The Thing in B-3

by Talmage Powell

  “I see.” Bill straightened slowly and looked at his father. “I guess that figures.”

  “Bill—” Dr. Latham’s eyes smoldered with concern. “Hornaday was pretty much upset. What happened over here?”

  Bill’s quick irritation with Hornaday edged the tone of his voice. “What was Dr. Homaday’s tale?” he countered.

  “Tale?” Dr. Latham drew a breath. “The insinuation you put on the word hardly becomes you. You know Josh Hornaday better than that. Anything he mentioned was for your good, not a gossip’s pleasure.”

  Bill knew this was true-if Hornaday was his normal self.

  “Just what did Dr. Hornaday say?”

  “That you were—” the older man endured a difficult moment—“acting strangely.”

  Bill recoiled slightly. “You’re a doctor. What do you think? How do I look to you?”

  Bill hadn’t intended his words to be quite so belligerent. The relationship between him and his father had always been man-to-man, lay-it-on-the-line. For a second he had the feeling that a shadow was slipping between them.

  “You do look a little tired, Bill.”

  “Well, I’m not. I feel great.”

  His father waited a patient moment for the air to settle. “Bill, whatever is troubling you. ...”

  “Please, Dad,” Bill said on a full sigh, “don’t let Homaday’s imagination run away with you.”

  The old, stout shoulders moved in a vague gesture. “I guess that’s one way of putting it.”

  “Sure, Dad. Homaday—he’s okay. But he can make mistakes like any of the rest of us.”

  “I’m sure he would admit that.” Dr. William Latham hesitated, knuckling day’s-end stubble on his jawline. “How about letting me have a look at the compartment that raised the fuss?”

  “You want to....” Bill measured the words.

  “Just mark it up to the curiosity of an old sawbones.” His father was trying to pass it off lightly. “Okay?”

  A short laugh burst from Bill. “Be my guest!” Leading the way along the corridor, Bill felt his spirits rise. The emergency run and his father’s unexpected appearance had kept him from immediately facing a serious and depressing problem.

  The problem of Homaday. The quirk that kept Homaday from seeing the girl could only mean that Homaday himself had received her. Then Homaday’s mind had refused the experience.

  And the problem of the identity of the girl—and the unpleasant revelation of Homaday’s condition.

  It was all going to be a little heartbreaking, and Bill’s dad might help in a way he hadn’t dreamed of.

  Bill slid the door on its tracks and courteously waited for his father to pass. They moved through the chill, white silence of the boneyard, his father a few steps in the lead.

  “Help yourself.” The near emptiness of the huge, high-ceilinged room caught Bill’s words with the suggestion of an echo. “Third drawer from the farther end, middle row. B-three.”

  Inured to unpleasant sights by his years of medical practice, Bill’s father opened the compartment without hesitation.

  Standing to one side and slightly behind, Bill watched his father glance at the open compartment. One look was all he seemed to need. But before he turned, Dr. Latham obeyed an antiseptic instinct developed over a lifetime. He idly picked up a contaminate fuzzy of muslin lint that had collected in a little ball on the slab.

  His hand and arm reached right through the girl’s body . . . out again. . . .

  He straightened, rolled the lint fuzzy between his fingers, and glanced about for a receptacle in which to throw it away.

  Bill choked back a scream. He was dizzy, as if he’d fainted for a second without falling off his feet. His body tremored between hot and cold.

  A thought surfaced: Spare Dad, if you can . . .don't hit him with it, not yet....

  Bill turned, using all his strength of will to keep his movements normal. He managed to reach the utility closet on feet and legs that felt nothing. He opened the small door and groped for the mop and bucket. It was an act of hiding, of stealing a moment to collect himself and compose his face into a mask.

  “Satisfied, Dad? Now, why don’t you forget Homaday and leave me to my chores?” Bill plopped the mop into the bucket and closed the closet with his other hand, keeping his back toward his father.

  “It’s not Hornaday I’m worried about,” his father said. “Hornaday isn’t my flesh and blood.”

  “Then why worry about anything?” Bill had to turn at last.

  His father was standing at the end of the surgical table, one hand resting on its edge. His eyes gave Bill the desperate feeling that his father could see through the flimsy mask.

  “Bill. . . .” His father struggled to frame a question wholly hateful to him. “Tell me . . . straight out... on the line ... do you see anything in that compartment?”

  Bill forced himself to look across the room. His father hadn’t yet closed the drawer. She lay there, as real as death.

  Somehow Bill dredged up a faint resemblance of his old grin. “I think,” he said, “I’m safe in saying that no material substance is in that compartment.”

  “Homaday seemed to think that at first you were. . . ”

  “Homaday shouldn’t be such a thin-skinned, hungry-looking old wolf.” Bill carried the mop and bucket the few steps to the stainless steel basin. He turned on the hot water tap. “Why don’t you just forget it, Dad? You’ve plenty on your mind without running up and down Homaday’s molehills.”

  Without turning his head, Bill cut his eyes and watched his father move to the compartment and close it.

  The weight of his father’s eyes returned once more across the distance of the room. “Then it was nothing more than a gag, a silly experiment suggested by something that rubbed off in one of Dr. Pat Connell’s classes?”

  “Didn’t Homaday say that?” Bill countered.

  Dr. Latham’s grin was an older, and at the moment less strained, version of his son’s. “Okay—and say, Bill. . . .”

  “Yes, Dad?”

  “How about judging the annoyance gently? One of these days you’ll have a musclehead of your own, and you’ll know how it feels when you think something is haywire.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  He watched the hallway receive his father, and the door slide closed. He pulled in a breath and held it, giving his father time to leave the building.

  The water ran, forgotten. Little white ghosts of steam wisped up from the long, deep sink.

  Bill crept to the compartment and touched the handle. His hand refused the command of his brain. He was helpless for a long, empty minute. Then his trembling muscles reacted, and he eased the drawer open.

  He stood beside the girl in a crouch, simply looking at her, breathing in and out.

  The dismal thought was reflected in his face: Why don’t you be a nice chick and just go away?

  4

  Weighing the Evidence

  IN a sense, Dr. Patrick Connell was a multiple personality. As is often the case with the man who puts on no false fronts, Connell varied according to the eye of the beholder. The image of the man depended on his observer’s viewpoint and prejudices.

  In physical appearance he might have been mistaken for a graduate student. He was lean, fit, cleanshaven. His evenly featured face was friendly, alert, with quick, snapping gray eyes, the whole capped by a nondescript carpet of lank brown hair.

  To the crusty traditionalist, Dr. Connell seemed like a dangerous young liberal. To the far-left radical, he was a monstrous moderate.

  Young women employees of Crownover—secretaries, infirmary nurses, and such—regarded him as the most eligible bachelor on campus.

  Students who made it in his psychology classes and parapsychology workshops were convinced that Connell was Pavlov and Dr. J. B. Rhine rolled into one.

  He was a tough, tenacious, aggressive opponent on a tennis court and last year had placed a tight second in the faculty handball tournament that Dean
of Men Cruikshank had organized.

  He lived quietly in a sunny apartment just off campus. The building was about five years old, designed for the middle-class tenant, featuring a sidewalk canopy and small, balcony-like terraces that thrust like shelves from the sides of the six stories.

  Furnished with an eye to comfort rather than display, his apartment consisted of a living room with sliding glass doors yielding on the terrace, a dining alcove, kitchen, and two bedrooms.

  Connell had put the master bedroom to use as a study. It had accumulated the not unpleasant impression of bookish disarray. A pair of large leather chairs, studded at the edges with brass upholstery nails, invited the visitor to sit and talk long and learnedly. At various times these chairs had felt the weight of top men in the field as well as that of students. Connell’s working seat was a swivel chair behind a massive old mahogany desk, which contained both a typewriter and a tape recorder. The furnishings appeared to have been purchased secondhand at an auction, which happened to be true.

  The walls were a cluttered repository of shelves and cases stuffed with books and papers. The most prized of these was Connell’s scrapbook collections of newspaper reports from all over the world. The stories had one thing in common: Each dealt with an event in the psychic realm for which material science had no ready explanation. They ran the gamut, from the shenanigans of poltergeists in “haunted” houses to the account of a boy in India who could “see,” although doctors agreed that a rare disease had left him without eyesight.

  Connell enjoyed letter writing, and he corresponded with colleagues and laymen in several countries. Hardly a week passed without his mail turning up another clipping or two for his scrapbooks. Most of the stories he dismissed as the results of somebody’s overactive imagination, a publicity stunt conceived by a faker, or a clever trick. But there was that very small percentage—the woman in London waking in the dead of night, overpowered with the certainty that her sister’s car had just plunged off the road in distant Idaho . . . the discovery, two days later, of a touring English woman’s car in a Rocky Mountain chasm—the rescue of a boy from the surf off Point Marie, Florida by a man who explained that “something just told me that I should hurry right down to that stretch of deserted beach.”

  Always those challenging little thorns. They might be compared, Connell liked to point out, to the scattered bugs in Newton's theories that persisted until Einstein glimpsed a time and space that weren’t absolute.

  This evening Pat Connell’s thought was not of psychic forces. His electric portable typewriter had suddenly developed the habit of wildly spacing each time a key was touched. Connell had the thing upended on his desk, the bottom cover removed. He was trying to solve the mysteries of its innards with a small screwdriver, tweezers, and the poking beam of a flashlight.

  He was just beginning to get the hang of the interworking parts when the phone rang.

  His face shadowed with irritation. Then he swung the swivel chair in a quarter turn and picked up the phone.

  “Patrick Connell’s residence.”

  “Dr. Connell, this is Bill Latham.”

  Connell’s annoyance vanished. “Well, hello, Bill. How are you?”

  “Not so hot.”

  Pat sat a little straighter. “What’s the trouble?” The line hummed with Bill’s hesitation. “It’s a little hard to explain. If you’re not too busy. . . .” The hanging phrase was more an entreaty than a suggestion.

  Disturbed by Bill’s tone, Connell dismissed the typewriter with an impersonal glance. “Nothing that can’t wait for a while.”

  “Then I’d like to see you as soon as possible.” “Sure. By all means, come on by.”

  “I’d rather you came over,” Bill said. “I’m on duty, and this thing .. . it’s here.”

  “The boneyard?”

  “Yes,” Bill said.

  Connell itched with curiosity, but he checked his questions. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right over.” “Thanks, Pat.” The voice in the earpiece cracked with relief.

  “For what? I haven’t done anything yet.” Connell was shoving out of his chair as he cradled the phone.

  In the desertion of the secretary’s office, Bill heard the connection break. He lowered the phone slowly, looking at it. Vaguely, he regretted the call. But after the last look in B-3, he’d had to talk to somebody.

  He’d thought of Dad first, but he balked at the idea of tearing him with the truth. Dad’s shoulders always carried more than their own share, anyway.

  Homaday? Nope. Bill couldn’t be sure of his superior’s reaction, of what Homaday might do. Ringing in Homaday might make it even tougher for Dad.

  The choice, for the moment, had narrowed to Pat Connell. Bill was reasonably sure that Pat would look at him both as a friend and also as a detached scientist.

  Bill picked up the dustcloth he’d dropped on the secretary’s desk when he’d nerved himself into making the call. He moved about the office, swiping the surface of the furniture. The task busied his hands and helped tick away the seconds.

  Every few minutes he went to the front door and took a look for Connell. Peering through the heavy glass pane the fourth time, he saw the hurrying shadow outside.

  Bill flung open the door when Pat was still half a dozen paces away.

  “Hi.” Bill’s greeting wasn’t quite a babble of relief.

  Connell’s eyes flicked a quick examination as he stepped inside. Bill was grayish pale, owl-eyed.

  “What’s the trouble?” Pat asked quietly.

  Bill closed the door and slumped back against it for a second. His head jerked in a short shake. “Now that you’re here, I hardly know where to start.”

  “Try the beginning,” Connell suggested.

  Bill looked along the hallway to the sliding door shielding the boneyard. “Last night . . . one of the cadaver compartments was tagged.”

  “Oh,” Pat murmured. “It was someone you knew.”

  A brittle imitation of a laugh gusted from Bill’s lips. “I wish I did. I just wish that’s all there was to it.”

  Connell stood by quietly, waiting for Bill to get his thoughts out in his own way.

  “The tag—it was blank,” Bill said. “My first thought was that somebody had goofed. Normally, I would have checked the record. Finding none, I’d have called Dr. Homaday and told him that a mistake had been made”

  “Normally?” Pat picked out an isolated word. “Are you implying you didn’t act normally?”

  Bill’s face worked with a touch of despair. “I guess I am. At least, from the time I first looked at the tag I haven’t felt normal.”

  “Just what did you do?”

  “I opened the compartment. I had the urge to open it, the feeling that something would be terribly wrong if I didn’t.”

  Connell watched Bill shuffle to a rattan chair and sink to its edge. Bill sat cracking his knuckles, staring at the carpet, looking up at last.

  “Terribly wrong,” he husked. “Wildest bit . . . like somebody without a voice is trying to tell me something.”

  Connell drifted across the silent reception room toward Bill. Pat recognized the onset of a prize case of heebie-jeebies when he saw it. He didn’t belabor Bill with the usual platitudes to take it easy, get hold of yourself, it’s all in your imagination. Instead, he merely touched Bill’s shoulder with calm strength. “How about keeping it chronological? The events as they happened? You opened the drawer. What did you see?”

  “A girl.”

  “Young? Old?”

  “Young—I think” Bill worked up a dry-throated swallow. “She was slender. Her hair looked young. Dark. Glossy. Not gray.”

  “Didn’t her face clue you?”

  The shoulder beneath Connell’s hand twitched. “Did you have to ask?” Bill said. “It was all messed up, like she’d been in a terrible accident.”

  “Rough.” With casual motion, Connell idled to a nearby chair and rested on its arms. Clearly he knew that the sight of the gir
l in itself hadn’t plunged Bill into his present state. Patiently Connell waited.

  “Rough,” Bill mumbled in echo. “Good word to describe my night and day today. Then finally it hit me. The girl is wearing a dress, yellow linen, with two little rhinestones at the neck. But a corpse in one of the compartments is always shrouded, like in a white sheet. So I decided that she’d been slipped in.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “Then I—” Bill ran his fingers through his hair. He looked distantly embarrassed. “I even had a wild idea about Dr. Homaday. He couldn’t see the girl. He opened the drawer, but she simply wasn’t there to him. I wondered if he’d flipped, from working so many autopsies, if his mind had suddenly refused to admit another.”

  “Sounds possible,” Connell said mildly.

  Bill turned his head and looked directly at Pat.

  The suppressed black fire seemed to burst in the depths of Bill’s eyes.

  “My father—he didn’t see her, either,” Bill said miserably. “He came over later, after Hornaday told him I wasn’t acting . . . quite right.”

  “That would seem to answer the question about Hornaday,” Pat admitted. “How’d you lay it off with the two of them?”

  “Passed it off as a goofy experiment,” Bill said. “But I don’t think either of them bought the explanation. Maybe a down payment.”

  Connell slapped his thighs and straightened up. “Let’s have a look.”

  “It’s drawer B-three.”

  “Let us have a look. You can’t look, parked there on your spinal column.”

  Bill’s fingers curled and uncurled on the slender bamboo arms of the chair. Then with a final pressure he pushed himself upright. He led the way through the corridor and into the cold glare of the boneyard, with the heaviness of a man walking his last mile.

  Within arm’s length of B-3, Bill dragged to a stop. Connell was a patient, immovable shadow beside him.

  “Bill,” Connell said, after the lapse of a long minute, “I know how you feel about opening that drawer again. My impulse is to do it for you. And I will, if you want me to.”

  Bill rubbed his fingers across his forehead. “No, I understand. It won’t get any easier from here on out, if I start showing yellow at the start.”