | didn't see a thumb - thin legs and feet, and an oversized incandescent lightbulb shaped head that looked like it was floating over a balloon gondola for a chin. | know | must have cringed at first, but then | had the urge to pull off the top of the liquid container and touch the pale gray skin. But | couldn't tell whether it was skin because it also looked like a very thin one-piece head-to-toe fabric covering the creature's flesh. Its eyeballs must have been rolled way back in its head because | couldn't see any pupils or iris or anything that resembled a human eye. But the eye sockets themselves were oversized and almond shaped and pointed down to its tiny nose, which didn't really protrude from the skull. It was more like the tiny nose of a baby that never grew as the child grew, and it was mostly nostril. The creature's skull was over grown to the point where all of its facial features - such as they were - were arranged absolutely frontally, occupying only a small circle on the lower part of the head. The protruding ears of a human were nonexistent, its cheeks had no definition, and there were no eyebrows or any indications of facial hair. The creature had only a tiny flat slit for a mouth and it was completely closed, resembling more of a crease or indentation between the nose and the bottom of the chinless skull than a fully functioning orifice. | would find out years later how it communicated, but at that moment in Kansas, | could only stand there in shock over the clearly non-human face suspended in front of me in a semi-liquid preservative. | could see no damage to the creature's body and no indication that it had been involved in any accident. There was no blood, its limbs seemed intact, and | could find no lacerations on the skin or through the gray fabric. | looked through the crate encasing the container of liquid for any paperwork or shipping invoice or anything that would describe the nature or origin of this thing. What | found was an intriguing Army Intelligence document describing the creature as an inhabitant of a craft that had crash landed in Roswell, New Mexico, earlier that week and a routing manifest for this creature to the login officer at the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field and from him to the Walter Reed Army Hospital morgue's pathology section where, | supposed, the creature would be autopsied and stored. It was not a document | was meant to see, for sure, so | tucked it back in the envelope against the inside wall of the crate. | allowed myself more time to look at the creature than | should have, | suppose, because that night | missed the time checks on the rest of my rounds and believed I'd have to come up with a pretty good explanation for the lateness of my other stops to verify the sentry assignments. But what | was looking at was worth any trouble I'd get into the next day. This thing was truly fascinating and at the same time utterly horrible. It challenged every conception | had, and | hoped against hope that | was looking at some form of atomic human mutation. | knew | couldn't ask anybody about it, and because | hoped | would never see its like again, | came up with explanation after explanation for its existence, despite what I'd read on the enclosed document: It was shipped here from Hiroshima, it was the result of a Nazi genetic experiment, it was a dead circus freak, it was anything but what | knew it said it was - what it had to be: an extraterrestrial. I slid the top of the crate back over the creature, knocked the nails loosely into their original holes with the butt end of my flashlight, and put the tarp back in position. Then | left the building and hoped | could close the door forever on what I'd seen. Just forget it, | told myself. You weren't supposed to see it and maybe you can live your whole life without ever having to think about it. Maybe. "Saw what, Major?" Brownie said, and | walked back to the base general headquarters, the image of the creature suspended in that liquid fading away with each and every step | took. By the time | slid back behind the desk, it was all a dream. No, not a dream, a nightmare - but it was over and, | hoped, it would never come back. 15 Once outside the building | rejoined Brownie at his post. "You know you never saw this, "| said. "And you tell no one."