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

An Unbridgeable Gulf

When he turned into the student parking lot, Bill was still peeved about the experience with Kahler. But a sense of mystery overshadowed Bill’s rankled personal feelings, which he could handle with a mature cool.

He slid into his space in one of the long parallel rows of parked cars. But with the car at rest, he made no immediate move to get out. He reviewed the morning, picking at the details. His hands remained curled on the steering wheel. The engine idled without purpose.

He was nagged with a sense of incompletion. Staring through the windshield, he thought of the unknown woman who had watched from the silent seclusion of a window.

What was the real scene out there at The Oaks? Did any of it actually have anything to do with the Presence (the name for it came naturally) in B-3?

The questions stirred a dim struggle in a dark corner of his mind, a groping toward a shadow flitting just out of reach.

The campus surrounded him like a not-quite-real painting, trees blushing with the first touch of autumn, far-flung buildings serene and strangely silent.

The painful valley of a frown pressed between Bill’s eyes. His shoulders twitched. He didn’t feel entirely alone in the car...

Then the sensation seeped away as quickly as it had come. It didn’t seem to have happened at all. The campus focused in prosaic normality.

Bill pushed away his tinge of fright with a sheepish grin. His hand stabbed motions, clicking off the ignition, snapping the door handle.

He got out and started walking toward the weathered stone building a hundred yards distant. Pat Connell often detoured by his office on the way to lunch.

He reached the shallow stone steps as his father stepped from the front door. Both stopped in surprise. Then each moved, Bill going up, his father down.

They met midway, and Bill saw the gray tone of his father’s husky face, the flare of relief in his eyes.

“Young man, will you please tell me why you spend good money on tuition and cut classes?”

The greeting was both gentle and rough. It reminded Bill of a long-ago experience, when, as a very small boy, he had sneaked off with some older boys to explore a woods. He’d got separated and lost, wandering in circles until descending darkness had frightened and chilled him. Briar-scratched and exhausted, he’d stumbled on and on, fighting the rustlings and strange night shadows of the woods. Then his father’s stalwart figure had loomed, arms outstretched. “Boy, I ought to whale the socks off you!” But the big, capable hands had quickly swept the small figure up and anxiously explored for damage.

Bill glanced beyond his father, toward the double-door entry.

“No,” his father said, “don’t surmise that Pat Connell tattled. He should have. I think he stretched his prerogatives. But it was Mrs. Hofstetter who put me onto you.”

“Dad, the last thing I wanted was to upset you and Vicky.”

They moved aside, clearing the steps for the occasional student or faculty member who came and went.

“I know.” Dr. Latham nodded. “And if you didn’t want to stand on your own feet, I’d be disappointed.”

“It must have been quite a morning for you,” Bill said.

“Quite a morning,” his father agreed. “It could have been avoided — with a word from you. Or did you think I’d haul you off to the nearest padded cell?”

“I wasn’t too sure.” Bill matched his father’s bluntness. In really important discussions, they could lay it on the line without stretching the bond between them.

“If you’d thought twice, you would have known better,” Dr. Latham said. “I’m not a crusty-brained savant burying my own ignorance behind a know-it-all front.”

“I know that, Dad.”

Bill met his father’s gaze. Dr. Latham’s eyes probed. With quickened feeling, Bill sensed the full measure of his father’s concern, bewilderment, and helplessness in the face of the unknown. He must have felt the same way, Bill thought, when Mom was so sick and there was nothing he could do.

Bill gripped the sturdy old shoulder in a gesture filled with warmth. “Dad, how about trusting me — and Pat Connell — for just a little while?”

Dr. Latham’s chest rose and fell with a heavy sigh. “I’d have but one other choice, wouldn’t I? Connell told me his theory. I either buy it” — his words faltered for the first time — “or assume that my son’s mental machinery went haywire without any of the usual warning signals.”

“I wish none of it had happened,” Bill said. “It’s rougher than your hunch about your heart patient.”

Dr. Latham studied the trees, lawns, the first streams of students from far-flung buildings toward an early lunch. The locale seemed to drive into him the strangeness of the conversation.

“I don’t know that I buy Connell’s theory,” he said finally. “All this talk of a psychic experience... parapsychology is too young a science.”

“They all were, once,” Bill said. “They all had their scoffers, their witch burners.”

“I’m hanging on to the thought.” The old doctor’s lips clamped grimly. “I’m remembering that Pat Connell is quite a man and scientist — unless he’s let his psychic researches carry him over the deep end.” A friend of Bill’s came out of the faculty building. But he caught the gravity between Bill and his father and passed down the steps with only a nodded greeting.

“But my suspicions of Connell” — Dr. Latham gusted a mirthless laugh — “are less painful than thoughts of the alternative.” The iron gray head glinted in a shake. “Maybe I’m thinking of myself, but I seem to be very much in a bind. I can’t fully accept Connell’s ideas — and I can’t deny them flatly, either.”

“Then give them a chance, Dad, to work or fail.”

Dr. Latham’s stout hand was a white-knuckled pressure kneading the iron rail. “That’s what it comes down to. But if I delay and anything happens to you...” His jaw muscles clamped off the words.

Bill offered the only comfort he could think of. “Remember that Pat Connell is a trained psychiatrist, and more.”

“Infallible, I hope,” Dr. Latham said wryly.

“And as far as Vicky is concerned...”

“I know,” Dr. Latham broke in. “And I agree. The moment may arrive when we have to jar her out of her dreams of Fortesque Fifth Avenue. But until then... well, borrowed trouble usually carries a high rate of interest.”

Dr. Latham peeled his fingers from the rail and took a step down. He paused and looked up. Bill felt the full power of his father’s eyes. “I’m risking something very near and dear to me, Bill. I hope it’s the lesser of alternative risks. But I won’t give you and Connell much leeway or time to play with this thing.”

“I wouldn’t want you to feel any differently,” Bill said.

He watched as his father turned and went down. Dr. Latham’s movements to the walkway were heavy and uncertain.

Bill wished he could rush and overtake his father. He longed to laugh and say, “You buying lunch?”

But B-3 had happened. B-3 couldn’t be wished away.

B-3 was between them, and no hand could reach across the gulf.