Floater

by Gary Brandner

  CHAPTER 19

  It was with great reluctance that Frazier Nunley withdrew from the mind of little Chuckie Yarrow and returned to his disembodied astral state. He watched from above as the baby’s eyes spun crazily for a moment before they settled into frightened focus. Then the little face reddened and puckered and the child began to scream.

  The frantic mother dropped the telephone and scooped the child into her arms. Gradually the baby returned to normal, and Frazier drifted out of the house.

  He floated without destination for a time, reliving the delicious experience of touching things, smelling, tasting — powers taken for granted by everybody. No one could imagine the devastating loss of having those senses stolen.

  But even more than the delight he experienced in returning to the tactile world, Frazier thought about the power he had held for those brief minutes. He was awed by the ease with which he might have crippled or destroyed the tiny mind and body he had so briefly inhabited. Never did the suffering of Chuckie Yarrow concern him. To Frazier, the baby existed only as a vehicle for experiment.

  But he was not ready yet for that experiment. He still had much to learn, skills to perfect. But he was at last sure of one thing.

  Payback time was coming.

  • • •

  The experience with Chuckie showed Frazier that a child’s mind afforded easier entry than the stronger, more resistant mind of an adult. The place he selected to search for his next host body was the Tiny Tots Preschool, run by Alma Zanoff, a kindly spinster, and her sister, Freya. The Zanoff sisters had lived their entire lives in Wolf River and were trusted absolutely by local parents with their children.

  Over the months that followed, unseen by the youngsters who played on the swings and in the sandboxes at Tiny Tots, the astral spirit of Frazier Nunley floated just above their heads. He watched patiently … waiting, choosing.

  • • •

  No one could say for sure later precisely when or with whom it had started. The behavior of children under five is unpredictable at best, and the early seizures might have been passed off as normal playfulness. Exactly which of the Tiny Tots charges was first to be afflicted was never finally determined.

  It might have been little Boone Eisenreich who one afternoon laid open the scalp of Alma Zanoff with the locomotive of a Lionel electric train. Boone had always been one of the more introverted children in the preschool, and after the incident he quickly reverted to his quiet self, showing no memory of having attacked the lady.

  Or it could have started with Rosie Schwartz. On an afternoon when several parents were visiting, Rosie slipped into the gingerbread playhouse, took off all her clothes, and emerged dancing nude in a childish parody of lust that she had never learned on Sesame Street. She was quickly hustled out of sight by the Zanoff sisters, but for those who were present, it was a memorable sight.

  Whoever it started with, it was soon recognized that Wolf River had been hit with some outlandish epidemic among its children that caused them to behave in a bizarre manner. The origin of the strange disease was easily traced to Tiny Tots, and the facility was ordered to close. County health people from Shawano swarmed over the preschool, sampling its food, the air conditioning, the insulation materials, the sand in the sandboxes. No cause for the illness of the children was discovered, but Tiny Tots remained closed. Alma and Freya Zanoff were shunned by the townspeople who had known them since birth, and were eventually forced to sell their property. The last anyone heard they had moved to Milwaukee and opened a flower shop.

  Some of the local citizens still considered the Crazy Kids Syndrome to be nothing more than standard childish misbehavior, augmented by mass hysteria on the part of the parents. They were unwilling to accept the possibility that some undetectable virus or whatever was attacking their children. Not until Carol Ann Cernich.

  Carol Ann had been pulled out of Tiny Tots by her parents before the official closure by county officials. Her mother, Dolly Cernich, had made up her mind quickly after the episode of Rosie Schwartz and the childish striptease. Dolly was not about to take a chance of something like that happening to her daughter.

  When Carol Ann came home she showed no unusual symptoms, and her parents relaxed, thinking she had been spared. Then, one night at dinner, the little girl changed into another person before the horrified eyes of her family. It happened right after Dolly had brought out the dessert. Carol Ann suddenly sat differently in her chair, head cocked to one side, squinting in turn at each of the family members as though she had never seen them before. She grabbed the ice cream from her dish in her bare hands and stuffed it into her mouth, making strangled animal sounds as she devoured it.

  She ignored her mother’s startled reprimand and proceeded to snatch away the ice cream from her older sister and her baby brother.

  “Carol Ann,” her father cried, “what on earth are you doing?”

  “Fuck you, you sonofabitch,” Carol Ann said. Words that were surely never heard in the Cernich home.

  When her father jumped from his chair and came around the table toward her, the little girl screamed at him in some wild gibberish and brandished a butter knife.

  “Don’t come near me, you bastard,” she screamed, “or I’ll cut your fucking heart out.”

  Her parents carried Carol Ann to a bedroom, where her father had to hold her down while Dolly called for a doctor. Then suddenly the little girl’s screaming stopped, the wild gyrations of her body ceased, and she went limp on the bed, her face dull and expressionless.

  She was taken to St. Martin’s Hospital that night, and the next day after extensive testing she was found to have massive, irreversible brain damage. The source was never determined, and Carol Ann Cernich lapsed into a coma from which she never recovered. She lived for a year before becoming the first fatality of what was known as CKS.

  • • •

  The death of Carol Ann was of no consequence to Frazier Nunley. Compassion was not a component of the astral being he had become. The girl was important only for what she had taught him about entering the minds of others.

  The strange epidemic of crazy kids ended in Wolf River when Frazier concluded that he could learn nothing more from children. He moved on to slightly older minds, being careful now to refrain from behavior so outrageous that it would draw unwanted attention. With high school students this was not difficult, as a certain amount of normal weirdness is expected from that age group.

  He was not yet ready to try a healthy adult mind, but searched until he found a subject he could handle but who would tax his powers more than the children had.

  Henry Ulbricht was ninety-one years old and lived with his grandson and granddaughter in a house as old as he was on Flower Street. He had been a logger and a pretty good semi-pro baseball catcher before World War I. The local story was that he had once had a tryout with the Cubs. He served in France in the war, and came home to Wolf River to become a successful Ford dealer until his retirement at seventy-five.

  Henry’s memories of his baseball years, the war, and the old days in Wolf River were as sharp as photographs. He was sometimes sought out by historians of Wisconsin or the Midwest, and unfailingly provided them with valuable material from his reminiscences. However, his recall of what had happened to him yesterday, or even an hour ago, was fogged. He was nevertheless a cheerful old man whose favorite joke was that the doctor who warned him to cut down his drinking and quit smoking had been dead for twenty years.

  Henry was, for a fact, in pretty good shape, except for a bum hip joint that kept him confined to the house, and hands crunched into arthritic claws by years of catching baseballs in the old lightly padded catcher’s mitts.

  It was Henry Ulbricht that Frazier chose as his next host.

  Entering the old man’s mind was not so easy. Henry had been tough and smart in his youth, and his grandson said fondly that it was sheer stubborness that had kept him alive for so long. Frazier’s initial probings met with hostility. For several days
he was unable to get in, but he persevered.

  The old man took to complaining to anyone who would listen that “Something’s poking at my head.” However, so accustomed are the young to patronizing the old that his complaints were disregarded as harmless imaginings. Frazier kept up his efforts, and one rainy afternoon as the old man dozed in his chair by the window, he slipped successfully into Henry Ulbricht’s head.

  He was very careful not to alarm the old man’s grandson and his wife by saying or doing anything to call attention to himself. They noted only that Henry was quieter than usual and seemed tired.

  The old man’s mind, however, refused to be shunted into darkness. It struggled constantly to push out the intruder. The need to maintain his dominance was a drain on Frazier’s energies, and he was angry with the old man for deterring him from the experiments he wanted to try.

  Also, he found that the body was not suitable for any real test of his powers of control. The damaged hip made it impossible for him to move far from the chair, and the clawed hands were a constant affront as they lay useless in the old man’s lap.

  The frustration gave birth to an idea that would open new avenues for Frazier in the use of his powers, and would never be forgotten by those who saw it.

  It was Saturday evening, and the family was watching an old Doris Day movie on television. Henry always sat farther away from the set than the younger people because he could see better at a distance. The first indication his grandson had was a sharp popping sound from behind him. He and his wife both turned, and what they saw was to stay with them like scars on the retina.

  Henry sat in his chair, staring fixedly down at his lap. There his deformed hands twitched and shuddered. One by one, each of the twisted fingers straightened itself out. The popping sound they heard was the snapping of long-calcified bones and knuckles as the fingers were forced out of their cramped position.

  “Grandpa, what are you doing!” cried the young man as a yellow shard of bone ripped through the flesh of a straightened index finger.

  Henry Ulbricht looked up at them, his face a mask of unholy glee. There was no sign of pain as he continued to crack the brittle bones of his fingers. Only when he had gone through all ten did the intense, triumphant expression vanish. Then, with his hands a ruined mess of torn flesh and splintered bone, the old man’s face crumpled in agony. He began to scream.

  • • •

  The howling of the old man’s mind had nearly driven him out, but Frazier had continued to enforce his will until he had broken all ten fingers, proving to himself the capacity he had to hurt.

  As he tested his powers and worked to strengthen them, Frazier also learned his limits. He was at his most powerful when he was close to Wolf River — the place of his birth … and his death. Although he could travel timelessly wherever he chose, his powers of control diminished as the distance from home increased.

  The incursions into the minds of others were not without their costs to Frazier. Depending on the extent of his physical activities, the experiences left him drained of psychic energy. Sometimes, as in the case of Henry Ulbricht, it took many days of retreat back to the void to restore his vigor. Over the months Frazier’s endurance increased, but gradually.

  One drain on his psychic energy was the problem of repeatedly finding a suitable host for his experiments. To overcome this, Frazier began a search for a body he could use as a semipermanent home for his astral mind. Ideally, it should be a body with considerable physical strength, but equipped with a mind that would not fight back. In searching the streets of Wolf River and the surrounding farms, he soon found what he needed. His name was Roy.

  • • •

  When the people of Wolf River later talked about it, they realized that no one had ever really known much about Roy — not how old he was, or where he came from, or even if he had a last name. He was an Indian, from the looks of his strong nose, copper skin, and straight black hair, but beyond that his origin was a mystery.

  He just showed up one day, big and grinning, at Elmer Peterson’s farm and said, “Chop your wood for supper?”

  It took Elmer a minute to understand that the big Indian did not want to eat his stacked logs, but was offering to turn them into kindling in exchange for a meal. The sheer size of the man was intimidating, but his open face and gap-toothed grin were so disarming that Elmer told him to go to it.

  In a little more than an hour Roy had split and chopped the mountain of logs and stacked them into neat piles, a job that would have taken Elmer half a day. The Indian worked with a fierce joy, smiling constantly, and when he was through, devoured the food he was given with the same unfettered enthusiasm.

  Peterson did not have enough work on his place to keep Roy on full-time, but he spread the word among Wolf River farmers and merchants, and Roy soon had all the jobs he could handle. The Indian proved to be an eager worker, skilled at any kind of task he could do with his hands, so long as it didn’t require thinking. In the powerful man’s body was locked the mind of a four-year-old.

  Roy became a familiar figure around Wolf River. When he wasn’t working for somebody, he could be found by looking for a crowd of children and dogs. They loved him, and followed him about like a fan club. Roy treated them all, dogs and children, as equals.

  The town more or less adopted Roy, as a family might take in a dim-witted but lovable relative. They gave him work and fed him and clothed him. They protected him from outside forces like the well-meaning Shawano social worker who wanted to put him in a “home.”

  There were many beds in town available for Roy. Just about anyone who had a spare room wouldn’t have minded letting the Indian use it. He was quiet and clean, and never took anything without returning equal value in work. Nevertheless, Roy preferred to sleep in the open when the weather permitted. When it got cold, he liked the warmth of a barn, where he had the company of animals. People grew accustomed to seeing him around. Roy was always just “there,” like the stopped clock in the old courthouse.

  Roy was in a barn, sleeping on a bed of straw during an early summer rainstorm, when his life effectively ended. That was the night Frazier Nunley entered his head.

  This time Frazier met with little resistance. The pliant, child’s mind of the Indian offered no opposition. If somebody else wanted to use his body for a while, that was all right. He’d just go somewhere out of the way and lie down.

  Roy’s body was a delight to Frazier. He gloried in the Indian’s strength and agility, qualities Frazier had never known with his own poor body. He went out into the fields alone to try it out, and was delighted to be able to run faster, jump higher, lift greater weights than he could have imagined.

  The interaction with people was more difficult. He was able to arrange the facial features into something like Roy’s habitual grin, but the voice was more difficult. Fortunately, Roy never had much to say anyway, so Frazier was able to get by largely on nods, shrugs, and gestures. And although he was unskilled in the kind of work Roy did easily, Frazier found he could relax and let muscle memory take over while Roy’s body chopped wood or dug a well or put up a fence.

  But to continue the tests of his powers, Frazier would have to make this body perform some act that would have been impossible for Roy. The Indian’s love for all forms of life was well known. That gave Frazier his idea.

  He would have liked to use a dog. They had always been plentiful wherever Roy went, but something in the animal senses told them that their old friend was different. The dogs that once had followed him leaping and yapping joyfully now shunned the Indian. Frazier would have liked to hurt one of them, do something that would have been impossible for Roy, but he could never get close enough to one.

  Some other life form would have to do. After one heavy rain, a stretch of road down by the old millpond provided the answer.

  Frogs.

  Scores of them hopping about, croaking happily or lustfully, as suited their mood. The frogs had been as much Roy’s friends as anything e
lse that lived. He would lie on his side, head propped on his hand, and watch their froggy party as cheerfully as though he were a part of it. The frogs, lacking the brain and instincts of the dogs, did not recognize the change in Roy when Frazier guided his new strong body to their pond.

  With the air still wet and the clouds slowly breaking up, Frazier stood quietly watching them. He picked out one of the dozens of frogs, fixed the little animal with his eye, and in two quick steps brought his boot sole down on the creature, squashing it like a ripe plum.

  The frog made a satisfying plop under his foot. Frazier/Roy grinned happily and looked around for more frogs. Plop. Plop. Plop.

  A faint tickling sensation was the only indication that Roy’s dormant mind objected to the cruel use of his body. Frazier easily put it down. He was enjoying this.

  Plop. Plop. Plop.

  “Why are you doing that, Roy?”

  So intent had he been on killing that he had not heard the approach of the little girl. She was a daughter of one of the nearby farmers. Neither Frazier nor Roy knew her name.

  “Why are you hurting the frogs?”

  At this crucial moment Frazier could not get the Indian’s tongue to form words. All he could manage was a deep growly moan. He waved his hands in a meaningless gesture.

  The little girl backed away. “You’re not Roy. He wouldn’t hurt anything. You’re somebody else.”

  The innocent insight of a child had undone him. The mind of Frazier Nunley, slipping out of its normal logical pattern, made the body of Roy the Indian move forward swiftly and catch hold of the child by her shoulder. When the girl started to cry out he clapped a big copper-colored hand over her face.