The Thing in B-3

by Talmage Powell

  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 tlie 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 comer 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 straggled a moment longer in his master’s grip, frantic to leap upon Biff. 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!”

  11

  The Search

  PATRICK CONNELL sat tilted back in his office chair, hands laced across his stomach, feet on his desk. He brooded at the stack of papers on the desk before him. They were individual student appraisals of a report dealing with ESP experiments at the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man at Durham, North Carolina. He had read the report to his parapsychology classes.

  He told himself for the dozenth time to get busy on the papers. Otherwise, he knew he’d have to take the stuff home and spend half the night on them.

  Usually he enjoyed the sort of chore that now faced him. He was always buoyed by the keen insights and sense of judgment in the great majority of the young minds in his charge.

  But this afternoon he couldn’t seem to focus his powers of concentration. He would read a paragraph or two and drop the paper back on the stack. He knew what ailed him. Bill Latham.

  If it turned out that he’d said or done anything harmful for Bill. . . .

  He shook aside the thought and reached with grim resolution toward the stack of papers.

  His movement was arrested by a knock on the door.

  He lifted his feet off the desk, straightened in his chair, and called, “Come in.”

  The door opened several inches. Bill Latham’s head thrust in. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Not a bit,” Connell said. “As a matter of fact, I was sitting here thinking about you.”

  Bill entered and closed the door. He came forward and chose the nearer Windsor chair. Watching him, Pat grew a shallow crease in his brow.

  “Bill, you’re looking a little off your vitamins. Frankly, I don’t like it.”

  “It’s my personality.” Bill’s lopsided grin was a tired effort. “I draw punishment like the big breakers pull out the surfboards.” He dropped heavily in the chair.

  “You and Betty? That the trouble? Of course, if the talk was personal, you have permission to tell a professor to shut his mouth and mind his own business.”

  “Betty and I had some rap,” Bill said. “Nothing too personal to talk about. She cut out at lunchtime and took a headache home.”

  “She comes from a hard-dollar background, a little different than your own, Bill. You can’t expect her to see eye to eye with you at the drop of a lash. Not on a subject like psychic phenomena.”

  “I know.” Bill nodded. “But Betty isn’t the subject that brought me, this trip.”

  “What then?”

  “I went back to Harlandale and The Oaks. This time by invitation, driven out in a Mercedes limousine. I had to hitch a ride back, though. A truck driver gave me a lift into town, and I just now paid off a taxicab driver outside the building. My car’s still in the parking lot.”

  Pat propped his elbows on the desk and leaned heavily. “And this time you saw Mrs. Braxley.” “Yes,” Bill said, his tone dropping. “Yes, I did.” He mused on the space beyond Pat’s shoulders, then shook his head. He brushed the heel of his palm across his temple. “Pat, I don’t think I’ve ever been sorrier for anyone, thinking what a woman she must have once been!”

  “What did she say to you?”

  Bill’s brows gathered in a rueful pinch. “For one thing, she practically wanted to adopt me—so we could spend our days in spook-haven having happy little spirit seances that would call forth Elizabeth. For another. . . .”

  Pat let Bill break off for only an instant. “Yes?” Connell prompted, his feelers of scientific curiosity opened up like a Venus flytrap.

  “She—Mrs. Braxley—has this theory,” Bill said. “She’s convinced that Dr. Jonathan Braxley’s overdose of radiation changed hereditary factors and caused Elizabeth to be born different from any other person on this planet. A sort of side step in the chain of evolution, I guess you could say.”

  Sharp points of light glittered in Pat’s eyes. “I know you pretty well, Bill—and you’re still not down to the nub of it.”

  “Well, I saw a portrait of Elizabeth Braxley. Drawn from life. And that . . . that thing in B-three is not the image of Elizabeth Braxley.”

  “Why not? How can you be sure? You said the face appeared to be battered beyond recognition.” Bill pulled in a br
eath. “B-three. . . . The impression in B-three has dark hair, very dark. But Elizabeth Braxley was a blonde, a blonde like sunlight through a window stained with a tinge of gold.” Pat had picked up a pencil and busied his hands with it. Now he stared at the ragged ends of two pieces of pencil, one in either hand. He tossed them on the desk.

  “Dead end,” Pat said bleakly. “Blank wall. Short circuit. And the dimmest of candles goes out.” “Except for one thing,” Bill amended. “I thought about it all the way in from The Oaks.”

  Pat snapped his fingers in his impatience. “Well, give! Clue me in!”

  “The dress,” Bill said, “that yellow dress the image in B-three is wearing.”

  The skin flashed tight across Connell’s cheekbones. His eyes reflected his effort to computerize his thoughts.

  “Of course!” Pat breathed. “Your experience at The Oaks firms up the scene. We know definitely now that B-three is not a glimpse at Elizabeth Braxley’s past. So it’s got to be a warning of somebody else’s future.”

  “Dark-haired girl, wearing a yellow dress, slated for the morgue,” Bill said. “I had a feeling from the start that B-three was a danger signal. But I couldn’t be really sure until I’d seen that portrait of Elizabeth Braxley.”

  Pat rocked forward. “But the future isn’t cut-and-dried. The future is the accumulation of moment-to-moment actions. You pull off the highway for a Coke—and never know you’ve avoided a collision by just that many seconds.”

  “Or the seconds used up in the delay,” Bill pointed out, “puts you exactly in the path of the other car.” “Granted. Normally you never know. But B-three is a little tear in the curtain. B-three is pointless— unless a nudge in the present can alter the future of a girl in a yellow dress.”

  Bill suddenly choked on a breath. “What if she isn’t wearing the dress? Nothing will happen if...

  Pat slammed his chair back. “That’s it, Billl The dress is the one thing that stands out like . . . like a yellow dress! We don’t know who the girl is. So we’ve got to find that dress!”

  “How?” The practical side of Bill’s mind grabbed hold of the problem. “We can’t ask eveiy girl in town if she owns a B-three dress!”