The Thing in B-3: A Tale of the Supernatural

A Revealing Portrait

Driving toward Harlandale, George Kahler worked at being friendly. He asked about Bill’s courses at Crownover and insisted on picking up a bag of hamburgers at a carry-out place on the edge of the city.

Kahler got back in the Mercedes, grinning as he handed over the food. “That’ll push a wrinkle out, anyhow.”

“Thanks.”

Kahler whisked the car back onto the highway. It moved with the fluid power of harnessed black leopards.

Kahler drove with his left hand, taking a big chomp at the hamburger he held in his right.

“Your girl in the MG?” Kahler asked.

“I guess you could say that.”

“Real nice-looking chick.”

“Yes, she is.”

Kahler glanced at him. Bill’s tone hadn’t invited pursuance of the subject. And right now, Bill rated royal courtesy, at least until Kahler had finished the job of fetching him to The Oaks.

Bill watched trees and telephone poles whip past. By now, he judged, Betty would have covered the distance of the expressway, Eastern Parkway, Fairfield Boulevard, Foxlane. She would be entering that luxurious house. Her father wouldn’t be home for a few hours yet. Bill hoped her mother would be. But that was always questionable. Mrs. Atherton was always running hither and yon, making motions to fill a life that had grown empty.

She could try filling it a little more with Betty, Bill thought grimly.

Kahler watched Bill without appearing to. The young fellow was sure thinking some long thoughts, he observed.

Kahler slowed the car, turned the steering wheel, and eased across the rutty drop onto The Oaks driveway.

Bill’s moodiness drained off a little. He braced against the armrest as the car rolled and pitched along the ruts up through the trees.

They passed the point of their earlier confrontation. Then Kahler was stopping the car in front of the house.

The silent, weathered face of the house held George for a moment.

“Just be kind to her, Mr. Latham. The years haven’t been. It never hurts to be kind.”

Bill’s hand stiffened for an instant on the door handle. His face twisted leftward in a short arc. George was looking away, toward the house. Bill studied the almost earless head that might have been carved from yellowish marble. George’s words had rung unpleasantly like a warning, a threat.

“I didn’t come along to be unkind,” Bill said.

George looked around with a bull-like movement of head and shoulders. “Yes, that’s right. You’re a nice young fellow.”

“And kindness is a two-way street,” Bill said.

George caught the counter-warning. It seemed to amuse him. “You’re mighty right, Mr. Latham,” he agreed amiably.

They got out of the car. As Bill walked around to fall in beside George, he looked toward the house, expecting it to show signs of life. But nothing happened. Even the big dog Blitzen was conspicuous by his absence.

George opened the front door and bowed Bill inside.

Bill had the sensation of a backward movement in time. The air had a mustiness that couldn’t have accumulated overnight.

He followed Kahler into a living room where the draperies had hung limp for a generation. The style of the couches and chairs was older than his earliest memories. On a coffee table a youngish Harry Truman doggedly electioneered from the cover of a yellowing magazine. Bill had never seen a radio like the ornate cabinet model in the end of the room.

“I’ll announce you, Mr. Latham,” Kahler said, as if he spent half his time ushering in callers.

The woman who poised for an entrance a few minutes later caused Bill to stand rooted in mild shock. She was a slender, wasted figure in a blue silk dress that reached within a dozen inches of her ankles. Her thin face was a gargoyle mask molded from white chalk, with slashes of crimson and blue marking mouth and eyes. Her hair was a sparse fall of silver that curled inward above her shoulders.

“So nice of you to come, Mr. Latham.” With hand outstretched and a smile pulling the garish lips, she stepped forward with a lingering trace of charm and grace. The hint of what she must have once been only pointed up, pitiably, what she was today.

Bill took the offered hand. The bones were thin and birdlike. Her touch was as dry as an old, long-stored newspaper.

“I’m Carlotta Braxley,” she said. “Do sit down. Be comfortable. We don’t stand on too much formality here at The Oaks. You may smoke if you care to.”

“Never picked up the habit,” Bill said.

“Then you’re a very wise young man. Neither did Elizabeth.” She turned and moved to one of the couches facing each other before the dead fireplace. “George will serve some tea shortly, and we’ll have a good talk.”

She sat down with a genteel breaking of the knees, her back straight. She patted the cushion beside her, and the movement provoked a hint of dust.

Bill was nearer the opposite couch. It was a good excuse for him to sit farther from her, with the old-fashioned oaken coffee table between them.

With a ferret intensity, she watched him sink onto the couch.

“Do you like Crownover, Mr. Latham?”

“Very much.”

“Do you live in a dorm or fraternity house?”

“I live at home,” he said. “My father is a local doctor.”

“I see. Do you wish to become a doctor, also?”

“I’d like to get into the research end of medicine. But it takes a long time and a lot of work.”

“And I’m sure you’ll succeed.” Her quick little nods admitted no argument.

George came in carrying a magnificent but slightly tarnished silver tea service. He set the tray on the oaken table.

“Thank you, George,” Mrs. Braxley said. “That will be all for now, but stay on call.”

Rising from the tray, George flicked a final warning glance at Bill. Be very kind to her, George’s eyes said.

Bill felt his hackles rise. It came to him that this echo of a woman and this ruin-ridden estate made up Kahler’s world. These were the responsibilities that gave George a reason for existing.

Bill sneaked a longing glance at the door. He was beginning to regret having come. But the strange urge to know more about Elizabeth Braxley still gnawed at him.

Mrs. Braxley was asking him how he liked his tea.

“A lump of sugar will be fine, please.”

She poured, tonged sugar, and offered the fragile, steaming cup across the table. She tilted the heavy teapot to pour her own, saying, “Did you meet Elizabeth when she was last in the hospital?”

“No, Mrs. Braxley, I didn’t know Eliza...”

“Surely you didn’t meet her when she was away at school? I’m sure she mentioned all her friends, and I don’t remember your name.” She looked at him over the thin rim of her cup. “Just how did you meet Elizabeth, Mr. Latham?”

“Well, I started to say,” he began again, clearing his throat, “I didn’t know Elizabeth at all.”

She had no facial expression, at least none visible through the layers of powder. “I’m afraid you’re confusing me. You came here earlier with inquiries about Elizabeth. Now you say you didn’t know her.”

Bill shifted awkwardly. Now that the moment was here, he wondered how foolish his words would sound — and what old wounds they might reopen in Carlotta Braxley.

“I’m waiting, young man!” For the first time her voice hinted at the emotional undertows constantly seething inside of her.

“It isn’t something that happens every day,” Bill said.

“No one has experienced the strange and the shocking more than I.” She pressed back, seeming to shrink into the couch. “I doubt that you could say anything that would surprise or upset me.”

Bill set down his drink, the cup emitting a slight rattle against the saucer.

“I have a part-time job, Mrs. Braxley, and I...”

“I’m sure it’s very nice. But I suggest you start getting to the point.”

“The job is the point — at least, in a way.” Bill rubbed the knuckles of his left hand with the palm of his right. “I work evenings at the city morgue.”

“A horrible place!”

“Yes... well... night before last...” Had it been that recent? He drew a helpless breath. “Mrs. Braxley, I think this has all been a mistake, starting with my coming here in the first place.”

She inched forward, and something in her movements sent a chill through him. “But you did come, Mr. Latham. You had a reason. And you’ve aroused my curiosity dreadfully.”

Bill found himself pressing the back of the couch, stretching the distance between himself and that hovering face. He knew he had come too far to turn back. She was going to have an explanation, or erupt like an ice-capped volcano.

“Okay, Mrs. Braxley, I’ll tell it to you straight. If you think the trouble is with me, you won’t have to call George to throw me out. I’ll leave quietly.”

“Then let’s by all means return to the morgue. I believe we were there, and the time was night before last.”

His glance slid away. He sat as if studying the film of gray ash in the long-unused fireplace. “I won’t bore you with details, but I discovered a girl in one of the refrigerated drawers. Only she wasn’t there, not really.” He hesitated. “Other people couldn’t see her. Just me.”

He slipped a look to see how she was taking it. He couldn’t tell. Her face was that of an expressionless clown out of a nightmare circus.

“Since the drawer was actually empty,” he said, “I looked up the name of the last person who’d been in it.”

“And the name was Elizabeth’s,” she said.

“Yes.”

“No, no, that’s only the beginning of it!” A wild, happy laugh burst through her words.

In a fury of movement she was up and around the table. Then she dropped sideways beside Bill and clutched his hands.

“You dear boy!” Tears of delirium spilled down the plaster-of-paris cheeks. “You dear, marvelous boy!”

Bill struggled away in quick panic, but she wouldn’t let go. She pressed his right hand against the hollow of her cheek.

“You bring me such happy news!”

“Happy?” Bill gulped. He’d expected nothing like this display.

She jumped up. Holding his hands, she dragged him to his feet.

He held back, and her eyes snapped a bolt of anger. Bill had never seen anything like it. Once it was charged up, the white mask could express joy, sorrow, wild rage, all in the same instant.

“Now, don’t be afraid, young man! We’re simply going up to Elizabeth’s room. Isn’t that why you came, to know and understand her better?”

Bill allowed himself to be led out of the living room and up a creaking stairway. In the upper hall, Carlotta Braxley stopped at a closed door. A hush came over her. She opened the door with soft, gentle movements.

“This room knew her private thoughts, Mr. Latham. These are the things she touched.” Mrs. Braxley held his hand and drew him inside. She moved inch by inch, as if she were on hallowed ground.

Special as the room might be to Carlotta Braxley, Bill saw it as comfortably ordinary. It was furnished in maple and chintz. And, in one respect, it didn’t seem a part of the house. Carlotta Braxley had tried to stop the passage of time when her husband died. But in here, at least, there were reminders of the immediate past — a portable TV in the farther corner, a book about John F. Kennedy on a nearby table, and a small stereo with a tape still in place.

“Everything is exactly as she left it, Mr. Latham,” Mrs. Braxley said in hushed tones.

Bill thought of a girl growing up in this house and staying in tune with the present only in this room. He shivered slightly.

Mrs. Braxley slipped about the room, touching objects here and there as if it were a daily ritual. She shifted comb, brush, cologne and perfume bottles on the dressing table, probably back to the exact locations of yesterday. She smoothed a nonexistent wrinkle from the flowered bedspread.

Bill stood as if glued. She looked at him from the foot of the bed.

“It was terribly difficult,” she said, “first realizing and then accepting Elizabeth’s differences. She was like no other person, Mr. Latham. She was different from the day of her birth. Yes...”

Her mind drifted. She looked vaguely about the room, then refocused on Bill.

“I’m sure your education has progressed to a knowledge of genes, chromosomes, those hereditary factors in our parents that cause us to be born the way we are.”

“Yes.” Bill nodded. “I know something about the subject.”

“Then you know that life progresses in a chain. Every now and then a link bursts out that’s different. We call this link a mutation. Elizabeth was a mutant... yes...”

She wandered to the windows overlooking the front lawn. A fold in the curtains caught her eye. She smoothed it with a gentle brushing of her palm, then carefully fingered it in again.

“It was, of course, due to the terrible accident Johnny suffered,” she said.

Johnny, Bill thought, Elizabeth’s father. To the rest of the world, he’d been a remote, incomprehensible, big-brain atomic scientist. But to this woman, Dr. Jonathan Fitfield Braxley had been Johnny, lovable sweetheart, husband.

She looked down at the front lawn, and perhaps she was seeing a stream of cars arriving for a party, hearing the laughter and exuberant greetings, the sights and sounds of a generation ago.

Bill took a step toward her. “Mrs. Braxley...”

She flashed about, her lips twisting in a snarl. “You haven’t let me finish, young man! Don’t you know it’s discourteous to interrupt?”

“I’m sorry,” Bill said.

“Well! At least you’ve been taught sufficient manners to apologize.” A shaft of afternoon sunlight caught bluishly in her silver hair. “Shall we continue?”

“Please do,” Bill said. Anything to placate her, to keep the fires of madness banked. He wondered how many years George Kahler had spent doing the same thing.

“Johnny was... atomically radiated,” she said, “before we had any children. Elizabeth was the first, the last. Born after her father was dead from radiation poisoning.”

Bill might have expected talk of this sort to upset her. Instead, it seemed to do Carlotta good to get the thoughts out of her head.

Her voice gained strength as it droned on. “The accident was foolish and unnecessary, but things like that did happen in the hurry and pressure of those wartime days. An assistant dropped a shielded container of high-energy material. He recovered. Johnny — who acted to reclose the casing — didn’t. Yes...”

She’d drifted toward the bed. She grasped one of the foot posters at shoulder height and leaned slightly against it.

“The results of atomic radiation were passed on to Elizabeth,” she said. “She was a fragile child from the beginning, but such a lovely little girl. The sickness that eventually claimed her wasn’t apparent at first. Leukemia, the doctors called it, for want of a better word. But I know... Indeed, I know...”

She rested her forehead against the bed post. “We human beings are more than mere flesh and blood. Don’t you agree, Mr. Latham? Yes, you do, or you wouldn’t be here.” Her words crowded on, giving him little chance to speak.

“Our psychic nature is more important than our physical,” she said. “And that was the important difference in Elizabeth. She was a new kind of human being. Her psychic outreach grew as her body weakened. Even when she was small and her powers first noticeable, I rarely had to call aloud to her. She would come into the room where I was. ‘Mama,’ she would say, ‘did you want me for something?’ And I would reply, ‘Why, yes, dear, but how did you know?’ ‘I just felt it, Mama,’ she would answer. Further than that, she never had any explanation. And sometimes she had no psychic powers at all.”

Mrs. Braxley’s palm left a damp impression as it slid from the poster.

“This is what she looked like, Mr. Latham. That is, her physical shell.”

Bill turned by degrees, his gaze following her across the room.

She stopped and looked up at an oil portrait hanging on the inner wall. Bill took a few steps for a straighter, broader view.

In lifelike flesh tones, the painting of Elizabeth Braxley suggested that she’d just said something gently humorous to the artist. The soft mouth was quirked as if her little joke was really beyond human understanding. Her blue eyes were patient and kind. Her sheen of golden hair, falling to her shoulders, relieved the etching of suffering in her delicate jaw and chin lines.

“Isn’t she lovely, Mr. Latham?”

“Yes,” Bill said honestly, “she was beautiful.”

The shoulders in front of him stiffened. “Was? Did I hear correctly, young man?”

She spun about. For a second he thought that her hands were about to tear like talons at his face. “How dare you speak of Elizabeth in the past tense!”

“Please, Mrs. Braxley. Don’t upset yourself.”

“It is you who are upsetting! I’m surprised Elizabeth chose you!” She parked her knuckles against her sides and looked him up and down. A breath hissed from her. “But since she did, I suppose I must accept her choice.” Her hand darted and was suddenly plucking his sleeve. “So come along, young man, and I’ll show you to your quarters.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Braxley?”

Her glance was impatient. “Your quarters. Your room. We’ll try to make you comfortable while you’re living with us.”

He gulped, dry-throated. “Mrs. Braxley, I really have to get going now. There’s school and my job.”

“Nonsense! None of that is important now. Nothing matters — except that Elizabeth found you and sent you. It naturally follows that you will stay here until you have raised her.”

Bill balked immovably in the hallway outside Elizabeth’s room. “Raised her, Mrs. Braxley?”

“Certainly. It’s perfectly clear, dear boy. You are her medium. Through you, Elizabeth will speak. You’re the connection through which she will return.”

A dreamy glow melted Carlotta Braxley’s eyes. “We’ll have endless seances. Each evening after dinner we shall turn down the lights and wait for Elizabeth to come and speak through you.”

Bill cleared his throat. “Mrs. Braxley, please let me explain something.” Unobtrusively he eased into motion, moving along the hall, her eyes rapt on his face as she stayed beside him.

“You see,” he said, “I’m not a spirit-medium. I’m just a college student who never had anything like this happen to him before. I’ve a feeling when this is over I’ll never experience anything like it again. A once-in-a-lifetime thing, you understand?”

“I don’t like the sound of this, Mr. Latham.” Her tone was brittle.

“Don’t you want me to be honest with you?”

“You had best be!”

Ahead loomed the shadow of the stairwell, the escape route.

“There are a lot of phony mediums who’d love to come here and give you a spook show for your money, Mrs. Braxley. Some of them are very clever. They could make you think you were talking to Elizabeth through them. But I can’t produce what your heart craves so much. I couldn’t fake it. I’d feel like a nut, sitting in the dark and calling out to Elizabeth’s spirit.”

“You lack dedication, Mr. Latham,” she warned thinly. “The way you feel isn’t the important issue.”

“No, you’re right about that, I guess. But don’t you see, I’d only disappoint and hurt you.”

She slipped between him and the stairway. In the corridor’s gloom, her face hovered as if disembodied. Facing him in a slight crouch, she seized his elbows. “What is it you want, Mr. Latham? Your room redecorated? It shall be done. Special foods? You shall have them. Money? I have lots of it.”

He moved his hands, gently breaking her grip, almost a finger at a time.

“I want,” he said, “you to have peace of mind. I think the woman who mothered Elizabeth was a fine lady. I want her to be happy. I want her to know that I would have done as she asked, if it had been possible.”

Holding her hands, he had quietly shifted their positions as he talked. Now he could feel the emptiness of the first stair under his left sole.

“Please try to understand, Mrs. Braxley. Good luck, and good-bye.”

He went down quickly, hitting every third stair tread, touching the banister with outthrust hand to keep his balance. Her wild screaming of his name threatened to shatter the plaster and bury him in moldering ruin.

He raced through the foyer and yanked open the front door. A crimson, glaring sun met his eyes.

An upstairs window showered tinkling glass as Mrs. Braxley smashed it with the first thing she could lay hands on.

“George! Blitzen!” she was screaming from up there. “He’s running away! You must stop him. You must, you must, you must!”

Bill ran toward the Mercedes. He tried to remember: Had George left the keys in the ignition?

He jerked open the door on the driver’s side, and the ignition lock leered at him, empty.

Hearing a deep-throated growl, he twisted a frantic glance over his shoulder. The huge dog had slipped up behind him. Blitzen was crouched, bunched to spring. Bill glimpsed the reddish eyes, and the gleaming fangs, and his reflexes almost failed him. He threw himself aside as the dog catapulted. The hurtling shadow blurred his sight. Losing his footing, Bill rolled away. He heard the heavy thud of the powerful animal against the open car door.

He was up and running before Blitzen could regroup himself. Then he heard Blitzen’s snarl, closing in.

Bill ducked behind an oak tree. The ground beneath spreading branches was littered with dried leaves, chips of bark, dead twigs and branches that had fallen victim to high winds.

Bill grabbed up a decayed limb that was almost as thick as his arm and half again as long.

With the rough bark of the tree trunk biting his back, Bill jabbed the limb as Blitzen closed in.

The dog veered, slowed, and began circling with muscles bunched and eager.

From Bill’s throat came a sound to equal Blitzen’s growl. Bill punched and feinted, warding off the dog.

He glimpsed Kahler’s massive, running form coming from the farther corner of the house.

“Call the brute off, Kahler!”

Kahler stopped, his feet showering dead leaves. He slapped his thigh. “Heel, Blitzen!” The dog didn’t obey immediately. He inched sideways, eyes glazed with excitement of the hunt, ears laid back, tongue lolling.

Kahler took two strides, closed on the dog, and grabbed him by the scruff. “Easy, boy, easy now.”

Blitzen struggled a moment longer in his master’s grip, frantic to leap upon Bill. Kahler backed the dog, holding the bunched neck fur and talking softly to him.

Blitzen gradually calmed, but his muscles continued to quiver, his eyes not leaving Bill.

Kahler straightened, his hand slipping a pistol from the waistband of his trousers.

Bill looked at the man for a nerveless moment. The dead tree limb slipped unnoticed from his hand.

He slowly looked from the gun up into Kahler’s face.

“She wants you back in there, fellow,” George said as he leveled the pistol at Bill.

Bill tried to calm the pounding in his chest. He shook his head slowly. “You’re making a mistake, Kahler. You’ll end up in jail for a long, long time.”

Kahler showed the first sign of hesitancy.

“She’s sick, Kahler,” Bill pressed on. “You know it as well as I. You probably hurt for the tragedy of her even more than I. But making me a prisoner in that house won’t help her.”

Kahler’s face turned briefly toward the house. It was silent now, as silent as a lost ship in ocean depths.

“Maybe she’s collapsed or hurt herself,” Bill said. “You’ve spent a lot of your life taking care of her, Kahler. Don’t ruin it. Don’t let her down now.”

Bill stood with his hands pressed beside him, clawing into the tree trunk. He watched the play of slow wits through Kahler’s face.

“People are no good for her,” Kahler said savagely. “People make her remember too many things.”

Kahler again looked at the house. He was brutish and dull, but as the man’s tortured eyes swung back, Bill glimpsed the human depths that even the dullest of men may possess. There are few clods on this earth, Bill thought, except in the eyes of the beholder.

Kahler took a step backward, the first in his hurried return to his appointed task. “Like I told you the first time, fellow — get out!”