The Mind Thing

CHAPTER SIX

Swearing under his breath, Doc Staunton braked the car to a stop. It hadn’t been his fault; there was no possible way he could have avoided running over that dog, but still it was an unpleasant thing to have happened. What had been wrong with the dog? Mad and running blindly? It had simply come from nowhere, out of the bushes along the side of the road. Even if it hadn’t stopped to look for cars, it couldn’t have failed to hear his—the only sound in a quiet countryside. The car was a station wagon, ancient and quite noisy, that he had bought two weeks before in Green Bay after having flown that far. He’d paid so little for it that if he sold it even for junk at the end of his Wisconsin vacation it would have cost him less to own it than to have rented a car for six weeks.

He turned off the ignition, got out of the car and walked back, hoping that the dog was dead. It couldn’t possibly survive; both the left front and the left rear wheels had gone squarely over its body. Since it would die anyway he hated the thought that it might have to live and suffer a while first. It was about twenty paces back of the car; it had taken him that far to stop. It didn’t seem to be moving, nor was it making any sound that he could hear, but when he was about halfway to it he saw that it was still alive; its side moved with convulsive breathing.

Doc swore again and went back to the car. He didn’t have either of his guns in it, but a tire iron would be better than nothing. He got one and hurried back to the dog, but it was dead by then; its eyes were open and glazed. Blood had run out of its mouth and there was no sign of breathing.

“Sorry, old boy,” Doc said softly. “Guess I’ll have to find out who owned you, and tell him.”

He bent down to lift the dog by its legs to move it off the edge of the road, but then he straightened up instead and stood thinking. The dog would have to be buried in any case, whether by him or by its owner, and it would be a much less pleasant job—because of ants and possibly buzzards—if he left it here while he did his errands in Bartlesville, which might take hours. He had no shovel in the station wagon but there was a tarpaulin which was old enough to be expendable. He got the tarpaulin and spread it out, folded once, on the road; then he lifted the dog onto it, rolled the tarpaulin around it a few times, and put it into the back of the station wagon.

In town a little later he made purchases at several different places, describing the dog—it had been a hound, male, liver and white—at each, and on the third try he found someone who said that it must be the dog that belonged to Gus Hoffman, and that Hoffman would be in town because he’d be attending the inquest on his son, who had committed suicide last night, that was being held at the local mortuary.

Doc Staunton had never attended an inquest and since he was mildly curious how one was run, he went to the mortuary and found it just starting. All the chairs were taken, but several other men were standing at the back of the room and Doc stood there too and listened.

Charlotte Garner was testifying, and Doc found himself increasingly fascinated. First by her calm and courageous frankness in telling the full truth about her relations with the boy Tommy Hoffman, and then by the story itself of how she had awakened to find Tommy’s clothes, but not Tommy. When she’d finished describing searching and calling for him and then running home to tell her parents, the coroner tried to dismiss her, but there was, she said, one thing that she wanted to add; his questions had led her to skip the part about the field mouse and she wanted to put it in the testimony because she thought possibly it had bitten Tommy when it had tried to run up his leg and he had knocked it off with his hand. And that maybe he had been infected by some form of hydrophobia…

The coroner let her finish, but before calling his next witness he talked to the jury a moment, explaining the symptoms of hydrophobia and its relatively long incubation period; a bite from the mouse could not possibly have affected Tommy so suddenly nor, for that matter, in such a way. Besides, he said, while it was possible that the mouse had had hydrophobia, which would account for at least most of its actions, it had not bitten Tommy; the skin on his hands had been unbroken. There had been scratches on his, legs, but these were caused by his running barelegged through bushes in the woods; none of the scratches could have been a bite.

Gus Hoffman testified next, then Jed Garner. Their stories were identical because they had been together all the time.

Doc Staunton listened carefully, especially when the dog Buck was mentioned—Buck following the boy last night, Buck leading them to the cave this morning. The sheriff testified last, about being called and going into the woods with Hoffman and Garner to bring out the body.

The coroner’s jury went into another room but came back almost immediately with a verdict of suicide while temporarily insane. People began to wander off.

Doc started to make his way toward the man whom he now knew to he Gus Hoffman, owner of the dog, but Hoffman disappeared into an inner office of the mortuary, no doubt to discuss arrangements for the funeral, and Garner and Garner’s daughter had gone with him.

Doc then cornered the big man who was the sheriff, introduced himself, and told about running over the dog.

“Maybe it’s just as well, Sheriff,” he said, “that I’m talking to you instead of Mr. Hoffman because—well, Mr. Hoffman had a nasty blow losing his son last night. Possibly it would be better if he doesn’t learn right away that his dog is dead too. It might be kinder to let him think the dog has just run away or got lost, and to realize gradually that it won’t be coming back. What do you think?”

The sheriff scratched his head. “Well—” He hesitated.

“May I make a suggestion?” Doc asked. “To give you a few minutes to think about that and also to let me ask a question or two about the suicide, which interests me, will you have a drink with me at the bar across the street?”

“Well—guess I’ll have time for one. Couple little things I gotta do here first, though. If you want to go ahead I’ll join you over there in ten minutes.”

At the bar, which he had investigated and found not wanting on his first day in Bartlesville, Doc ordered himself a beer and then got his pipe loaded and going. The cold beer tasted good, and he was just finishing it when the sheriff slid into the booth across from him. He said, “Beer looks good,” and turned toward the bar and called out, “Hey, Hank, bring us two beers. Big ones.”

And then to Doc, “Been thinking while I crossed the street. Guess you’re right about not hitting Gus with the news about the dog right now. He’s pretty broke up. But—uh, did you leave the dog along the road where he might see it driving home, or where somebody else might see it and phone him?”

Doc shook his head. “It’s rolled up in a tarp in the back of my car. I’ll bury it when I get home.” He relighted his pipe, which had gone out. “Damned sorry about the dog, but I couldn’t help running over it. It dashed from nowhere right under my wheels. Didn’t even have time to touch the brakes before I hit it.”

“Funny,” the sheriff said. “Buck was always afraid of cars, ran into the fields when he heard one coming. Car-shy, like some dogs are gun-shy.”

Doc stared at the sheriff. “Good Lord, Sheriff. Then he must have been crazy, running blind and deaf. Have there been any cases of rabies around here?”

“Not in a couple of years. Longer’n that, I guess.” He seemed uninterested.

Doc stared at the big moon face, wondering whether or not the sheriff was stupid. Probably not, he decided; probably of average intelligence, but unimaginative. He could dismiss the strangeness of the actions of the field mouse and those of the dog as irrelevant and think only about the actions of the boy Tommy. They’d been peculiar, yes, but after all the boy had gone suddenly insane, and insane people do insane things. That would be the reasoning of the sheriff, and no doubt of everyone else, concerned or not concerned, who had attended the inquest.

Let’s see, what had he wanted to ask the sheriff about the inquest? Yes… “Uh—Sheriff. I got to the inquest a little late; didn’t hear the medical report. Was there an autopsy?”

“Autopsy? No, what for? Wasn’t any doubt he killed himself, slashing his wrists with a knife. No other marks, except scratches on his legs, from bushes, and the bottoms of his feet cut and bloody.”

Doc opened his mouth and closed it again.

The sheriff said, “Say, I been trying to place where you’d be staying or living out that road. House at the very end of it, about ten miles out?”

“That’s right,” Doc said. “The old Burton place, they call it; used to be a farm but it’s gone wild now. Friend of mine back in Boston bought it to use as a summer vacation place. This summer he couldn’t get away and offered to let me use it.”

“Yeah, guy named—uh—Hastings. Met him a few times, summers. Wife with you, or staying alone out there?”

“I’m staying alone. Not married. I like to get a little solitude once in a while. When you teach—”

“What do you teach, Mr. Staunton?”

“Call me Doc, Sheriff. I teach physics at M. I. T. Specialize in electronics. I’ve done some work on the satellite program, too. Spent the first half of my vacation working on that, but I’ve got the rest of it to myself.”

“You mean you work on rockets?” There was respect in the sheriff’s voice.

“Not rockets themselves. Mostly on the detectors and transmitting sets in the satellites that send back information on radiation, cosmic rays, things like that. I helped design the components for the paddlewheel satellite, for one thing. But right now I’m more interested in fishing. There’s a creek about a mile east of where I live that’s—”

“I know it; I’ve lived there. But you—and your friend that owns the house, Hastings—ought to come out here in the hunting season sometime. Plenty deer out that way, in the woods north of you.”

“Afraid I’m not much of a hunter, Sheriff. Brought along a rifle and a pistol, but just for some target practice. And a shotgun because Hastings said there might be rattlers around the place, but I haven’t seen any yet. Have another beer?”

“Okay,” the sheriff said; he held up two fingers to the bartender.

“Had any other strange deaths here, Sheriff?” Doc asked.

The sheriff looked at him curiously. “Don’t know what you mean by ‘strange,’ ” he said. “Couple of unsolved killings in the last few years, but they were robbery kills, nothing strange about them.”

“No other case of anyone going suddenly suicidally—or homicidally—insane?”

“Ummm—not since I’ve been in office, six years almost. But what’s strange about it? People do go crazy, don’t they?”

“Yes, except that insanity usually follows certain patterns, and Tommy Hoffman’s—well—”

“You’re not suggesting it wasn’t suicide, are you?”

“Of course not. Just wondering what kind of a psychosis he had, and why it hit him so suddenly, and right then. While he was, or should have been, happy and relaxed, taking a nap after—after what should have been a pretty pleasant experience. It just doesn’t make sense. Well, let’s skip it. You say you’ve fished my creek, Sheriff. What kind of fly do you use for trout?”

After he finished his second beer the sheriff said he’d better get back to Wilcox, and left. Doc ordered himself a third, and over it, and over a pipe that kept going out because he couldn’t remember to keep puffing on it he lost himself in thought. Was he going overboard in thinking that the three deaths—the field mouse, the boy, the dog—formed an almost incredible sequence? The sheriff hadn’t seemed to think so, but—

Or was he making much ado about nothing? A field mouse had acted strangely. First it had sat up and pawed at the boy and girl as though to warn them away. Then it had let the girl pick it up but had nipped her. When she dropped it it had started to run away and then had run back and attacked the boy, thereby in effect committing suicide.

Then the boy, Tommy Hoffman. Again, suddenly insanity starting while he was asleep or just after he awakened beside the girl, and again ending in suicide. Doc admitted that people do go insane and do commit suicide while in that state. But he’d read quite a bit about abnormal psychology and had never yet heard of a case of a person going suddenly and completely insane without having shown any preliminary symptoms and without there being some inciting cause, some traumatic experience, at the time of the onset of insanity.

Then the dog, which was where Doc had come in. Of course the dog could have had rabies, could have been running blindly and deafly—but if it hadn’t, if it had been normal, then it too had in effect committed suicide by running in front of his car, especially since it had been car-shy. That was the one bit of new information he’d picked up from the sheriff, and it certainly did not make Buck’s death seem more natural.

But animals, except possibly lemmings, simply do not commit suicide.

Suddenly Doc downed what little was left of his beer and knocked the dottle out of his pipe as he stood up. There were laboratories in Green Bay which could tell him whether or not Buck had been rabid; Green Bay was only forty-five miles away and it was only three o’clock in the afternoon: He had the dog’s body in the station wagon and could get it there in plenty of time. Besides, he hadn’t been farther from the house than the ten miles to Bartlesville in a week, and an evening in Green Bay would be a pleasant change. He could eat in a good restaurant and take in a movie if anything worth while was playing.

He did all of those things and, between leaving the dog at the laboratory—he paid in advance so he could get the report by telephone from Bartlesville late the next day—and having dinner, he picked up a dozen or so paperbacks for light reading. Strictly mystery novels. He did his serious reading at times when he was working, and read only escape literature while he was on vacation. The dinner was good; it was a change from his own cooking and better than anything he could get in Bartlesville. The movie he saw was a French farce featuring Brigitte Bardot; he had trouble following the plot but after a while gave it up and just watched Brigitte; he enjoyed the rest of it very much.

He got back a little after ten o’clock to the house at the end of the road, the house he had borrowed from his friend Hastings. It was a fair-sized house that had been a farmhouse once. There were three bedrooms upstairs, although only two of them were furnished, and a bath; there were three rooms downstairs, a big kitchen, a big living room, and an extra room used only for storage, in which he kept his guns and fishing equipment. Electricity was provided by a generator in the basement, run by a small gasoline engine, and the same engine could be used periodically to pump water from a well to a tank on the roof. There was no telephone, but he didn’t mind that; in fact, be preferred it. The area around the house and to the south of it had once been a farm, but for whatever reason it had been abandoned it had not been farmed for at least twenty years. All of it except a yard immediately around the house had gone back to brush and woods, distinguishable from the wild country north of the road only in that trees were fewer and not so tall.

It had seemed a friendly, comfortable place, until tonight.

Doc got himself a can of beer from the refrigerator and sat down to read one of the books he’d brought back, but he couldn’t get interested in it. For some reason he felt uneasy. For the first time since he’d been here, he felt his isolation. He fought an impulse to pull down the shades so he couldn’t he seen by anything or anybody watching from outside.

But why would anybody have any reason for coming way out here to the last house to look through his windows? And what did he mean by anything? Anything capable of looking through a window could only be an animal, and why should he care how many animals might be watching him? He charged himself with being ridiculous, found himself guilty as charged, and sentenced himself to opening another can of beer and trying harder to concentrate on the mystery novel.

Going back to it, he discovered that it was open at page twenty, but he couldn’t remember a single thing about the previous pages he had presumably read. He started over again. It was, or should have been, an exciting mystery; there was a murder on the very first page. But he just couldn’t get interested in it; between the book and his mind there interposed the story of Tommy Hoffman… Getting up naked, except for blue socks, from lying beside his sweetheart, and running off to a sand-floored cave; crouching in it until he saw the lanterns approaching carried by his father and his sweetheart’s father, and hearing the barking of Buck, the hound. Running away from them again, circling back to a point near where he had started, picking up a rusty, broken-bladed knife and slashing his wrists, both of them.

The book was open to page fifteen now, but again he had no recollection of anything beyond the first page. He tossed it down in despair and let himself think.

He decided to try his best to put the Hoffman case out of his mind until late tomorrow afternoon when, from Bartlesville, he could phone the laboratory for the report on Buck.

Then, if the dog bad had rabies, which would explain one of the three deaths, he would put the whole thing out of his mind permanently—and enjoy the five weeks remaining of his vacation without letting himself try to solve something that was probably a coincidence instead of a mystery… But if Buck had not had rabies…

He had one more can of beer to make himself sleepy, and went to bed. After a while he slept.