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

Sudden Awakenings

Dr. Latham came into the dining room with his face a ruddy glow and his iron gray hair curling damply at the ends from his morning shower.

Victoria was already at the table, gulping orange juice and toast. “Hi, Dad. You look just great this morning.”

Moving to the buffet, Dr. Latham smiled. Everything, the whole world, looked great to Vicky these days. And looking at her bright face, the early sunlight catching in her dark hair, Dr. Latham himself felt pretty good.

He poured a cup of Mrs. Hofstetter’s robust coffee and turned to sit down at the end of the table. The morning paper lay folded beside his plate. He picked it up, snapped it open, but he didn’t look at it right away.

“Any further word from Fortesque Fifth Avenue yesterday?”

“Nope — but any day now. I do declare, you’re as anxious about the job as I am.”

“Just shoving the young bird out of the nest.” Dr. Latham laughed. Affectionately he watched Vicky dash the last of the juice into her mouth. “Young lady, a doctor should have the healthiest family in town. So take time to taste or you’ll ruin your digestion.”

“These days I could digest nails.” Victoria tossed her napkin beside her plate and jumped up. She paused beside her father to give him a quick hug and peck on the cheek. “Just you take time to eat. You’re not an entire medical squad, you know.”

Her parting gesture was a flip on his earlobe. “Got to run. Big doings. I don’t want any loose ends at the store when Fortesque Fifth Avenue whistles.” Dr. Latham watched her dash to the cloak closet in the foyer and peel out a light coat for the autumn morning. She flung it capelike about her shoulders and blew a kiss back as the front door closed behind her.

Her departure left Dr. Latham with a sudden awareness of the quiet in the house about him.

He picked up his coffee and sipped slowly. Vicky and Bill — children no longer. The day was just after the morrow when his crack about the nest would be a fact.

He looked at the back of his hand. It was still firm and steady. Was it possible he’d used up so many years?

His gaze drifted to the stretch of lawn visible through the sun-glowing windows. How long before the grass would be bruised by the racing feet of grandchildren? A skinned knee to doctor... a sleepy head nestled against his chest as he told a story of witches and gingerbread houses...

The moment was suddenly empty, as it hadn’t been for a long time. A wisp of the future crossed his mind, he and a child talking. Is that Grandmama’s picture on your bureau, Grandfather?... Yes, child... She’s pretty, Grandfather... She is indeed, child... Did she get sick?... Yes, child, she went away from us...

And I, he thought, was so helpless — little better than a witch doctor — against the adversary of cancer, when it struck my own wife.

“Good morning, Doctor.” Mrs. Hofstetter’s greeting snapped his mood. He glanced up. The spare-boned housekeeper, entering from the kitchen, was carrying a serving of grapefruit sections.

“I found some of those pinks you like so much at the supermarket yesterday.”

“You spoil us all, Mrs. Hofstetter,” he said with a smile.

She set the dish before him, then swished to the buffet to pour her second coffee of the morning. She joined him, sitting in one of the chairs at the side of the table.

While the grapefruit disappeared, they discussed household problems. The old hot-water heater was balky again. Dr. Latham questioned whether it was worth the cost of another repair. The power company wanted to trim back the oak at the corner of the yard to protect the wires. Dr. Latham nodded permission.

He glanced at the wristwatch which Bill and Vicky had given him last Christmas. “By the way,” he mentioned, “is Bill turning into a chronic ten o’clock scholar?”

“He beat everybody out of bed this morning, Doctor. He’s already up and out.”

“That’s too bad.” Dr. Latham liked for the family to breakfast together, their schedules nowadays scattering them so much during the day. Usually they did, although there were exceptions. Yesterday, for example, an emergency call had sent him to the slum section known as Goosetown before any of the household was stirring.

“He didn’t look so upset this morning,” Mrs. Hofstetter remarked. “I was worried about that boy yesterday.”

Dr. Latham’s coffee cup halted, half raised to his mouth. “Strange,” he murmured. He put down the cup slowly. “I had an anxious moment about Bill myself yesterday. Dr. Hornaday took the trouble to mention that Bill looked weatherish.”

“Well, he was worried about the math quiz, for one thing. It isn’t his best subject, you know.”

“Talking with Bill,” Dr. Latham followed his own line of thought, “it appeared that Hornaday was miffed by a prank. Hornaday does get cranky sometimes, when he’s overworked and his dinner long delayed. Still, I couldn’t get over the feeling that Bill wasn’t his usual bushy-tailed self.”

“You know youngsters,” Mrs. Hofstetter said. “Draggy with a bug one minute and bouncing back the next.”

“I doubt that it was a bug. But, in a sense, you may be right. He was down for a minute when I showed up. Skittish, jumpy. Then after I talked with him, I couldn’t isolate but one reason. Hornaday’s reaction to a prank had jolted him. Bill hadn’t expected such a backfire as a report to his father.”

“Bill’s no shrinking violet, and not yet the settled adult,” Mrs. Hofstetter said. “I’m not surprised he’s still got a boyish prank or two kicking around in him.”

“This one was supposed to be more than just a joke. Some sort of far-out psychological test of Hornaday’s reaction to an impossible development.”

Mrs. Hofstetter pushed her chair back a few inches. “Ready for your eggs, Doctor?”

He shook his head. “None this morning.” He watched his fingers turning the cup back and forth in its saucer. There was a hint of tension in the unconscious gesture. He pulled his hand away. “The more I think about it, the less real the experience seems. It doesn’t jibe with the Bill I know.”

“Just what did he do, Doctor?”

“He told Hornaday that the unidentified and unrecorded body of a girl was in the morgue.”

In the act of rising, Mrs. Hofstetter’s muscles held. She eased back into her chair. Her gimlet eyes snapped. “Isn’t there?”

“Of course not. That was the gimmick.”

Mrs. Hofstetter’s colorless lips pursed. “That’s odd. Yesterday morning Bill told me about the girl.”

A tightness seeped through Dr. Latham’s muscles. The indefinable shadow of worry which had gnawed at him struggled to stronger life. What in the world was going on? Why this sudden twist in Bill’s behavior?

His mind went over details of the experience in the morgue. I think I’m safe in saying that no material substance is in that drawer. Those had been Bill’s exact words. The phrases now seemed in Dr. Latham’s mind to smack of a too-careful, sideways statement of truth.

Dr. Latham’s fingers twitched in a nervous drumming on the tabletop. He thought of the strong bond between himself and his son. He knew that his son would give his right arm for him. Despite this, Bill was holding back something. The meaning of the action was obvious. Bill was trying to shield him. And this implied that it was from something of a serious nature.

His eyes met Mrs. Hofstetter’s. He sensed that the same sinister questions were needling her.

“What can possibly be the meaning of it?” he wondered aloud.

“I haven’t the faintest idea, Doctor. It just isn’t like Bill at all.”

The chair became an uncomfortable pressure against Dr. Latham’s back. He stood up in sudden decision, strode into the kitchen, lifted down the wall phone, and dialed his office number.

Miss Pegran, his nurse-receptionist, responded with the usual: “Dr. Latham’s office.”

“This is the doctor,” he said. “What have we on the docket this morning?”

“Mrs. Bayliss first.”

“Routine prenatal,” he said.

“Then Mr. Chizik...”

“For a cortisone injection. You needn’t detail the list, Miss Pegran. Just tell me if we have anything that looks critical.”

“It’s the lightest schedule in days, Doctor.”

Thank goodness for small favors, he thought. The parade through his office was rarely so healthy.

“Then you and Dr. Smithfield can hold the fort for a while.” Young Smithfield had joined him a year ago, fresh from internship. Smithfield had wanted the sort of experience he would gain in Dr. Latham’s practice, and Dr. Latham had been glad to get him. The load had been too much for one man for a long time.

“I’m sure we can, Doctor. When will you be in? Some of the older patients won’t have anyone but you, you know, even for a case of heartburn.”

“I’ll try to make it by noon. And of course I’ll keep in touch.”

“Very well, Doctor.”

Miss Pegran’s tone told him that her curiosity was rising like a malarial thermometer. She couldn’t remember when Dr. Latham had taken the morning off. To her, the prospect was comparable to the idea of the President boarding up the White House.

Dr. Latham hung up, forestalling questions.

By eleven o’clock the bug of worry was growing in his mind. Bill hadn’t reported for either of his two morning classes. And his space in the student parking lot yawned emptily.

Dr. Latham turned indecisively, a man without direction. He looked about the shade-dappled grounds, at the ivied buildings cloistered peacefully about the sprawling campus. His rugged face was tinged with the wish to see Bill hurrying along a walk, around a lawn, with his easy, long-legged stride.

A hundred yards away, beyond a hedge-boxed stretch of grass, the Gothic quiet of the Humanities Building was broken by a stream of emerging students. A light clicked in Dr. Latham’s eyes.

He hurried from the parking lot and across the lawn. He bucked the tide of students fresh from bouts with English literature and Grecian tragedies. Now and then a friend of Bill’s would speak a greeting. Dr. Latham’s replies were courteous but absent-minded.

Betty Atherton was among the last of the students to come out. He picked her out of a cluster of three young women chatting their way through the towering portal.

She saw him standing beside the wide, stone steps when she was halfway down. She spoke a parting to the others and angled toward him.

Watching her close the distance between them, Dr. Latham agreed with his son’s taste. Betty was lovely. Yet her attractiveness included more than looks. In her face one sensed intelligence, humor, compassion. Depth of character, Dr. Latham would have summed up in a moment when his mind was less strained.

She stepped down beside him, comforting an omnibus textbook in the crook of her right arm.

“Well, hi, Dr. Latham.” Her tone reflected her puzzlement at his appearance in this time and place.

“Good morning, Betty. How was Chaucerian England today?”

“I’ve a feeling,” she said, “you just didn’t happen to be here. Were you looking for me?”

“I happened to be nearby and always welcome the pleasure of seeing you,” he evaded. If he could fish in blind waters, he wanted to keep from upsetting her more than necessary. “How about an old bear for company as you walk to your next class?”

Her response was to stand firmly on the spot. The gush of students had subsided to nothing. They stood in an isolated privacy beside the walk, in a splash of shadow cast by a willow tree.

“Dr. Latham, has something happened to Bill?” Her tone was steady, but he sensed the controlled alarm behind it. He knew he wouldn’t be able to hide much from this girl. Perhaps he shouldn’t even try. For all her femininity, she was no precious petal. Honesty might hurt her less than the feeling that she was being protected because she was too weak to face the truth.

“I don’t know,” he answered bluntly. “Do you?”

“No,” she said. “But I’ve been uneasy since night before last.”

“Why?”

Her shoulders made a slight movement of struggle. “I wish I knew. Something I felt. When you really like someone, you can usually tell when something’s wrong.”

“I don’t disparage a woman’s intuition,” Dr. Latham assured her.

A vagrant breeze, a hint of winter in the Indian summer morning, brushed a wisp of her glossy, black-purple hair across her forehead. “We had a coffee break together, Bill and I.”

Dr. Latham nodded. “I remember. I met him as he brought in an emergency and told him he’d probably find you in the hospital commissary.”

“Then, later, when he clocked out, a late snack — and he wasn’t the same.”

“In what way?”

Her smooth brow crinkled. Then she shook her head. “I don’t know. But inside — he was changed. It must have happened while he was in the morgue, during the time between the coffee break and the pizza. Something happened... touching him.”

A non-existent girl in a cadaver compartment. Dr. Latham kept his shudder from twitching to the surface.

“When did you see Bill last?”

“Yesterday at lunch,” Betty said. “He looked beat, I might add. I blamed it on a math quiz.”

“Are you meeting him today?”

“No,” Betty said. “He phoned me early this morning. Said he had to attend to something.”

“Did he say what?”

Betty’s head moved in the negative. “But he sounded okay. I didn’t pry.”

Dr. Latham’s face felt warm, despite the chill in the breeze.

“Whatever it was,” he said, “it wasn’t here at Crownover. Bill apparently hasn’t been on campus all day.”

She clutched the textbook a little tighter. Her knuckles showed white. “I don’t like any of this, Dr. Latham. I admire and respect Bill for wanting to protect me... us. But this is one time I wish he’d shared a problem.”

“We may be jumping at shadows. Could be the problem doesn’t rate a sharing.”

Her wide-lipped mouth twitched with irritation. Then she tilted the soft oval of her face and her eyes gentled. “Well,” she sighed, “Bill inherited the trait, I guess. But don’t kid-glove me, Doctor. I understand. I know when you’re putting me on.”

“All right.” He nodded. “No communication gap. Maybe the shadow is big enough to slice up and go around.”

“Then what’s the next move? Check the police and hospital for accident reports?”

“Not yet,” he said. “If anything like that had happened, my office or home would have been notified. Both know where I am.”

Absently, he lifted a hand and kneaded the coil of tension in the back of his neck. “Bill’s phone call canceling lunch today means that he didn’t intend to come to classes. His absence from the campus is deliberate, not by accident.”

“But why?” Betty cried.

“That is a rather good question,” Dr. Latham conceded. “Since Bill didn’t broadcast advance publicity, there is one person to whom he might have spoken.”

“Dr. Connell!” Betty said, before Dr. Latham could get the name out.

“It’s a chance. Bill refused the idea of dumping his troubles on us. Let’s hope the heroics didn’t extend to Pat Connell.”

Connell’s office in the faculty building was a rather cramped cubicle with a severe decor. The walls were paneled with a dark brown wood veneer. Two windows were at the end of the room, but they were narrow, faced north, and admitted little sunlight. The desk was boxlike in its sharp lines. Against the wall between desk and doorway, a pair of Windsor chairs, uninviting in their stiffness, were separated by a low table that bore a large ceramic ashtray and a lamp with a shade of tan parchment.

The office reflected very little of Connell himself. He’d restrained the normal urge to enliven the surroundings with gimcracks of himself. No pictures of his choosing on the walls and no rack holding some of his tennis trophies.

The office, Dr. Latham’s practiced medical eyes noted, was as impersonal as a confessional booth.

Connell leaned across the desk to shake Dr. Latham’s hand. He included a smile of greeting for Betty.

“Welcome to faculty row, Doctor. How are you, Miss Atherton?”

At Connell’s gesture Betty sat down in one of the chairs beside the table. Dr. Latham chose a chair nearer the corner of the desk. Connell sank down into a secretarial type chair that received him with a faint metallic squeak.

“Obviously your son is the reason for seeing his faculty adviser, Doctor,” Connell said. “What can I do for you?”

Dr. Latham’s questions were suddenly too personal to come easily. An awkwardness touched him. He cleared his throat. “I’m not here with one of the usual beefs.”

“I shouldn’t think so.” Pat nodded. “Bill’s record is excellent. He’s steady, dependable, and works at the top of his I.Q., which, as you know, is well above average.”

Dr. Latham wasn’t a man who lapped up praise of his son. He thanked God often for the quality of his children, but his love was big enough to see and accept Bill’s — and Vicky’s — faults.

Still and all, under normal circumstances Dr. Connell’s opinion would have been heartwarming. But right now Connell’s words made Bill’s behavior seem even more puzzling.

“Thank you,” Dr. Latham murmured. “But have you any idea why the usual pattern should suddenly shatter?”

Pat’s elbows were resting on the desk, his hands folded before him. His fingers tightened slightly against each other. “Bill hasn’t as yet told you about his experience in the morgue?”

“I know a little bit about it, the little that I found out for myself,” Dr. Latham said.

Betty reminded them of her presence with a tight, small stirring. “Then I wasn’t wrong in my guess. Something did happen.” Her shoulders strained forward. “Tell me, Dr. Latham. I’ve a right to know.”

His face dragged toward her, and she glimpsed the controlled fear deep in his eyes. His voice was steady, but she didn’t miss the painful twisting of his lips as they put words together: “Bill thinks the body of a dead girl is in one of the drawers at the morgue — an empty drawer.”

The color dashed from Betty’s face. A gasp ripped from her. “Oh, no!”

“That isn’t entirely correct.” Connell took issue in a courteous but firm voice. “Bill’s mind accepted the evidence. He knows that no material body is in the compartment.”

Dr. Latham frowned. “But he saw...”

“He received an impression,” Connell amended.

“Is there a difference?”

“In this case — yes, I think so.”

Dr. Latham’s jaw muscles rippled. “One of your fancy theories, Dr. Connell?”

Pat wasn’t offended. Right now Dr. Latham’s coolly scientific outlook was clouded by the fires of apprehension.

Anyway, Pat was used to skepticism. Parapsychology was in its infancy, and every branch of science suffered the same birth pangs. The thought helped, whenever Connell was discouraged.

Discouragement was the least of his worries at the present moment. It was one thing to discuss theory in the security of the classroom, and a horse of an entirely different feather to gamble high stakes on it in the field.

None of the turbulence of misgivings showed on Pat’s face. “Will a commonly accepted theory explain all the facts of the case, Doctor?”

Dr. Latham’s hands were clamped together in his lap, knuckles cracking under the pressure. Faced with Connell’s experience in the specialized fields of psychology, psychiatry, and, finally, parapsychology, Dr. Latham endured a moment of feeling as helpless as a layman.

His lips were numb. He heard himself speak as though the voice belonged to someone else. “You’re asking me to believe in my son’s sanity.”

“At least for a little while. Until the score is in. Just don’t brush aside parts of the evidence that we don’t understand, that’s all I’m asking.”

“But why did he receive this impression, this psychic contact from the unknown?”

“I don’t know,” Connell said. “I don’t know why X rays work, either. But I’ve a smattering of knowledge of how they work, and so I’m able to take pictures with X rays. The top scientists of yesteryear would have pooh-poohed the whole idea.”

A glisten of sweat squeezed from Dr. Latham’s face. “X rays are deadly in inexperienced hands, Dr. Connell.”

Pat felt a pulse beating unpleasantly through his chest. He knew exactly what Dr. Latham was thinking. He didn’t blame the older man for not wanting to put it into words. The unknown force — if it existed — could be far deadlier than X rays.

And we are so inexperienced, Connell thought. Like primitive men finding a door open and blindly wandering into a nuclear power plant.

A sudden small cry burst from Betty. Her eyes flashed from one to the other of the two men. “Will we help Bill by sitting here and talking theories?”

Dr. Latham took the long breath of a man reinforcing control over his anxieties. He glanced at Pat. “She’s more practical than both of us, Doctor.”

“And perhaps twice as sensible,” Pat admitted.