Specimens Part 8

TEN.

On Wednesday night Dan Post suffered again through strange and terrible dreams.

Dead Josie played the piano in the living room of the old house, and wrote in her red diary how much her living husband loved her still. On top of the piano, Nancy rested in her crystal coffin, and blunt-ended probes came out to burn her eyelids off. And somewhere Millie screamed ....

. . . as a small crowd of men in rough, homemade-looking clothes, with heavy boots, were gathering at night in the yard of a burning house atop a hill. With the setting of this scene the dream attained the familiar merciless clarity and control that the specimens'

memories had when they came through to Dan.

The crowding men bulked over Dan, who seemed to be in a small boy's body once again, shutting him off from any clear view of the black-garbed shape that lay on the ground before the burning house. But when his host got in one quick glimpse between the men, Dan saw that it was only a dead man there, and therefore nothing very terrifying - not any more.

The men were standing stolidly about and talking, low-voiced.

"- Schwartz - "The name came through clearly from a nearby conversation, and Dan realized now who it was that lay there dead, and whose this burning hilltop house that stood where Dan's would later stand.

The men had firearms and pitchforks and torches in their hands to suit a vigilante task force on this warm summer night, but their talk, which had at first sounded like that of good humored successful hunters, was now fading rapidly into a morose silence.

Only the boy, Dan's host, seemed not directly affected by the spell settling over the group. But it quickly began to worry him, and he ran from man to man, looking up into their faces. Faces that would not see him. Eyes that would not focus.

Now their talk was starting up again, and sc.r.a.ps of it were clear to the boy's ears above the roaring crackle of the growing flames.

"...both drowned like that..."

The men were turning to one another, animated once again, but sadly so.

"...turr'ble thing..."

"...both young'uns at one time like that..."

And young Peter, in whose body Dan dwelt again, ran in among them pushing and screaming: Dad, Dad, Dad, And the man he tried to cling to put him aside with a huge powerful hand, put him aside unseeingly as he might have brushed away a dog, and went on weeping, crying brokenly for Petey, his lost son.

The men standing about with their pitchforks and their rifles looked as foolishly dazed as two detectives were going to look in the living room of an old house more than a century later . . . and now the crab-machine came out unharmed from beneath the burning house. Knocking flaming boards casually out of its way, it scuttled straight for Peter. No mind control would be imposed on him, for him the collector had a.s.signed a choicer role. He ran in terror, while none of the men who mourned could see or hear his screaming flight.

He ran at terror-speed but in a moment it had caught him from behind, and touched his back, and he went limp. Then from his fallen position he could see the crab turn and go back to Schwartz's body. It picked up Schwartz with two of its cable limbs, easy as a tiger hoisting a monkey, and threw the corpse toward the burning house, lightly disposing of a bit of trashy evidence. Schwartz's black-trousered legs flailed as he spun out of sight behind a curtain of orange flame.

"Reckon Schwartz's done for, too," a farmer mused. Spat at the inferno. "No way we could'a got 'im outta that in time."

''It's been a turr'ble week. Fust th' two boys drownded, then this."

"Wonder how t' fire started?" Then the speaker frowned at the torch he was carrying in his own right hand, and pitched it meaninglessly toward the burning house.

The men were beginning to drift away, Peter's father with the rest.

And now Peter could see, at the edge of the field of his unfocussable vision, that now the crab was coming back for him ....

. . . and then Dan dreamed that he was Red, lying on the bank of the muddy stream with a steel needle in his back ....

. . . and all was going incoherent once again, and on the far bank savages riddled Nancy with their arrows, and black slaves caught her blood in great bark buckets, and Indians took it to anoint the great G.o.d crab-machine, demonic ruler of the universe. He saw it with a clarity as great as that of any of the previous visions, for just a moment: its feet shod in what looked like tanned wolf-paws, while naked brown-skinned men rubbed it down with stinking lard. . . then he was waking, while the crab seemed to call out to him some most profound, important secret, couched in the words of some language that he could not understand. . . . And when he was awake, he would have chosen if he could to go back into nightmare.

When Nancy got in to see Dr. Baer, quite early Thursday morning, he took one good look at the expression on her face and got up from behind his littered desk and shut the office door she had forgotten to close, and then came back and led her to a chair.

"Now," he said, perching on his desk and hitching his right foot up over his left knee.

"You want to tell old Uncle Conrad what this is all about?''

She had been crying very recently, and was near the point of tears again. "I want to know what you think of that book I gave you yesterday. Don't tell me that it's out of your field, please. It's out of everybody's field that I know. Just tell me what you think. I've tried to talk it over with my parents and my brother, and they all think I'm the crazy one."

Instead of whom? Baer wondered. He knitted bushy gray brows and reached behind him on the desk to pick up the red volume. "Well. Nice Spencerian handwriting, like my own Grandma's, before it goes to pieces toward the end. But I presume you mean the content.''

Nancy nodded.

"Unless it should be some kind of a clever forgery, for what purpose I can't imagine, then I 'd say the writer was probably suffering from delusions and hallucinations."

"Do you think it's a forgery?"

Baer smiled wryly. "Now I do have to say the question is out of my field - I can't tell whether the ink and paper is a hundred years old or maybe was made two years ago. The book doesn't seem especially old or worn. But if as you say it was dug out of some protected spot, I suppose that might account for its appearing new." He drew a deep breath and shifted his position. "One other possibility of explaining the content had occurred to me."

Nancy was wanly eager. "What?"

"It's rather far out, I suppose ... but what if the anonymous lady was starting to write a novel, in diary form? Mary Sh.e.l.ley wrote Frankenstein sometime in the early nineteenth century, as I recall."

Nancy said: ''The idea of nineteenth-century fiction hadn't occurred to me. But I don't see that it helps. . . besides, if it was only a novel, why hide it away like that?"

"Maybe the lady's friends would have considered novel-writing a vice. But Nancy, tell me if you will, why does it matter so much where this book came from? Your interest is obviously more than academic."

Now it was going to come out, and the words once started tended to be hurried.

"You've met Dan, my fiancee."

"Yes, once, as I recall. On Members' Night. Seemed like a very nice fellow."

"Since last weekend when he moved into that old house, he's been showing symptoms very similar to those the diary writer attributes to her husband James.

Talking about strange odors, having terrible dreams. And I went out to see him last evening, and he's not right."

"Not right? How?"

She made a gesture of not knowing; rather, of not being able to say just what she knew or how she knew it.

Looking at her, Baer was very serious now. "Has Dan seen the devil, too?"

Nancy gazed over his head. "We don't know that James ever claimed to see the devil, Dr. Baer. It was his wife who said she did. I haven't seen the devil out there either. I don't know what Dan's seen, or imagines he's seen. But I do know that something's terribly wrong.''

"Well. When you say Dan wasn't right, do you mean he spoke - wildly? Or incoherently? Or - ?"

"Crazily, you mean. I ... don't know. I don't know. He looked at me at first as if he hardly knew me. Then he was too reticent, too uptight. As if he was hiding something.

And he didn't want me to see the children - he must have sent them to some neighbor's house when he thought I might come around.'' She fell silent, looking inward.

"Nancy." Baer shifted around on his desk again. ''Do the kids maybe object to getting a new Mommy?"

"Maybe . . . no, no maybe about it, they sometimes do. But that could be worked out.

The longer I think about it, the more certain I am that there's something more wrong than that, far more wrong."

''Well then, is it possible maybe ... I don't want to upset you any more, but bridegrooms do sometimes get cold feet before the marriage, you know, and ..."

"You mean, does Dan just want out? He'd tell me, not act like this. If it was conscious.

But maybe it's upset him. I think he loved his first wife very much. She's only been dead about a year and a half."

''Very well." Baer was frowning. "If he's behaving very oddly then I suggest it would be a good idea for him to see a doctor. I don't want to alarm you, but smelling strange odors that aren't there can be one symptom of a brain tumor. And there are other possibilities, I suppose."

''He told me that he had seen his doctor. But being a suspicious woman, I phoned the doctor's office just a few minutes ago, and when I told the girl I was Dan's fiancee she told me that he had made an appointment a couple of days ago and then phoned in yesterday to cancel out. He was evidently lying to me about that.''

"Maybe he saw another doctor."

She shook her head, abstractedly, as if one doctor more or less would make no difference in a situation as grim as this.

"Nancy, Nancy, this is really tearing you up, isn't it?"

''It's no joke. He must have seen last night that I was really worried . . . maybe he is sick. In a way I almost hope so. That I could cope with. But ..."

"There's more?"

Nancy nodded. "You see, he was talking about bad dreams, and complaining about these odors that came and went, from the first night he spent in the house, before he found the book at all. I guess I've told this badly. I must have given you the picture of him reading the book and brooding over it, and his mind ready to snap anyway with the strain of getting ready to marry me. Or something. But d.a.m.n it, his mind wasn't ready to snap when he moved into that place. And he never had time to brood over the book, even if he were the brooding type, which he isn't, not ordinarily. I doubt if he even read much of it. Just brought it down from the attic and pushed it at me, saying 'Here, you're the history nut', or some such thing - "

Baer's phone was ringing, and he picked up the receiver, listened a moment, then said: ''Call me back, hey? About an hour?" He hung up and looked at Nancy. "Anything else?"

She nodded. ''One point I've been trying to work up to. And the more I think about it, the more important I think it may be. A couple of times in the old house I had these - olfactory hallucinations, or whatever they should be called, too. Before Dan found the book, before I had any idea anything was wrong. Mine was woodsmoke. His was like something rotten - 'rancid grease' is what he said."

Baer, who had started to get up from his desk, sat down on it again. "You had them too."

"Yes."

''Before you suspected he might be sick? Before he found the book?"

"Yes, definitely."

"Nancy." Dr. Baer walked around his desk to sit down in the chair, glanced irritably at some papers on the desk and then pushed them aside. "I'd like to hear this all once more from the beginning, if you don't mind."

Dan was in a sense relieved when Thursday mom-ing's forecast on radio indicated that pleasant weather was to be expected for the next few days. Weather would be of some importance in the plan he had tentatively evolved, for securing what the enemy called a degenerated but preserved specimen for its vaults. He would really get it an old man or woman if he had to, anything to keep it from going after Nancy, anything to buy time in which he might find a way to strike back and set his children free.

After breakfast of cereal and juice and coffee in the sunless kitchen on the west side of the quiet house, he lowered his head as if he could look down through floor and concrete and earth to the machinery below.

"I want you to let Nancy alone," he announced. "That has to be part of the deal. Along with my kids being released, and me." Of his own volition he took up the pencil and held it ready in his hand.

The answer was not long in coming.

NANCY WILL NOT BE COLLECTED IF YOU HAVE TOLD THE TRUTH ABOUT.

THE DIARY AND IF YOU CAN FURNISH ANOTHER SUITABLE SPECIMEN. IT IS.

NOW TIME FOR YOU TO PROPOSE YOUR PLAN.

The enemy's agreement was too ready to be at all rea.s.suring. Probably it didn't believe any of his promises, either; anyway he was sure that it wasn't going to stop watching him for a moment.

He lit his third or fourth cigarette from the pack that it had let him buy the night before, and began to talk. Explanation of his plan took a while, and then the enemy had some questions. When he had finished giving answers, the controller lettered one more word on the pad before him: PROCEED.

And he was physically free.

In an attempt to show some willing loyalty he tore up on his own initiative the notes it had just written, and threw them into the garbage. Then he went up to Sam's bedroom and got out his son's Scout binoculars. Armed with these he stationed himself at the second floor window from which the nursing home, about a block and a half away, was most conveniently visible. He moved a chair near the window, and arranged the curtain so that he would not be too easily visible from outside.

He applied himself with patience, and saw that the good weather was producing the effect he had hoped for. By midmorning the nurses' aides (or practical nurses, or whatever their proper t.i.tle was) were out four or five strong, supporting their tottery- legged wards by the arm on short walks into the mild sunshine, or pushing them in wheelchairs.

Only a block west of the nursing home, as Dan recalled, was a small park, and sure enough several of the white-uniformed girls were soon propelling oldsters in that direction. As Dan remembered, it was a small and quiet stroller's park, the big one with the playground and pool being some distance to the north.

Dressing to go into action, he looked himself over critically in his dresser mirror. Not quite handsome, but really not bad. No noticeable gray in the hair as yet, and the face showing only the interesting beginnings of lines. Before Josie, it had never been too hard to get to know the girls. And then after Josie ... his eyes started to move toward Nancy's picture, which he had set upright now that her appearance was no longer a secret to be kept. But it would not be wise to start to think of her just now.

Should he put on a tie, or at least a sport coat? Then he would look like one of the suburban cops. He decided definitely against the tie, and at the last minute made up his mind to take a sport coat, at least carried over one arm as the day seemed to be getting warmer now. It added a touch of cla.s.s.

The plan on which he had sold the enemy required that he persuade one of the girls who worked at the nursing home to spend enough time in his house for the enemy to establish physical control over her and make her into a puppet like Dan himself. Since this would require hours of work by the enemy, over a period of several days, it was not going to be enough to simply have her drop in for a cup of coffee.

In one variant of the plan, he would hire a girl as a part-time housekeeper, in another, considerably more personal appeal was going to be required. In either case, it wouldn't do for him to look like an utter slob.

Ready at last, freshly shaved and sharply dressed in a new sport shirt, knit slacks, summer shoes newly whitened, coat over his arm, he left the house on his own nerves and walked right along, going west along Benham as if he were on some decent business. He had left his front door half-locked again, just to appear consistent with what he had done before.

Mrs. Follett, working in her flower beds toward the rear of her large lot, looked up and answered Dan's wave with a gesture of her trowel.

"How are the children?" she called over.

He waited for a moment, expecting a clampdown of control that did not come. How are they, Mrs. Follett? Why as well as can be expected; they do not suffer unless what you may call a small galvanic force, in other words a voltage, is applied to a certain part of the brain.

No control clamped down, he realized with bleak despair, because with threats against his children it had found a better way. What could he yell to Mrs. Follett, while they were hostages?

''Fine!'' he called back, his voice loud if not exactly hearty.

"You're looking better, too. How's Nancy?"

''Fine.'' He smiled and waved again, and walked on his way. Mrs. Follett, you tried once. You had the intelligence to call in the cops. What more can I expect?

He didn't know what more he had to hope for, but he was going to keep on hoping.

Keep on stalling for time and piecing together whatever bits of information he could gather about the enemy. There had to be a weakness in it somewhere. Or he had to believe there was. Meanwhile he was taking a zig-zag course to the park, a block this way and a block that, still walking briskly along through the summer sun as if on decent business. Once he had reached the park, and entered on a gravel path that meandered through its shrubbery, he slowed down and began to stroll. He breathed deeply of only moderately polluted air, and turned his head to look at squirrels and birds. Tall, broadleaved bushes gave the paths a feel of privacy throughout much of their winding length. Wheatfield Park was moderately famous for its lilacs, but it was too late in the season now for them to be in bloom.

Here came the first of the white-garbed girls whom he was going to encounter. This one was a coffee-colored black, tall and almost modelish in her posture, not at all bad looking. In fact she was probably too good-looking for Dan's purposes. She gazed straight through his effort at a friendly smile and nod as she pushed along past him her wheelchair with its blanket-wrapped patient. Perhaps she was absorbed in the mental images of several boy friends who were already complicating her life unduly; perhaps she was simply contemptuous of this gray cat or white cat or whatever offensive slang term she might want to apply to him.