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

Unexpected Visitor

Patrick Connell was closing his office when Bill entered the corridor.

In the act of turning, Pat saw him. Pat poised in awkward balance, face twisted toward Bill, right hand clamped on the door handle.

He jerked to life and shoved the door open as Bill neared. His hand flashed as if he would literally propel Bill inside.

“Where have you been all morning?”

Pat’s ire jarred Bill to a stop. “Hey, I didn’t mean to rattle everybody.”

Pat motioned him in, almost trampling his heels.

“You didn’t,” Pat said. “But the disappearing act had me privately throwing questions all over my fine theories. I had to sit here and talk as if I knew it all — while I wondered if I were a phony.”

“I’m really sorry about that, Pat. But I wasn’t out chasing hallucinations or voices in my head.”

“Okay.” Pat banged the door shut. “But how about a little closer cooperation in the future? We’re not playing a hand of bridge, you know, or shaking a known substance in a test tube.”

Pat went around his desk and flopped in his chair. “You can imagine the turn it gave me, when your father and Betty...”

Bill started. “Betty was here, too?”

“She left a few minutes before your father.”

“Was she...”

“She was,” Pat said. “Worried as all get-out.”

Bill glanced toward the door. “I’d better let her know I’m okay.”

“Yes, you had better.” Pat stabbed a finger at the Windsor chair near the corner of his desk. “But first — you’re making with some words.”

Bill sat down slowly. “I started for school this morning, but I ended up in Harlandale.”

Pat blinked. “Harlandale! Why Harlandale, of all places? How did that happen?”

“I was driving along to school,” Bill said, “when the idea hit me to find out who was last in B-three. I stopped by the morgue and checked the record.”

Pat strained an inch taller in his chair. “Was the last B-three a young woman? Like the image, the impression that you receive?”

“Young woman... young woman image...” Bill paled slightly. “It sure fits.”

“Beyond the mathematical laws of probability,” Pat said.

“It seemed so natural I didn’t think about it.” Bill stifled the shiver that quaked through him. Frightful thoughts lashed him. What’s happened to me? Am I some kind of psychic freak?

In every nation psychic researchers were exploring the frontiers of the human mind. Many would have welcomed a personal experience. Even Pat, Bill suspected, would have jumped at the role of guinea pig, the unique chance to probe and analyze. But not me, Bill thought. I would give anything if B-three had picked on somebody else.

Pat was looking at him closely. “You all right?”

“Hardly,” Bill admitted. “B-three isn’t a harmless trick done with mirrors, you know.”

Pat’s eyes reflected a struggle with himself. “Bill, if all this is too difficult for you...”

“Don’t garble the signals now, quarterback.” Bill tried to grin. “I want to get rid of this... this thing. If B-three can make her point, I got a hunch she’ll go away.”

“Well, she didn’t pick on a coward.”

“You just don’t know where the yellow went.” This time Bill managed the grin.

“Let’s get back to the morning,” Pat suggested.

Bill pressed his elbows on the arms of the chair. “B-three’s surviving next of kin is her mother, who lives in Harlandale. But I didn’t have a chance to get out of the car. A Genghis Khan character manned the outpost — with a German shepherd, Blitzen, who looked like he wanted my right leg for breakfast. This guerrilla — George Kahler was his name — said I was trespassing and told me to drop out. I didn’t have much of a rebuttal. But I’m sure Mrs. Braxley saw me from the house.”

“Braxley?” Pat’s voice snapped. “Did you say Braxley?”

“Sure,” Bill said. “The last occupant of B-three was named Elizabeth Braxley. The morgue record indicated that her father, Dr. Jonathan Fitfield Braxley, is deceased. The mother, Mrs. Carlotta Braxley, is secluded out there in an old place called The Oaks. Looks like she’s handing the whole kaboodle over to the worms.”

Pat had the look of a man who had stood too close to an explosion. His face was rigid. The Braxley name had swept his thoughts from the present moment.

“Did you know them?” Bill asked.

Pat’s eyes focused. After a moment he shook his head. “But I don’t have to refer back to scientific journals to know about them. The facts are the kind that stick in your memory.”

Pat noticed the way he was gripping the desk’s edge. He quietly folded his hands and rested them on the blotter pad. “Jonathan Braxley was a casualty in the scientific wars. Like Madame Curie, killed in the end by the very radium she’d discovered.”

Pat watched his fingers curling against each other. “A generation ago Braxley had everything. Youth. Genius. Beautiful young wife. Growing recognition. Unlimited future. He was one of the youngest men in the Manhattan Project during World War Two. As a nuclear physicist he helped develop the first controlled chain reaction in history.”

Pat seemed to listen a moment to the friendly, ordinary sounds filtering in the office — the distant ringing of a phone, a burst of laughter from students passing beyond the window.

“Then... a laboratory accident,” Pat said. “Braxley suffered a walloping dose of high-energy particles. It didn’t get him right away. He lived on for a short time. And then it got him.”

“Rough,” Bill murmured with feeling.

“And it gets rougher. It’s beyond me how a sensitive woman like Carlotta Braxley survived it all. Little wonder she’s shut herself up behind a bodyguard.”

Bill held back his questions, watching Pat mull the story.

“Elizabeth Braxley was born shortly after her father’s death,” Pat said. “I recall at least two papers about her that appeared in the parapsychology journal. They suggest the broad picture. It isn’t hard to guess the details.”

Pat’s head made a vague, pitying movement. “No one can say for sure that she inherited the changes atomic radiation made in her father. Greenleaf does suggest that hereditary factors were altered. He conducted a series of psychic experiments with her at the small, expensive private school where she was then enrolled. The results were astounding. I don’t think Greenleaf quite dared to believe them himself. You can detect doubts between his lines, if you want to dig out his treatise.”

A reflection of bitterness quirked Pat’s mouth. “Greenleaf never had a chance to doublecheck and assemble all the proofs. Elizabeth Braxley, who had been sort of mistily fragile from childhood, was taken ill, and had to leave school.”

“She had leukemia,” Bill said. “It was on the morgue record.”

“The end?” Pat pushed back his chair and stood. “Or an ESP linkup that will end when we get the message?”

Bill glowered in mock reproach, partly to cover the chill threading through him. “I do love the way you put it, teach.”

“I know,” Pat said gravely, “but we haven’t a blueprint to lead us to the switch and tell us how to turn off the juice.”

“On that note,” Bill said with a jocularity he didn’t feel, “Elizabeth Braxley can wait — while I time in the flesh and blood female in my life.”

As Bill crossed to the door, Pat spoke his name.

Bill stopped and looked over his shoulder. Pat was moving around to stand in front of the desk.

“How about a flight plan prior to any more solo takeoffs?” Pat requested. “I know you can take care of yourself — but it’s bad for my blood pressure.”

“Sure, Pat, and I’m sorry I wasn’t a little more thoughtful.”

Bill was certain he’d catch Betty in the cafeteria. Instead, he saw her when he was half a block away. She was a trim figure on the concourse slipping past a small group of strolling students.

With her quick, tense pace she had covered a couple of hundred yards before Bill caught up with her.

“Hi,” he said, a bit short of breath as he fell in step beside her. “Training for a broken-field run?”

His quip fell flat as she jarred to a stop and spun to look at him. The sight of him crumpled the softly oval lines of her face.

She said, “Bill,” on a slightly strangled note.

He caught her hand. “Hey, what gives?”

She glanced away. “I couldn’t eat. The thought of it choked me.”

“Then we won’t eat.”

She muffled a soft sob. “Bill, why do you have to be so nice?”

“With you, it’s easy. I don’t have to be. I’m just...”

“Oh, you know what I mean! It would be a lot easier for me if you were a casual friend, a now and then date.”

He drew her aside. A wooden bench encircled the bole of a huge old water oak nearby. He touched her shoulders with firm gentleness, forcing her to sit down.

“Please, Bill.” She was fighting tears. “I’ve got a bomb of a headache. I was on my way to the parking lot. I’m going home for the afternoon.”

He sat sideways on the edge of the bench so that he was almost facing her. “I guess I should have told you, before everybody found out secondhand from Dr. Connell.” His shoulders rolled in an ironic shrug. “Just goes to show — I thought I was being the big man, protecting everyone.”

Her moist eyes crept up to his face. “Bill, it really isn’t true — those things Dr. Connell told your father and me?”

“I’m afraid it is.”

She bit her lip and looked at him miserably. Then her gaze dropped away. “I wish no one had told me. I could have gone on being around you in blissful ignorance,” she whispered. “Looking at you and seeing the nice, normal person I wanted to see. The person I enjoyed so much.”

“Now, wait a minute.” Bill’s tone was peppered with irritation. “I’m the same person I was this time yesterday.”

“Yes, I know. I know now.”

He studied the strained white line of her chin and cheek. “Let’s not let our concern for each other peel our nerves and start us fighting,” he said.

“Maybe we shouldn’t talk about it at all.”

“Maybe not,” he agreed.

She lifted her hand and touched her temple. “But I can’t stop thinking about it!”

“Then why try?”

Her eyes flashed up. “You mean I should just accept the idea that you’re the sort of person who... who sees dead bodies that don’t exist, in strange places?”

His back muscles flinched.

She suddenly seemed to catch the way her words had sounded to him. “Oh, Bill, I didn’t mean it to sound that way! It’s just that I’m so puzzled, and frightened, and mixed-up.”

“I don’t blame you for that.” He hesitated. The question was almost too important to risk asking. “Are you suddenly frightened of me?”

She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes pored over his features. With her palm she touched the back of his hand where it lay on his knee. She tested her response to the feeling of contact.

“No,” she said. “I’m scared... down deep inside. For you. Not of you.”

“Fine,” Bill said. “Let’s take it from there.”

“Would you, Bill?” The first hint of hope touched her voice. “Really take it from there?”

Looking in her eyes, catching the subtle inflections of her tone, he began to realize what she was driving at. “You think I’ve been going about it all wrong, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. I wanted to scream, sitting there in Dr. Connell’s office, listening to him talk about psychic forces and evidence suggesting that you weren’t suffering an ordinary hallucination.”

She paused to see how he was taking it. His tight control on his composure let his face give her no clue. But inside, he was tom with the thought that she was trying to deal with him gently now, trying to reach into a wounded mind. She didn’t buy Connell’s theories. She thought he was sick, period, and right now Bill wondered whether she might very well be right.

“Bill, parapsychology is such a young science.” She was choosing her words with careful tact. “It might be like the old practice of alchemy.”

He didn’t point out that alchemy had evolved into the very real science of chemistry. Man today could build molecules and even make artificial elements because the alchemist had searched the darkness of ignorance for a way to turn lead into gold. Their gropings had accumulated the foundation stones of knowledge on which the first chemists had built.

But he knew that Betty would find no comfort in dark gropings right now. She wanted an answer to come out of what she believed was hard, proven, safe knowledge.

He hated the sound of the words, but he had to say them: “You think I ought to go to a head-shrinker?”

“Mental sickness is no disgrace, Bill. They do wonders nowadays.”

He studied the ground at his feet. A colony of ants was laboring a bread crumb around the obstacle of a dried oak leaf.

B-three, he thought, the cost of your company may be more than I can pay.

He felt the feather-light touch of her hand on his shoulder. “Bill?” she said softly.

He lifted his head slowly. “What if I put the psychiatrist off a little longer?”

“But why? The quicker you...”

“Why?” he echoed. It was hard to look at her suffering and tell her why. “Betty...” he pleaded, taking her hand in both of his, in almost a fatherly gesture, “what if a psychiatrist doesn’t have the answer to this one?”

“You could try...”

“And cut the slender thread?”

“You’re not a laboratory animal for Connell to observe!”

“Forget Pat Connell. This is something I have to do for myself.”

Her shoulders folded slightly. “The way men had to plant a flag on the South Pole, climb Mount Everest, and risk their lives in weightless space just because it’s there?”

“Yes, I guess so — because she’s there.” He saw the small, fresh flare in her eyes and added quickly, “More accurately, the impression is there. My conscious mind accepts the evidence of other observers. I haven’t gone that far. Consciously I’m well aware that there is no material body in that morgue compartment.”

She closed her eyes. “Bill, this can’t be real...” He ignored the glances they were drawing from passing students.

“Betty, I’d do almost anything to make it easier for you.”

“I know,” she said with a little gulping sound. She opened her eyes, looked about her, and stood up. “Well, I guess we’ve said it, haven’t we?”

“Not quite.” He rose beside her. “What are you doing for lunch tomorrow?”

A glint of tears spilled over. “Meeting an impossible character named William Latham, Jr.” She mustered a look that was both bright and woebegone.

“I’ll walk you to your car,” Bill said.

On the way he considered telling her about Elizabeth Braxley, but then he decided not to. They hadn’t solved or settled anything between them, merely put it off. It was best to let things rest as they were for the moment.

He opened the door on the driver’s side of her small MG. She slid under the steering wheel and started the car, avoiding his eyes.

“See you tomorrow, Betty.”

He stepped back against the car parked parallel to hers and watched her back up and turn. The MG’s engine burred saucily as she drove the lane formed by the rows of cars. At the entrance-exit she had to brake suddenly and ease around an old Mercedes limousine that was nosing in.

Bill broke stride so suddenly his toes stubbed the asphalt. He stood rigid in the driving lane, watching the car approach. Despite its age and weight, the Mercedes moved with silken power.

Bill moved over, and the car whispered to a stop. In the driver’s seat George Kahler smiled at Bill through the side window, which was snicking down from a touch on an electric button.

“Hello there, Mr. Latham,” Kahler said pleasantly. “This is sure luck. I was looking for you and all prepared to go to the registrar’s office and find out where you might be this time of day.”

“What do you want?”

“First, I guess an apology is in order. I must have impressed you as a roughneck this morning.”

“I’ve met friendlier people,” Bill admitted.

“It’s just that Mrs. Braxley don’t usually want anybody calling. So, out of habit, I head off what you might call ‘unauthorized personnel.’ And I make it short and to the point. Saves wear and tear on the nervous system.”

Kahler leaned his head out. “This morning I thought I did real great.” He grinned hugely at himself. “But I about got tarred and feathered. Seems Mrs. Braxley likes your looks.”

A breath quickened in Bill’s throat.

“She said to me, ‘George, you go right down and look that fine young man up and you tell him you’re sorry you acted like a roustabout, and then you offer the hospitality of The Oaks to him.’” Kahler delivered his diplomacy in a single rush of words.

“She wants to see me?” Bill asked.

“She sure does.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

Bill glanced at a classroom building several hundred yards away.

“Be a pal, Mr. Latham,” Kahler wheedled. “It’ll mean a lot to her, talking with someone about Elizabeth. And to me, too. I can’t go back and tell the poor old lady you wouldn’t come. Anyhow, you must have missed some classes this morning. A little more classroom time spent at The Oaks won’t hurt.”

“I’ll get my car,” Bill decided suddenly.

“No need. Come around and hop in. I’ll bring you back.”

As Bill walked around the front of the Mercedes, Kahler let out a long, grateful sigh and slipped his hand from beneath his black jacket. His fingers felt stiff. His palm had grown sweaty from gripping his concealed revolver.