The Mind Thing

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

One day didn’t make the slightest difference, it turned out, on his ordering the screens. He went into town again the next day, Thursday, and saw Hank Purdy, the town’s only really good rough carpenter. He learned that Hank had more work than he could handle for at least a week. He promised to come out later the following week, take measurements and make an estimate. Doc might have found someone else who could do the job sooner, but he liked Hank, whom he knew from the poker games in the back room at the tavern, and decided he’d rather wait and have Hank do the job. After all, he wasn’t going to keep the cat shut up more than another few days, and after that the house would be in no more immediate need of screens than it had been all along. Besides, the weather was mild and having the windows as they were now, each of them raised about two inches, provided plenty of ventilation.

He parked the station wagon in front of Miss Talley’s little house. She must have seen him stopping there, because she had the door opened before he reached it.

“Come in, Doctor. All ready for you. Sit down, and I’ll bring the manuscripts. And my notebook.”

“Thanks, Miss Talley, but I don’t think I’m going to dictate those two letters today. I’ve decided I want a few days to think things over before I send them. And I may as well wait to write until I’m ready to mail them; something else might happen and I can put any subsequent information in the letter.”

“All right, if you think so.” She picked up a large brown envelope and gave it to him. “Want to read this now anyway?”

He shook his head. “Might as well read it at home. I’d rather talk a few minutes, if you’ve time.”

She had time, she told him. He told her about the cat. “I started out being scared of it, or about its being there.” He laughed. “You and your talk about possession did that to me, I suppose. But now I feel just the opposite. I hope it sticks around; it keeps me from getting lonesome, I think it’s a perfectly normal cat, Miss Talley.”

“And Buck was a perfectly normal dog, until he ran under your car. In spite of what you say, Doctor, I’m a little worried about its living there with you. I suppose it’s silly of me, but—I do worry.”

“I’ll be all right, Miss Talley. I’m afraid I’m beginning to think we both went a bit overboard on this.”

“Possibly, Doctor… Will you promise me you’ll send those letters, and the reports, to the two friends you mentioned?”

Doc sighed. “All right, I’ll send them. Just want a couple of days to think it over first.”

“All right. For the rest of this week I’ll be staying home, that is, early afternoons; so any day you want to come and dictate them… ”

That evening after he had finished washing the dishes he went into the living room and sat on the sofa; the cat was already there and he reached over and stroked its sleek fur. The cat purred.

“Well, Cat, getting to like it here? And to like me? Let’s see; this is Thursday evening. Let’s set a date for giving you your choice, a date and an hour. How does Monday strike you? Let’s see; I’ve been feeding you about the middle of the afternoon. I’ll let you go out—if you still want to go out—about the middle of the morning. That’ll give you time to think it over before you get hungry again.

“If I go into town I won’t stay long, I’ll go when I let you out, and be back by noon. Waiting and ready to feed you if you come back. Fair enough?”

The cat didn’t answer, but it still purred.

Doc said, “If it relieves a worry on your part, the Kramers gave you to me; they don’t want you back. Oh, they’ll take you if you want to go home to them. They’ll feed you, and forgive you.

“Yes, I know who you are, and that your name was Jerry there. Might have kept that name if another male cat had come with you. I’d have called him Tom. Tom and Jerry. Ever tasted one? They’re good. But that’s irrelevant. Which are you going to prefer, the Kramers or me?”

He got up and took a comfortable chair facing the sofa. He stared at the cat from across the room.

“Cat, why did you hide? Why did you come in an upstairs window? Don’t you know cats just don’t do that? Damn it, why didn’t you act all along as you’re acting now?”

The cat stretched languorously and then curled up again and closed its eyes.

“Cat.” Doc said it sharply and the cat opened its eyes again and stared at him.

“Cat, don’t go to sleep on me. I’m talking to you, and sleeping isn’t polite when you’re being spoken to. Cat, you used to live on the farm next to the Grosses. Did you know their cat? The one that committed suicide the night Gross did? Don’t tell me it wasn’t suicide, that cat jumping right into the jaws of a vicious dog it must have known was there. If it was suicide, why? And if it wasn’t, what was it?”

The cat’s eyes had closed, but somehow Doc felt that it wasn’t asleep.

“And an owl killed itself that same night. What do you know about that? And before that, along with Tommy Hoffman’s death we had a field mouse that got itself killed, seemingly deliberately. And a dog. Do you know that I was the one who ran over the dog? And that it had been hiding beside the road until my car got just the right distance away—only a few yards—and then ran right under my wheels? I’ll swear that one was deliberate—especially since they tell me that dog was car-shy.

“Two human beings, four animals—that we know of. Of course any other human suicides we’d know about, but how many more animals, especially ones out in the woods and not under observation, might have brought about their own deaths recently after— After what? After they’d served the purpose of whoever, or whatever, was using them?”

Outside, crickets were chirping, thousands of crickets. Doc’s mind wandered and he thought how strange it was that one could tell the temperature, almost exactly, by timing the interval between the chirps of a cricket. A cricket was a thermometer, and probably as accurate as the average household thermometer. There were many strange things in nature. Lemmings, with their periodical suicidal migrations to and into the sea. Group insanity? Or do the lemmings know something that we don’t know?

He heard the crickets, watched the black night press against the window pane. He turned back to the cat.

“Cat,” he said, “why did those other animals kill themselves? If you’re like them, why don’t you? Is the only reason you’re alive the fact that there isn’t any way of killing yourself shut up here? Wait a minute, I’ll find out.”

He left the living room and went across the hall and into the third downstairs room, a small room that was only partly furnished and used mostly for storage. Except for items that were already there, Doc used it only to store his fishing tackle and boots, his guns and ammunition. Although he knew there was open season on nothing worth hunting in Wisconsin in summer, he’d brought a pistol and a rifle for target practice and a shotgun mostly because it was a brand new one and he wanted a chance to try it out. All these things he’d had shipped ahead of him before his flight to Green Bay; he’d picked them up there after he’d bought the used station wagon which he’d sell before flying back at the end of the summer.

He took the pistol, a .38-caliber S. & W. Special and took a cardboard rifle target from a package of them. In the doorway between the hall and the living room he put the square of cardboard down on the floor and went back to the chair he’d been sitting in. He cocked the gun and saw the cat raise its head at the sudden click.

“Listen, Cat,” he said, “let’s try this for size. If you’re only wanting out of here so you can find a way to kill yourself, I’ll save you the trouble. If you understand what I’m saying and want me to shoot you, prove it by going to the doorway there. Sit down on that target, that’s all you have to do.”

For a moment the cat blinked at him sleepily and then it put its head down again and went back to sleep—or pretended to. If it understood his offer, it wasn’t having any.

Doc sighed; he hadn’t really expected the cat to go and sit on the target. If it was—well, if it wasn’t altogether a cat, it would be giving itself away by doing that. And shooting it would have been the last thing he’d have done under those circumstances. Especially with a gun he hadn’t bothered to load.

He put the pistol and the target back where he’d taken them from and went into the kitchen. He’d have a final can of beer and a snack, if something in the refrigerator looked good to him, and then go to bed.

The sound of the refrigerator door brought the cat from the sofa into the kitchen. It paid no attention to anything he said but it had come to recognize that sound—or more likely was familiar with it from having been in the Kramers’ kitchen—and he couldn’t get anything from the refrigerator without the cat being there watching him. It didn’t beg, but it was on the spot and ready for any handouts he might give it.

He found a few slices of liverwurst, dropped one into the cat’s dish, and made himself a sandwich with the rest of it. He opened a can of beer and went over to the table. The cat finished its share of the liverwurst and went back to the living room, presumably to lie on the sofa again. Doc had managed to convince it that once he’d taken his own food to the table, further begging was useless. Besides, the cat couldn’t be really hungry. It came to him when he went to the refrigerator only because it wanted a snack of something different from its staple diet of cat food and milk.

Doc got the flashlight before he turned off the lights; he still used one to light himself up to the bedroom as he had the first night the cat had been in the house, but not for quite the same reason. Now he simply didn’t want to step on or fall over the cat in darkness. Since it could see in the dark itself, it couldn’t realize that he couldn’t.

The next day, Friday, nothing special happened. He made his usual trip into town but found no mail waiting for him, and didn’t have to do any shopping. He dropped in at the newspaper office on the excuse of canceling his ad about having found a cat, but mostly just to talk to Ed Hollis a while to make sure nothing unusual had happened since the day before. Nothing had, except that the Garners had found a buyer for their farm and were planning to move west, possibly to the Ozarks, possibly on to California. And Gus Hoffman, Tommy’s father, was putting an ad in the Bartlesville paper offering his farm for sale, and was planning to run one in the Green Bay paper too.

“My guess,” Hollis said, “is that that means Charlotte’s pregnant. The Garners moving, I mean.”

“You’d better not put a guess like that in your paper, Ed.”

Hollis looked at Doc so resentfully that Doc apologized.

“But why,” Hollis wondered aloud, “would that make Gus Hoffman decide to move too? I mean, with Tommy dead, a scandal—not that there’d be much of one anyway—wouldn’t hurt Gus.”

“You’re a damn fool, Ed. Hoffman will stick close to the Garners from here on in. He hasn’t a wife or a child—but he’s got a grandson or granddaughter on the way. Illegitimate or not, he’ll be crazy about that kid.”

“Hell, yes. Why didn’t I think of that? Probably, wherever they go, he’ll talk the Garners into letting him come in with them on a farm big enough for him too. And Charlotte will be a very young widow named Mrs. Hoffman and Gus will be her father-in-law. So the kid will even have Gus’s name, and Gus will again have something to live for.”

Doc had so few errands to do in town that day that he got back quite early and decided he might as well spend the rest of the afternoon fishing. It would be his first time fishing since he’d run over the dog and had through that episode become interested in the strange details surrounding the death of Tommy Hoffman.

He was glad to notice that the cat had apparently reconciled itself to staying in his house; at least—although he took precautions both times—it made no effort to get past him when he let himself in to get his fishing equipment or let himself out after he had gathered what he needed. It was becoming acclimated.

Or was it because it understood everything he’d told it and knew that he’d promised it its freedom on Monday anyway? He put that thought out of his mind and decided to concentrate on the pleasure of his hike to the nearest trout stream and his fishing when he reached it.

The fishing was quite good, considering that it was the wrong time of day for it. Within an hour he had five medium-sized trout in his creel. Enjoyable as the fishing was in itself, that satisfied him. It was more than he could eat today, possibly even tomorrow, even with the help of a cat. And fresh trout were infinitely more tasty than ones that had been in the refrigerator for more than a day or so.

After his return he cleaned the fish and cooked three of them. He ate two and the cat had no trouble disposing of the third, so avidly that Doc was amused. He said, “All right, Cat, consider that a bribe if you want. But over all, if you decide to stay with me, I’ll promise you a trout about every third day. Not every day, though.”

At breakfast Monday morning he gave thought to his decision to release the cat about mid-morning, then see whether, after five or six hours of freedom, it would return at the usual feeding time he had established for it. Oh, he’d do it; he couldn’t keep, didn’t want to keep, a cat shut up any longer than the few days he’d decided to keep it. He’d let it out; it would be a free agent as to whether it returned to him or not. But there was one little thing he could do and might as well do. He had a pair of excellent binoculars with him. The moment he let the cat out of the door he’d take them upstairs. From the window of one or another of the rooms up there he’d be able to follow it quite a distance, no matter which direction it went. If it headed toward the Kramer farm, he’d probably never see it again; if it went any other direction he might. If it stayed around the immediate vicinity, just wandering in the yard, it would be almost certain to come back in if he called it at feeding time.

Looking out, he saw that a light drizzle had started and wondered if a real rain was coming. If so, the cat probably wouldn’t go out at all; cats hate water. But the drizzle lasted only ten or fifteen minutes, just enough to lay the dust and moisten the ground a bit.

At ten o’clock exactly—might as well keep his promise on the dot, he thought; he’d said the middle of the morning—he went into the living room past the cat on the sofa and to the front door. He opened it wide and said, “Well, Cat, want out a while?”

The cat understood the action if not the words. It got down from the sofa, stretched itself leisurely and unhurriedly, and then padded past him through the open doorway.

Quickly he got the binoculars and went upstairs with them. He tried the window of the front bedroom first and it turned out to be the right one; the cat was about halfway across the front yard, heading for the place where the road dead-ended. It was neither hurrying nor dawdling, walking unconcernedly at the pace of a cat that knows where it’s going but is in no hurry to get there.

Probably heading back to the Kramers’, he thought. Well, if that’s what it wanted that was all right, and maybe all to the good. The Kramer woman’s attitude in giving it to him had shown him that it might not be as easy as he had assumed for him to find a home for it later. And, since he certainly wouldn’t abandon an animal, he might have to take it back to Boston with him, and that would be a confounded nuisance.

But when it reached the dead end of the road, the cat stopped. It turned its head and stared back at the house it had just left. Doc stepped hastily back from the window, but kept the cat in the field of the binoculars. Was it looking back in indecision as to whether it wanted to go home, after all? Or was it watching to see if he was watching it? He didn’t think it had seen him, or that it could see him now that he’d stepped back from the window.

It stayed there half a minute, either making up its mind or making sure that it wasn’t being watched. Which?

Then it started again, going a little faster this time, and not down the road that would take it to the Kramers’. It went right across the end of the road instead, into the woods. He could follow it only a few yards after that.

Doc put down the binoculars and scratched his head. After all, its behavior was probably perfectly normal, but—

Then he remembered the drizzle that had fallen a while half an hour ago. Because of that, it would be leaving paw prints. And why shouldn’t he follow them a while, for as far as he could, and see if he could find out where it was going? After all, he had nothing else to do right now that had to be done today, and a walk would be as pleasant a way of filling in the time as any other.

He started at once, delaying only to put on a hat and to hang a raincoat over his arm, in case the rain might start again. The cat’s paw prints were clear across the yard and once he bent down and studied a few prints to memorize their size and shape; he didn’t want to end up tracking some other small animal instead.

It was harder going when he got to the woods, for the prints didn’t show in grassy areas, nor did they show at all clearly under trees; the rain hadn’t been hard enough to work its way through the leaves and under every tree was a completely dry circle.

Then it got easier again when he realized that the cat, wherever it was going, had been traveling in an almost perfect straight line.

After that, Doc was able to make better time; he simply walked in a straight line himself across any grassy or dry areas and didn’t have to cast about on the other side to pick up the trail; it would be right at the place he himself came out.

He was at least a mile and a half into the woods when the trail ended. Suddenly, at the edge of a small stream of water that wasn’t over four feet wide at this point. Had the cat jumped across it? He jumped across it himself and tried to pick up the trail on the other side. It simply wasn’t there. The ground for several feet on either side of the stream was bare and moist; the cat’s prints leading down to the water were as clear as any he’d found. But the cat hadn’t jumped across or its prints would be just as clear as the ones leading to the stream.

Not quite daring to allow himself to think as yet, Doc followed the stream along the far side. Downstream, of course. The current was slow.

It took him only about twenty paces to see what he had been afraid he would see, ever since he reached the stream. In the water, drowned, one small gray cat.

It was even more obviously a suicide than the dog that had run in front of his car, the owl that had flown through a window, the field mouse that had attacked Tommy Hoffman, or the other cat that had attacked a vicious dog ten times its size.

And it had lived with him for days. It had refused his gambit with the pistol, it had not tried to starve itself or to bring about its own death in any other way.

It had waited till it could commit the act unobserved, so deep in the woods that—if he had not still had a residue of suspicion and the advantage of that brief drizzle that had made it trackable—its body would probably never have been found.

Had it, after all, understood every word he’d said to it and intelligently decided, when he promised to let it go this morning, that it would stand less chance of giving itself away by waiting that long than by making any attempt to die sooner?

But—suicide is no end in itself. What was the purpose?

The cat had been an ordinary cat once; he’d traced its origin. The dog Buck had been an ordinary dog until it had run away from its master only a short time before it had found death under the wheels of a car.

Was something using animals, each for some mysterious purpose, and then getting free of them by causing them to kill themselves?

What had been in the mind of that cat, all the time it had been with him?

And what of the human beings, Tommy Hoffman and Siegfried Gross? Had something been using them, controlling their minds, causing them to commit some action too difficult for an animal host, and then causing them to kill themselves?

But what? And why?

He remembered stroking the cat and enjoying its purring under his hand. What had he really been stroking?

He shuddered. The slight scare he’d had the night the cat had hidden from him—had that been only Tuesday night?—was nothing now. It had been based on nothing more than hunch or intuition.

Then he’d been only guessing. Now he knew.

But what did he know? Only that he was frightened.

He found a stick and maneuvered the small body to the edge of the water where he could reach it. He picked it up gingerly and carried it back with him to the house. He wrapped it in an old blanket and put it in the back of the station wagon. To take it to the laboratory in Green Bay and have it autopsied? He hadn’t decided yet, but the body was there now if he should decide to take it in. But what could he tell them to check for? There was certainly no remote suspicion of rabies this time; the cat had been—or seemed—completely normal when he had let it out less than an hour before.

He smoked a pipe and thought a while and then realized what was the first thing he must do. He got the envelope with the copies of the statement he had dictated to Miss Talley and drove to town with them. He should have mailed them sooner; now he’d get them in the mail as soon as he could add the story of the cat to what they already contained and dictate the covering letters.

Miss Talley was not at home. There was a note on her door, “Back about 3 p.m.” It was time for lunch anyway, so he drove back to the downtown district and ate, then killed time at the tavern drinking a few beers. He had several chances to get into conversation, but he didn’t feel like talking. He could hardly bring up suddenly now what he was thinking about; there was too much to tell all at once to anyone with whom he hadn’t talked before. And that left only Miss Talley.

He watched the clock and reached her place a few minutes early, but she was there.

“Doctor!” she said, when she saw his face. “Come in. Has something new happened?”

He nodded, a little grimly. “It’s about the cat. But I want to dictate it as an addendum to the statement I dictated to you last week. If you’ll get your notebook—”

Miss Talley got it, and her eyes danced as excitedly as her pencil point as he talked and she wrote. He told the whole story of the cat, from her first glimpse of it during his previous dictation to his finding it drowned in the little creek. He went into detail and it took him over an hour.

Miss Talley looked up then. “Doctor! Besides mailing these to your two friends, you’ve got to go to the sheriff now. Or call in the F. B. I.—or something, if he won’t take it seriously.”

Doc nodded slowly. “I’m going to, Miss Talley. I’ll tell you my plans before I leave, but first, while I’m dictating, let me give you the two covering letters that go with the statements that I’m going to mail out.”

He dictated again, and the letters ran longer than he had anticipated; it was almost five o’clock when he had finished. “Miss Talley, about how long do you think it will take you to transcribe all that?”

“A few hours, possibly four, but I’ll start it right away; I won’t even eat until I’ve finished. While I’m doing it you can go see the sheriff and—”

“No, I want to wait till I have a copy of the full statement to have him read when I see him. It’ll impress him more that way, I think. After all, outside of the gray cat episode, nothing in here will be new to him, and for me just to tell him over again—well, I’d rather have him read the statement.

“And I’m not going to let you work all evening without eating, or waste time cooking for yourself either. Put your coat on and we’ll eat together in town. Then I’ll drive you back here and leave you. You can do your typing, and in the morning I’ll talk to the sheriff and get those letters in the mail—airmail special delivery. It’ll be too late by the time you finish this evening, even if I’d let you work straight through.”

“Well—I suppose it would, even if you went in to Green Bay to mail them. But are you going to take the chance of staying out there tonight? Everything that’s happened has been, or has started, along that road you live on. And the last thing, the cat, right where you live!”

Doc smiled. “I’ll be all right tonight, Miss Talley,” he told her.

And he was, because the mind thing was otherwise occupied.