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

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 breath. “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, Bill! 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 every girl in town if she owns a B-three dress!”

Pat planted his palms on the desk, leaning his weight forward on his extended arms. “You didn’t describe it that first time as a bargain basement number.”

“No.” Bill shook his head. “It looked like a job from one of the better stores. But I know women’s clothing like I know the dark side of the moon.”

“We’ve no choice but to trust your opinion,” Pat declared. He straightened and stood a moment knuckling his jaw. “We’ve got a couple things going for us. The number of upper-crust stores and shops narrows the job. Those shops usually stock only a few of the same model. They don’t load a rack with duplicates of expensive dresses. And, finally, shops of that type keep a pretty good record of their customers.”

He continued speaking as he came around the desk. “We’ll divide up the stores and start digging, unless you can think of a better way.”

“No,” Bill said, “I can’t. But the afternoon is gone, and the places we’re after don’t keep discount-store hours.”

“So they all close before we get results,” Pat muttered with determination. “So we start out again tomorrow morning.”

Bill fell in step beside Pat. Pat closed his office door, and they started down the corridor at a fast pace.

“If B-three is just a trick of my eyes,” Bill remarked, “we’re going to look like a pair of fools.”

They came out of the building into the crimson shades of a setting autumn sun. “If B-three isn’t a trick of your eyes,” Pat countered, “we’ll feel like a pair of happy fools — if we succeed.”

Pat’s car was in the small area set aside for faculty members, adjacent to the building. As Pat drove toward the student parking lot and Bill’s car, he and Bill listed the stores and shops each would take.

“Luck,” Pat said as Bill got out and moved toward his own car.

Luck? The word returned to haunt Bill when the downtown stores began locking their doors and turning on their window display lights.

Whoever invented the lousy word?

He hadn’t eaten, but he wasn’t hungry. He could catch a delayed dinner at the hospital commissary. Right now, his stomach was too knotted with the hope that Pat had turned up positive results.

Pat timed a call that almost coincided with Bill’s entry into the morgue.

Bill crossed the reception room and picked up the phone in one quick movement.

“Pat, Bill.”

“Any luck?”

“All bad.”

“Ditto,” Bill said.

“We’ll try tomorrow.”

“Sure,” Bill said.

He dropped the phone in its cradle in discouragement. What if the girl who’d bought the dress had left town? What if the salesgirl who’d sold it was out sick, had been fired, couldn’t remember?

The sudden summons of the ambulance signal snapped the chain of what-ifs, at least for the moment.

An hour later Bill and young Dr. Childers were rolling a birdlike, protesting elderly lady from the ambulance at the emergency entrance.

“Young man,” she said vigorously from the stretcher, “I tell you I’m quite all right!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Barney said, sliding her through the swinging doors without a break in movement. “As soon as we X-ray the right shoulder and left ankle.”

Bill returned to the ambulance and jockeyed it back into its slot. When he got out this time, he saw his father drifting across the emergency ramp.

“Hi, Dad.” Bill grinned. “Not just passing, were you?”

“No,” his father said frankly. “Just keeping an eye peeled in a fond direction.” He nodded toward the emergency entrance. “What was all that?”

“Little old lady was returning a stepladder to her basement and took a tumble down the stairs.” Bill knew his father was using conversation as an excuse for an observant once-over.

“She had been using the ladder,” Bill continued, “to get her kitty out of a small tree. The cat’s okay — but the basement floor was solid concrete. Her shoulder is smashed, though she isn’t feeling much of it right now.”

They were walking toward the morgue, his father nodding now and then as if he had nothing more on his mind than Bill’s account of the ambulance run.

“By the way,” the doctor said, “Victoria got that call today from Fortesque Fifth Avenue.”

They paused at the front door of the morgue. “That’s really great!” Bill said. “That store will be her bag.”

“They’ll be interviewing her the middle of next week. But she isn’t waiting around.” Dr. Latham smiled. “Said she was going to see a sight or two and soak up a little of the feel of the big city before she marched on the store. I imagine she’ll be like the well-known headless chick tomorrow with last-minute shopping and packing.”

Bill looked at his father gravely. “Dad, nothing must spoil this for Vicky.”

“We agreed on that, didn’t we?” Dr. Latham remarked. “Victoria mentioned your peaked looks during dinner, not more than an hour ago. I didn’t contradict her conclusion that you’re suffering nothing more serious than a twenty-four-hour bug.”

Bill nodded. “Come on in, Dad, and I’ll loan you a mop.”

“Thanks, but I’ve a hospital check on a couple of patients.”

Bill watched his father turn and move away, a heavily striding shadow.

“Hey, Dad.”

His father stopped. Bill saw the pale oval of the doctor’s face turn toward him in the gloom.

“Yes, Bill?”

“Thanks.”

“For what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Looking in on me, before the other patients.”

“Sure, Bill. But you weren’t my only reason.”

“No?”

“Me.” Dr. Latham stabbed a thumb at himself. “Need to ease my own mind. When I’m swimming in ignorance, I like to stay in hollering distance of the shore, if I can.”

Bill watched the corner of the morgue wing swallow his father from sight. Then Bill opened the door and began an evening of routine that stretched to a dreary length.

When it was time to clock out, he crossed the boneyard, curled his fingers about the handle of B-3, and broke the silence with the metallic, whisper-soft sound of the compartment’s opening.

He wasn’t surprised to find her still there. He studied the dress for a few moments before he closed the drawer.

That night he slept better than he had expected to, and when he came to breakfast the next morning, it struck him that the only outwardly visible abnormality in the Latham household was Vicky’s hardly containable excitement. She chattered about New York, the big store there, how much she had to do today.

Bill followed her to the front door as she was leaving. He pressed ten dollars in her hand.

“It isn’t much, but you see a Broadway show on me.”

“Oh, Bill, you sweet character!”

He thought for a second she was going to cry. They hugged each other and he said roughly, “You take good care of yourself, now.”

“Like I am Bill Latham’s sister!”

“What time are you leaving?”

She paused in the front doorway. “Haven’t got my reservation yet. I may end up a standby at the airport.”

“Well, we’ll be talking on the phone when you get there, anyway.”

“Sure. I’ll probably end up working to pay my toll calls.”

When he left the house, his unfinished task crowded everything else from Bill’s mind.

By ten o’clock he had talked with saleswomen at three stores. He kept his routine brief and simple, stating that he wanted to see a dress for someone who perhaps would like linen fabric in, say, yellow. He let the salespeople draw their own conclusions. One saleswoman surmised that he was a terribly young husband shopping for his wife. Another hinted that a gift certificate was always a good patch on a lover’s quarrel; then the young lady could drop in and choose for herself.

Bill talked with a beautifully groomed, middle-aged department head at the third store. When he had described the dress he had in mind, she said kindly, “We don’t have the number. But I can tell you where to find it.”

The plush carpeting seemed to drop out from under Bill.

“All spies aren’t the James Bond variety,” the woman was saying with a smile. “We shop our competition continually, and I saw the very dress you describe in Ann-Helen’s.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s a lovely little shop on Grantland, not far from the university campus. All the college women who can afford it adore the place, though I’m sure you men have never heard of it.”

Bill took a groping step toward the elevator.

“Young man, are you quite all right?”

Bill glanced back at the frowning woman. “I am now — and thanks a million.”