The Mind Thing Read online

  Often, during the war and after it, he thought bitterly of his son, who had left home shortly before the war had started. His son and his daughter had considered themselves Americans; that had been one thing, besides their wanting to leave the farm, that his quarrels with them had been about. Had his son let himself be drafted—or even volunteered to fight against the Fatherland? If so, he hoped that he had been killed.

  During the war, to follow the news, he had subscribed to a daily newspaper and had bought a radio. After Hitler’s defeat he canceled the former, and vented his anger on the latter with an axe.

  Always he had wanted someday, even if he had to wait until he retired, to return to the Fatherland. But always, at times when it might have been possible financially for him to do so, there had been reasons why he could not. Now he knew that it was no longer possible. He was fated to die in this foreign land in which he had already lived over sixty years, among strangers. Completely among strangers since the first years of his married life and since his parents’ deaths.

  In one way, and only one, had he compromised with this alien land: he spoke English and had almost lost his German. At first he and Elsa had spoken German, but she, so obedient in every other way, had been adamant, after their children were born, that only English be spoken. If he spoke to her in their own tongue, she answered him in the foreign one. Since he was no teacher, the children had never learned more than a few phrases of German, and he himself had gradually acquiesced and come to use the language he knew almost as well as the one he considered his own.

  These facts about his host the mind thing bothered to learn only because he had time to kill while his own body absorbed nourishment, and because anything, however trivial, that concerned the mores and thought processes of human beings that he could learn might someday serve him. He had no sympathy for a host’s despair or his problems; he was concerned only with a host’s usefulness. And he had already decided that Siegfried Gross would be useless to him after tonight.

  Gross was a recluse; he had no real communication with anyone else, no way of gathering information that would not be completely out of character for him and which would not arouse comment and curiosity. He had no telephone, wrote no letters, and received no personal mail. He rode into Bartlesville—in a wagon behind a horse; he’d never owned or wanted an automobile—once a week on Saturday afternoon to do whatever buying was necessary. Never oftener than that except during certain seasons when he had produce to take in to sell, something that could not wait until his next Saturday trip. He went only to certain places, and even in them he never stopped to talk or to listen to gossip or news. He had not been farther from his farm than the five miles into Bartlesville in over fifteen years—since, in fact, Germany had gone down in defeat for the second time in his lifetime.

  No, Siegfried Gross, kept in character and made to act naturally, would be the worst information-finding instrument he could possibly have chosen. He was serving his purpose now, and when that purpose was finished, he must go.

  Besides, the mind thing had already discovered tonight his perfect host for the gathering of information—the cat. As long as he kept Gross, he could not use cats, but one of them would eventually lead him to the human being nearby, in or out of Bartlesville, best adapted to be his host, for whatever period of usefulness. There was no hurry, now that he was being fed.

  But while Gross sat waiting, the mind thing knew that he might as well gain from Gross’s mind what little it did know about his neighbors. He did learn a few facts, although none of them seemed of immediate importance. Gross knew much less about his neighbors in general than Tommy Hoffman had known. And he had not yet learned of Tommy’s suicide and the inquest; he probably would not have learned of it until his next Saturday trip into town.

  The mind thing did learn, though, the answer to a question that had mildly puzzled him earlier: why Gross’s nearest neighbor would keep a dog so vicious that it had to be kept chained in the barn. His neighbors were the Loursats (a French name, but they were of Belgian extraction). The dog was a Labrador retriever bitch, a fairly valuable dog that John Loursat used for duck hunting. Before it had suddenly turned vicious—toward everyone but Loursat himself—he had had it bred to another good Labrador and was due to have a litter within a few weeks. Since it had attacked Loursat’s wife—fortunately it had not bitten her—it was under sentence of death, but Loursat was hoping that it would not turn on its puppies when it had them and that he could let it nurse them long enough to salvage the litter before he had to shoot the dog. He had chained it in an unused corner of the barn and had given strict orders that neither his wife nor daughter was to go near it. Gross had happened to know this because Loursat, one of the neighbors with whom he was still on civil terms, had asked him if he wanted one of the puppies and, even when Gross had refused, went on to explain about them and why he would want to find homes for them as quickly as he could. Gross did not like dogs any more than he liked people; he tolerated a cat, so long as it lived in the barn, because it killed mice there.

  Through Gross’s eyes the mind thing looked at the clock and decided that he had been in the solution long enough; he had to decide it on a basis of timing because while in a host’s mind he had no sensation in his own body.

  Gross stood up and took the shell out of the now cooled solution and started with it toward the outer door. Then the thing in his mind had an afterthought and he turned back to the sink. He rinsed the shell off very thoroughly and dried it. The mind thing’s afterthought had been that the odor of the solution might attract some animal and cause it to crawl under the steps and draw attention to them, perhaps even drag the mind thing out from under them. He himself had no odor whatsoever. He knew that from having been in the mind of the dog Buck when the dog had dug him up in the cave and moved him to the hollow log.

  Gross carried him outside, again leaving the door wide to give himself a little light. The mind thing made his hiding place even safer by having Gross scoop out some dirt under the steps and bury him an inch or so deep, smoothing the ground carefully. Then from the steps he reached down and smoothed out the marks of his bare feet on the ground beside the steps.

  Then he went inside to die.

  But first he cleaned up the evidence of what he had been doing; he poured the rest of the solution down the drain and washed the three things he had used. He put the pan and the gravy bowl back where they belonged, the empty glass jar with other empty jars. Of course Elsa might miss the stock and the gravy and wonder a little, but there was nothing he could do about that. Besides, she was getting absent-minded lately and knew it; she’d probably think she’d used the stock and the gravy and forgotten about it. Then, too, there’d be the shock of his death to distract her from trivia. Although she wouldn’t grieve for him, any sudden event that changes one’s life is a shock. Later she’d come to realize that she was better off for his having killed himself. What the sale of the farm would bring would be much better provision for the old age of one person than of two.

  Should he mention that in his suicide note? For a suicide note there was going to be, this time. That lesson the mind thing had learned from Tommy’s death; it had aroused too much curiosity, enough to send Hoffman and Garner to the cave, even to make them decide to dig there. He wanted Gross’s suicide to appear to be perfectly normal, fully motivated, so it would arouse no curiosity at all.

  He had Gross get a writing tablet and a pencil and sit down at the kitchen table with them. Then he gave thought to how Gross would word a suicide note if he genuinely decided to kill himself. He would not have and would not mention any such unselfish motive as leaving more money for Elsa’s old age. And his note, if he wrote one at all, would be short and to the point, with no apologies and no good-byes.

  Gross wrote slowly and laboriously, in a handwriting that still looked more like German script than English, although the words were English, spelled as Gross would have spelled them.

  “I cant stand pane from art
herites army more. I kill myself.”

  He signed his name in full and then, under it, a final defiance, in German, to the country he hated. His last word. “Deutschland über Alles.”

  Then he got his shotgun from the kitchen closet, loaded it, and sat down at the table again. He put the muzzle in his mouth, pointing upward, and pulled the trigger. Blood and brain matter splattered the note on the top page of the writing tablet, but the words were still legible.

  Back in his own body, well hidden under the steps, the mind thing, able again to use his perceptive sense, heard Elsa cry out her husband’s name upstairs. He watched her turn on the bedroom light, then the hall light, and come down the stairs.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Doc Staunton awoke slowly, turned over, and raised his arm to look at his wrist watch. It was after ten, which was not surprising since he’d got to bed pretty late the night before. He’d gone into Bartlesville late the previous afternoon so the time would be right for him to phone the laboratory in Green Bay about the dog. He’d phoned them and had learned what, he realized now, he’d known all along he would learn.

  The dog Buck had not had rabies. Nor had he had, aside from the injuries that had caused his death, anything organically wrong with him that could be determined by dissection. The dog’s having run in front of the car couldn’t be explained by anything ascertainably physically wrong with him.

  Doc had sighed, and had phoned into Wilcox to try to reach the sheriff. The sheriff would be interested, or at least he should be interested. But the sheriff wasn’t available and his office didn’t know where he was. Doc had stayed in town for dinner at the better—such as it was—of the two local restaurants. Then he’d tried to reach the sheriff again, this time first at his office and then at his home number. He got no answer at the former and no satisfaction at the latter.

  He’d killed a little time in the tavern and had been enlisted in a poker game starting in the back room. One of the local merchants, Hans Weiss, the grocer from whom he bought most of his supplies, had invited him and vouched for him. There were only four others, counting Hans, ready to start the game and they’d needed a fifth. The stakes were just enough to make the game interesting; nickel ante, fifty-cent limit. Doc lost twelve dollars in the first half hour without winning a hand, then a big hand put him ahead and he stayed that way. Twice, once around eight o’clock and once around nine, he tried to reach the sheriff and failed. The next time he happened to look at his watch it was almost midnight and he decided it was too late to try again that night. By that time there were seven in the game and he was the big winner, about seventy dollars ahead, so he didn’t think he should quit until someone else suggested breaking up the game. That hadn’t happened until one-thirty and he’d got home at two, still forty-some dollars to the good. And he’d become a friend of everyone in the game and had accepted an invitation to play again. After all, he had to give the boys a chance to win their money back. As a comparative stranger in their midst, that was the least he could do.

  Now, Thursday morning, he yawned and got up. Might as well get into Bartlesville before noon and phone the sheriff; he could make an appointment, if the sheriff was free, to drive on into Wilcox to see him. Unless, of course, the sheriff was coming into Bartlesville anyway; then he could ask the sheriff to have lunch with him.

  He made himself only coffee for breakfast and got into town by half-past eleven, where he phoned the sheriff from the drugstore. This time he connected.

  “Doc Staunton, Sheriff,” he said. “Something I wanted to talk to you about, if you can spare me a few minutes. You coming here anyway, or shall I drive in to Wilcox and come to your office?”

  “You caught me just as I was leaving, Doc. For Bartlesville.”

  “Good. Can you have lunch with me, then?”

  “Guess so. Sure, thanks. Which restaurant?”

  Doc said, “Let’s meet at the tavern first. One drink won’t hurt us, if we’re eating right afterward.”

  The sheriff agreed and said he’d be there within half an hour.

  Doc walked from the wall phone to the drug counter to make a few purchases. The druggist was one of the men with whom he’d played poker last night and they greeted each other by name.

  “Heard you call the guy you were talking to ‘Sheriff,’ Doc,” the druggist said. “Nothing wrong, I hope.”

  “No. Just want to pass on some information to him.”

  “Not about our poker games, I hope. Say, Doc, you live out the Bascombe Road, don’t you?”

  Doc nodded. “I’ve wondered why they call it that, but I do. Last house. Why?”

  “Another suicide out your way, last night. Or maybe you heard about it already?”

  Something prickled at the back of Doc’s neck. “No, I hadn’t. Just got in town; this is my first stop. Who was it?”

  “Old geezer by the name of Siegfried Gross. Not much loss; nobody liked him and he liked everybody even less than that. He lives—lived—about five miles out from town. That’d be about three miles from your place.”

  Doc probed but found out only two things more: that Gross had killed himself with a shotgun sometime in the middle of the night, and that he had left a suicide note saying be was killing himself because of the pain of his arthritis.

  He put his drugstore purchases in his car and strolled thoughtfully to the tavern. Mike, the bartender, was talking with two customers about the suicide of Gross, but none of them knew any more than Doc had already learned from the druggist.

  Doc nursed a beer until the sheriff came in, then he downed what was left of it and he and the sheriff took the booth they’d sat in after the inquest.

  “No beer for me this time,” the sheriff said wearily. “I can use a pickup, Mike. Double bourbon, water on the side.” Doc said he’d settle for another beer and Mike went back to the bar.

  The sheriff yawned. “Guess you heard about Siegfried Gross,” he said. “I had to go out there in the middle of the night and ain’t slept since. Gawd, but I’m tired. And soon as we eat I got to go out there again.”

  “Mind if I go with you?” Doc asked.

  “If you want. Was it something about the Gross business you wanted to tell me, Doc?”

  “No, I didn’t even know of it when I phoned you. It’s about the Hoffman dog. It did not have rabies.”

  The sheriff raised bushy eyebrows. “You mean you had it checked? What for, it didn’t bite nobody. Or did it?”

  “No, it bit no one. But I was curious, especially after you told me it was car-shy, why it ran blindly in front of my car. If it had been rabid, that would have explained it.”

  “Hell, Doc, dogs get run over every day. He was probably tracking a rabbit that crossed the road there, had his nose down and wasn’t watching. You can’t make a supreme court case out of a dog getting itself run over.”

  “I suppose not, but—Sheriff, was there anything unusual in connection with Gross’s suicide?”

  “It was plenty messy. Put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blew his brains all over the place. Took our mortician friend over an hour to clean up that kitchen. Lord, what a mess.”

  “Will there be an inquest?”

  “With a suicide note in his own writing, what for? Just a waste of taxpayers’ money. Well, let’s have one more quick one and then go and eat, huh?”

  It wasn’t until over dessert and coffee that Doc again asked if there had been any unusual circumstances, anything at all, in connection with the suicide.

  “Funny thing or two happened the same night, but nothing to do with the suicide,” the sheriff said. “An owl flew through the window, through the glass, I mean, around midnight, and Gross had to shoot it because it had a busted wing.”

  “With the same shotgun?”

  “Hell, no. Used a twenty-two rifle for that. And it was maybe three hours after that he killed himself, but I figure he couldn’t go back to sleep and laid there suffering and finally decided to put himself out of
his misery like he’d done to the owl, and went down to the kitchen and did it.”

  Doc frowned. “Was there any physical contact between Gross and the owl?”

  “Not till after it was dead. After he shot it Gross tossed it out through the busted window and told his wife he’d bury it in the morning.” The sheriff stopped to take a swallow of his coffee. “Loursat, that’s the guy next door, buried it. And the cat. Sometime in the night Gross’s cat got in Loursat’s barn and a vicious dog there killed it.”

  Doc Staunton took a deep breath. He said softly, so softly that the sheriff could barely hear it, “ ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat’.”

  “Huh?”

  “Line from a nonsense poem by Edward Lear. Sheriff, have you ever known an owl to fly through a pane of glass before?”

  “Dunno about an owl especially, Doc, but birds fly into glass all the time. Got a picture window in my house that a bird flies into—oh, maybe once or twice a week. Mostly sparrows. Usually just stun themselves a minute, but once in a while one breaks its neck. Well, guess we’re ready. You want to ride out with me, or go in separate cars so you can go on home after?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The mind thing had learned much that surprised him.

  Since the suicide of Siegfried Gross he had spent most of the time deliberately hostless so he could stay within himself under the steps and use his perceptive senses to see and hear all that went on inside the Gross farmhouse or near it.