The Thing in B-3 Read online

  THE THING IN B-3

  A TALEOFTHE SUPERNATURAL

  BY TALMAGE POWELL

  COVER BY DAVID K. STONE

  A WHITMAN BOOK

  Western Publishing Company, Inc.

  Racine, Wisconsin

  WHITMAN is a registered trademark of Western Publishing Company, Inc.

  © 1969 by Western Publishing Company, Inc.

  Produced in U.S.A.

  Contents

  1.

  The Boneyard

  11

  2.

  The Missing Detail

  26

  3.

  A Shocking Realization

  44

  4.

  Weighing the Evidence

  59

  5.

  Sudden Awakenings

  74

  6.

  The Oaks

  91

  7.

  An Unbridgeable Gulf

  119

  8.

  Unexpected Visitor

  116

  9.

  Something to Wear

  130

  10.

  A Revealing Portrait

  145

  11.

  The Search

  164

  12.

  A Yellow Dress

  176

  13.

  Last-Minute Purchase

  191

  14.

  Delayed Takeoff

  199

  1

  The Boneyard

  No OTHER student at Crownover University had a part-time job quite like Bill Latham’s. He worked at the city morgue five evenings a week, Monday through Friday.

  His duties in this place of the dead were light— except for those occasions when he manned an ambulance on emergency call.

  Early in the evening of October fifth (the date would stamp itself in his memory) Bill was threading the ambulance through the city streets with the cool of a NASCAR point leader.

  The attitude of his rangy six-foot body settled in the driver’s seat suggested total concentration, but not strain. He was grateful that the rush-hour congestion was over.

  The lights of street, buildings, and cars flicked past like winking fireflies. The moan of the siren added a painful quality to the crisp autumn darkness. It was a sound Bill could have done without.

  The instrument panel cast a dim glow. Bill’s husky face—cleft chin, rugged cheekbones, high forehead —right now reflected none of its usual quiet good humor. Under even brows, his brown eyes glittered with alertness as he picked and judged details of the street rushing at the windshield. The dawdling gray sedan straddling a white line ... the pedestrian stepping from a traffic island as if hypnotized by the spinning red light of the ambulance . . . the pickup truck nosing into the intersection . . . and that silly driver in the red sports car who had U-turned a block back to chase the ambulance.

  That dimwit, Bill thought grimly, should have to ride the ambulance for just one evening. He should have to help pull the mangled, screaming results out of a high-speed pileup. One evening of trips to the hospital emergency room, and he would drive his sports car like a mature adult.

  Bill eased over to give the gray sedan room. His toe touched the power brake to let the suicidal pedestrian leap to the curbing. The pickup, Bill saw with relief, was holding at the intersection. And— beautiful sight—a police cruiser was nosing around the small truck.

  As the ambulance roared past the side street, Bill glimpsed the cruiser pouncing on the sports car’s tail. At least, Bill thought, the psycho with four-on-the-floor wouldn't break his neck this time out.

  Almost a mile ahead, sprinkled with lights, City Hospital was a blocky, six-storied silhouette against the night sky. Bill envisioned the cool hustle of preparation in Emergency; he’d already radioed in the nature of the run.

  He flicked a glance in the parabolic rearview mirror. From the way Dr. Barney Childers, the young intern, was working with the oxygen equipment, Bill had the warming guess that the emergency was still alive.

  The patient, a stooped, gray man of about sixty, had collapsed on a downtown street as he came from a restaurant. The usual crowd, a mixture of the shocked, the morbid, the curious, had gathered by the time Bill and Barney had arrived. They had struggled through with a stretcher, assisted by a policeman, who had had his hands full keeping the crowd back.

  Barney had dropped to one knee and examined the gray, prostrate form quickly. “Heart attack . . . if we can stave off cardiogenic shock he’s got a good chance. . . .”

  Even while it was happening, the details had seemed to run together. The loading of the man on the wheeled stretcher, the sight of Barney’s hands busy with the oxygen, the pressure of the driver’s seat against Bill’s back, the merry-go-round blur of lights and shadows as Bill had turned the ambulance in the street.

  The shadows around the hospital began to take distinctive forms, tree-shaded lawn in the foreground with the vast parking area to the sides and beyond the half-block-wide building.

  Bill aimed the headlights at a driveway where a glowing red sign spelled out Emergency Entrance.

  The building loomed like the sheer wall of a canyon. Bill turned on the concrete apron, backed up to the ramp, and the ambulance came to rest with a catlike sigh.

  Bill flipped a door handle in the same instant he locked the hand brake. He was out almost before the ambulance had settled on its shocks.

  Barney was already sliding the stretcher out when Bill reached the rear. As they rolled the elderly man through the wide swinging doors, Bill noted that the face seemed a little less gray.

  A team of interns and nurses met them inside the wide, rubber-tiled corridor. Bill was perfectly willing to let them take over. He stepped aside, edging off tension with a deep sigh, and watched the stretcher being whisked toward the white-enameled door of Emergency B.

  The soft click of footsteps hurrying along the cavernous corridor caused Bill to turn his head.

  A familiar figure was swiftly descending on Emergency B.

  “Dad!” Bill said. “What are you doing here?” Dr. William Latham, Sr., broke stride. He was a robust, hearty individual who always looked a bit rumpled and shaggy, even after a trip to the clothier and barber. He was a craggy, iron gray, rather handsome promise of what Bill might one day become.

  “Is a hospital a strange place to find a doctor?” he asked good-naturedly.

  “You know what I mean. Down here in the emergency area.”

  “I’ve got a patient down here.” Dr. Latham glanced toward the burdened stretcher as it disappeared into B. “The man has been my patient for more than a year now.”

  A faint frown grew between Bill’s eyes as he watched his dad turn to follow the stretcher.

  “Hey, Dad.. ..”

  Dr. Latham’s pause was accompanied by a glint of irritation in the glance he threw over his shoulder. “What is it now, Bill?”

  “We had no way of knowing the man was your patient. We didn’t radio a call for you. Out of all the thousands of people in the city . . . how’d you know one of your heart patients was coming in, desperately needing you?”

  The question held Dr. Latham for a second. “Blamed if I can give you a test-tube answer for that one, Bill. All I know is that I was seeing some of my other patients here in the hospital when I seemed to sense that this heart case was in trouble. I simply knew that I should get to Emergency on the double.”

  Bill grinned. “Maybe you’ve ESP, Dad.”

  "‘It was just a hunch,” Dr. Latham decided. “Now, why don’t you grab a coffee break? You look as if you need it. And I passed Betty Atherton on the way down. You might find her in the commissary.” The commissary was drowsing through the midevening lull.
A white-jacketed busboy was lifting stainless steel compartments from the steam table and clanging them onto a dolly. In the kitchen they would be scalded and replenished with food for the duty changes at 11:00 P.M. At a formica-topped table three surgical nurses in rumpled green gowns and caps were taking a breather, sipping coffee, and indulging in harmless gossip. Bill returned their friendly greeting as he carried his coffee past.

  His destination was a comer table where an attractive girl in the white blouse and pink-bibbed apron uniform of a hospital volunteer sat alone. Her softly oval face lighted when she saw Bill. Her rather wide-lipped mouth parted, her even teeth flashing a smile. She had large dark eyes and feathery hair that was so black it reflected purple highlights.

  Bill curled his length in the chrome and leatherette chair across the table. “Hello, beautiful.” He reached for Betty Atherton's slender hand and gave it a squeeze.

  “Easy, fellow—or do you hold hands with all the younger members of the hospital auxiliary?”

  “All the pretty girls with the initials B. A.” Bill dumped three lumps of sugar in his coffee and stirred it. “How goes it?”

  “Okay. I read the bedtime stories this evening in one of the children's wards.” Her expressive eyes clouded. “Those little tykes, always so brave and cheerful.”

  “The children's ward can be especially depressing,” Bill remarked.

  “And lonely ... for them. No wonder they hang on to every word in a story.”

  Bill sipped his coffee. “How about a pizza when I clock out of the boneyard at eleven?”

  “Don’t you have an early class?”

  “A math quiz,” Bill said. “But I can breeze it.” “That isn’t what you were saying last week.”

  Bill tried for a sneaky grin; it was merely lopsided. “I’m cracking books on company time. Things have been quiet—and dead bodies in the morgue aren’t always interrupting a guy like brothers in a dorm.”

  “Bill, honestly!” Betty shook her head in mild exasperation. “The way you refer to that place.” “The occupants don’t mind.” He toyed with the handle of his coffee mug. “Seriously, I wouldn’t want to flunky in the city morgue and hustle an ambulance for the rest of my life. But right now it’s a made-to-order setup. I work an evening duty tour five days a week to keep me financially solvent. Most of the time I just have to be there, and I can study between chores. The emergency signal for an ambulance breaks up the monotony. And my days are free to soak up higher learning at good old Crownover University. Yep, some of the eggheads at school with their creepy jokes about my job would love to have such a deal.”

  “It remains,” Betty said with a slight shudder, “the city morgue.”

  “So how about that pizza?”

  “Ive an early class myself ... but... well, okay.” “Now that we ve hammered out an agenda,” Bill said with a grin, “I really ought to be getting along. I want to stick my head in Emergency B. We brought a heart attack in. . . His grin faded. “Funny thing. . . .” His voice trailed off. A slow change came to his eyes, the beginnings of a frown to his forehead. His thoughts seemed to slip away. Betty looked at him closely. “What is it, Bill?” His eyes came up slowly. He took a long breath and ran his fingers through his short-cut, slightly tousled light brown hair. He was having difficulty trying to frame a thought. “Dad threw me a curve a few minutes ago. It bugs me a little.” He studied her a moment. “Betty, do you believe in clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, that sort of thing?”

  She felt he was driving at some point he wanted to make. “I don’t believe in spirit mediums who dish out hokum in hopes of cheating grief-stricken widows out of money,” she said. “But I know that much of my own mind is a mystery even to me. Too many hardheaded scientists are researching the field of parapsychology for me to laugh off the existence of psychic forces. Just what they are and how they work, nobody can yet say. But, after all, electricity was around a long time before mankind pinned it down.”

  A moment of silence came, which took on an aspect of heaviness.

  Betty leaned forward. “What’s this all about, Bill?”

  “Wish I knew myself. The heart emergency . . . he’s one of Dad’s patients.”

  “Then he’s in good hands.”

  “Sure—and the hands were right there when we brought in the stricken old man.”

  “What’s so unusual about a doctor receiving a patient?”

  “Nothing,” Bill said, “if the doctor has been called. But in this instance, Betty, my father had absolutely no normal channel of communication. And yet, he knew. Without being told, he knew that a certain patient needed him at a certain time in Emergency. He called it a hunch and let it go at that.”

  “Well, why not? People do have hunches, you know. Your father understood the patient’s habits as well as his condition. Maybe he guessed the man was buying trouble.”

  “And would land in Emergency at a specified moment?” Bill shook his head. “I don’t like words such as ‘hunch’ and ‘luck’ and ‘coincidence.' They don’t really mean anything. They just pass over things we can’t explain.”

  He seemed to realize the growing seriousness of his mood and broke it with a laugh. “So the Norseman a few hundred years ago explained thunder by saying it was the god Thor throwing his mighty hammer. The Seri Indian explains dreams with the claim that it’s his soul wandering free while his body sleeps. Why not explain Dad by saying he had a momentary case of ESP and let it go at that?” “Why not, indeed?” Betty nodded, not sharing Bill’s laugh.

  “Hey! Now look who’s getting grim about the whole thing!” He nuzzled a knuckle playfully under her chin. “We keep it a family secret, but actually the Lathams had an ancestress who jumped on her broom and took off every time the moon was full.” His bantering was infectious. Betty smiled. “She must have gorged on pizza every night at bedtime.” “How’d you guess?” Bill pushed his chair back. “See you at eleven.”

  In the vaultlike corridor, Bill met a middle-aged nurse coming out of Emergency B.

  “How is the old gentleman making out, Miss Abbott?”

  “Doing nicely, Bill. I think we can chalk up one for our side. Your father knew the case history so well . . . lucky coincidence he was on hand.”

  Luck. Coincidence. Two of those words used in a single breath. Bill watched the starched rustle of Miss Abbott moving toward the elevator.

  If he hadn’t witnessed the minor miracle of his father’s timely appearance, he’d hardly have believed it.

  Was there really something to this ESP-telepathy bit? A pair of half-forgotten memories flashed into his mind. The first time he’d called at Betty’s home, the living room had seemed strangely familiar for only a bare fraction of a second. Surely, he’d been in this room before, shaking Mr. Atherton’s hand, knowing the first word Mr. Atherton was going to say. The second memory was of a road, an ordinary two-lane county road downstate. It branched from the interstate to the lake resort where Bill had worked two summer vacations ago. The very first time he’d driven the road Bill had known somehow that a certain kind of billboard was around the next curve.

  Later, studying parapsychology, the fledgling science of psychic forces, he’d learned that this phenomenon of familiarity is called deja vu, or, more accurately, paramnesia.

  With a final glance at Emergency B, Bill turned and went outside.

  He was a white-coated shadow crossing the narrow tract of lawn to the low-roofed extension that housed the city morgue. It hadn’t the aspect of a repository for the dead at all. With night lights burning behind antique and glass brick, the morgue, outwardly, resembled a quiet, conservative motor-lodge addition to a large hotel.

  The previous morgue, a lulu of dreariness, had occupied the basement of a century-old municipal building. When urban renewal had revitalized the downtown area, the city fathers had decided to locate the new morgue at the already-existing complex of hospital, health facilities, and clinics.

  One of the clinics was sponsored by Crownov
ers medical school, and now and then Bill bumped into premed upperclassmen around the hospital.

  The opportunity for razzing a likable and popular fellow student was rarely passed up. And Bill usually had a comeback.

  Now Bill keyed open the front door and stepped into the nighttime desertion. He was in a cheerful, carpeted anteroom with rattan furnishings and a pair of pleasant seascapes on the wall.

  Beyond and to his right, separated by a waist-high partition of pecan wood paneling, was the office of the secretary-receptionist. Behind it, in frosted glass privacy, was the office of Dr. Josiah Homaday, the pathologist in charge.

  To Bill’s left, beyond a wooden door marked “employees only,” were the laboratory and autopsy and dissection rooms.

  Bill strolled the hallway that led toward the rear. It terminated at a door set in steel tracks. He slid aside the panel, and before him lay a single huge, whitely sterile room that harbored a chill all its own. In the jargon of those who worked here the room was known, not irreverently, as the boneyard.

  The room heightened Bill’s awareness of the silence. With an instinct of then own, his lips puckered to whistle a pop time softly as he stepped inside.

  The overhead lights cast a bone-white glow that penetrated every cranny. Even so, the room suggested shadows.

  The furnishings were sparse, a large surgical table near the center, sterilizers and instrument cabinets beside the stainless steel basins against the west wall. In the rear comer was a wide, overhead, sliding door that could be lifted when the meat wagon drew up outside.

  On the east wall were banked the refrigerated drawers where the dead were tucked in a huge, bizarre filing cabinet like finished correspondence.

  Bill crossed to the utility closet where he took out a mop bucket and a gallon jug of green, antiseptic cleaner.

  With one ear tuned for the ambulance emergency bell, he mixed a solution of scalding water and cleaner, turned from the sink, chugged the mop a couple of times, and pressed his toe to tighten the wringer rollers attached to the bucket’s top.