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

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, clean-shaven. 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.

Hornaday? Nope. Bill couldn’t be sure of his superior’s reaction, of what Hornaday might do. Ringing in Hornaday 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. Hornaday 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 girl 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. Hornaday. 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.”

“Nothing ever does,” Connell said.

Bill touched the handle. The drawer glided open. He forced himself to look at the image of the girl. “Well, Pat?”

“I don’t see a thing,” Connell said.

Bill, without looking away from the drawer, laid his hand on Connell’s shoulder. The gesture seemed unconcerned. Actually, Bill was borrowing strength for his sagging knees.

“Of course.” Bill’s whisper was a part of the effort to breathe. “The drawer is empty.”

“I didn’t say that,” Pat said. “The air in the compartment is made up of billions upon billions of atoms, each as complex in structure and motion as the solar system itself. I don’t see them, either.”

Bill drew his hand from Connell’s shoulder. “This is no time for classroom speculations.”

“Got any better tools?”

“You know what I mean!”

“I know exactly,” Connell said. “You want a cut-and-dried answer. You want to duck the fact that we human beings are as ignorant as we are. You want a nice, neat theory pieced together out of the, bits and pieces of stuff we call knowledge. But” — Connell shrugged — “even if I had the answer it might sound as ridiculous as the idea of a round earth once did to the man conditioned from birth to a flat world.”

Connell looked at the compartment with the naked wish in his eyes that something was there. “I can’t be dishonest with you, not you, of all my students and friends. You want an answer in black and white terms — and I can’t give it to you.”

“Something is in the drawer,” Bill said, “or I’m... nuts.”

“Why must that be true?”

“There isn’t any other answer,” Bill cried.

“Not according to our present knowledge,” Connell agreed. “But what is our present knowledge? The knowledge of a thousand years ago was the present knowledge of that day — and a lot of those fellows were certain they’d found the answers.”

Bill turned away. He gripped the edge of the surgical table, his shoulders drawn with his storming thoughts.

“Hornaday would see a clear answer. He’d say I’ve blown my stack.” Bill wrestled the words out. “Even Dad...”

“Hornaday, yes,” Connell said. “He’s of that turn of mind. But your father — well, I’m not so sure his mind is so stifled with knowledge. He’s smart enough to glimpse how much we don’t know.”

Bill stared at the wall. “And you, Pat?”

“What’s the evidence?” Pat’s voice was almost droning in its steadiness and calm. “You see the girl. You, and no one else. Since she isn’t there in material form, the handiest explanation is that you’re mentally haywire. But that simply doesn’t include all of the evidence.”

“Is there any more?” Bill asked bitterly.

“You bet there is!” Connell gave the compartment a slight push. It closed easily on its oiled rollers. “Unable to explain it, some of our learned colleagues would dismiss the knotty point as unimportant. But the fact remains, there’s a big flaw in the case against you.”

“I’d sure like to hear it.”

“It’s right in front of our noses,” Connell said. “At first glance, the evidence indicates that you’ve suffered a hallucination. But if we consider all the evidence, a big question rises.”

Connell moved a couple of steps nearer Bill. “As we understand it, a hallucination is a symptom of a severe mental illness. An illness of that degree always gives advance warning. The patient’s behavior pattern changes and declines over a period of time. Do you follow me, Bill?”

“Every word you say.” Bill’s tone took on a fervent quality.

“Okay. Boil it down to your individual case. You’ve been surrounded by medically trained people all your life. Could you have reached the point of hallucinating without someone around you detecting the earlier signs, the danger signals? Frankly, I think it would be impossible.”

A glint of hope filled Bill’s features. “Pat...”

Connell held up a hand. “Now wait a minute. I’m not dumb enough to give you an all-wise answer. I’m just trying to admit all the evidence, not duck it because it throws us face to face with the unknown. Not ignore it because it raises questions beyond the range of our present-day scientific experience. I’m laying it on the line, that’s all. No one saw any danger signals because there weren’t any. Even now, your fears and questions about your sanity have a healthy, normal ring.”

Bill slowly released his grip on the edge of the table. “How do you explain the image in B-three?”

“How did primitive man explain lightning?” Connell said, rather shortly. “But did his inability to explain make the lightning non-existent?”

Bill knew the rhetorical question didn’t require an answer. He watched every flicker of expression on Connell’s face, the deepening of the eyes, the tightening of lip muscles.

“The admission of all the evidence,” Pat said, “tangles us in two possibilities. First, your case should prove unique in the history of mental illnesses — or we have here—” he seemed hesitant to take the step over an invisible, unknown edge — “a classic, authentic experience in the area of parapsychology.”

His words hung. The chill in the morgue seemed to drop several degrees.

Bill’s gaze eased toward the closed, impassive front of B-3. “Like ESP? Extrasensory perception?”

“Like a psychic force at work,” Pat agreed. “And, frankly, I wish she would have picked on someone else. Say, in Denmark, or Argentina.”

“I’d go along with that,” Bill said wryly. “But I guess even Galileo was bugged when he peeped through his telescope and saw the wild rings around the planet Saturn.”

Connell slapped him lightly on the shoulder, clearly pleased at the way Bill was wearing, enduring, and hanging onto a stabilizing sense of humor.

“My theory may be way off base, Bill.”

“I know. But we’ll grab hold until we can think of something better.”

Together they crossed the boneyard. Bill opened the sliding door and let Pat precede him into the hallway.

Then he closed the door and fell in step beside Pat.

“I wonder who she is... was,” Bill said.

Connell nodded, coming to a stop when they reached the reception room. “As a psychic experience, she certainly raises questions. Where she came from.”

“Why she picked on me,” Bill said.

“How long the phenomenon will last,” Pat added.

“How she managed it.”

“And why.”

They stopped speaking in the same instant and stood looking at each other.

“I get the feeling,” Bill said, “that she was a kind of nice girl. Tenderhearted. Generous.” His hand crept up to his temple in a vague motion. “Somehow, I get the idea she suffered and doesn’t like to see people suffer.”

“The experience is a warning?”

“Yes,” Bill nodded. “Come to think of it, I guess it is. Something is about to happen, but it can be prevented. B-three is trying to make the future a little different for somebody.”

Pat ran his fingers through his lank brown hair. “Ambulance...” he mused. “Accident... battered face... could there be a connection?”

“Wish I knew,” Bill said heavily. “I sure wish I knew. Gives me the feeling of being on a long limb. If I’m supposed to prevent something, I wish I knew who, how, what, when, where.”

“Maybe you’ll find out.”

Bill turned to look in the direction of the bone-yard. “I don’t think so, Pat. I get the feeling she’s done all she can. Somehow — if I’m to understand — I’ve got to meet her halfway. And I don’t think I have very much time left to do it in.”