Specimens Part 4

Standing on the entrance platform of curving rods, Dan's controlled body paused, before leaving the silo, to take a last glance back and down. Around Millie on the gimbaled table, the machines were already fabricating a new crystal box, tailored almost like a suit to her dimensions.

After closing the dark door behind him, and climbing through the short tunnel once more, Dan was made to stop in the bas.e.m.e.nt. There his hand picked up the trouble light on its long cord, and his eyes studied it for half a minute. Gingerly his fingers touched the hot metal framework that s.h.i.+elded the bare incandescent bulb; then they found the push-b.u.t.ton switch and clicked it off, then set the light down on the floor again.

Up on the ground floor, his body walked again through all the rooms. This was a somewhat more leisurely tour than the first reconnaissance had been. Now some time was spent in looking at the furniture, testing the locks and latches on some of the doors, and trying a light switch here and mere. All the light switches were turned off again. In the living room the television set received a few moments' study - though there was no attempt to make it work - and the calendar on the kitchen wall got a steady stare.

The electric stove, the built-in extra oven in the wall, and the refrigerator were all of interest. Dan's hands worked the faucets in the kitchen sink and bathroom fixtures, on and off. The toilet also drew close attention, but was not tried.

When it had again climbed to the second floor, his body once more visited all the rooms there in turn. All Were dark except Millie's; in hers a lamp still shone. Her record player had finished its program and switched itself to silence.

Dan's fingers turned the lone lamp off, and then his body looked out of each of the second floor windows, one after another. From the east windows it looked long at the staccato flow of pa.s.sing headlights down on Main, and at the floodlights of the shopping center on the other side of that busy highway. From a north window his eyes followed with great interest the lights of a large jet climbing away from a recent takeoff at O'Hare Field, some twenty miles away.

His hands turned on the bathroom light; then, in his own bedroom, half-lit by the reflected glow from down the hall, Dan was given a good deliberate look at his own figure in the big mirror atop the dresser. His clothes were grimy from his work, and from the struggles with his children; his hands were sore from breaking up and carrying stone, especially those last frantic minutes of labor without gloves. Sweat had mixed with dust and dirt to mat his hair and form an outer mask over an inner one, the inner one being terrible because it was formed of the very muscles of his own face, muscles that had been taken away from him and set in subtly alien patterns.

His body looked in dresser drawers until it found clean underwear. In the upstairs bath his hands had only the slightest hesitation in working drain control and faucets, getting the tub filled with water at a comfortable heat. The toilet was tested by working the handle once and observing the resultant watery turmoil; after which it was neatly used.

His body stripped and immersed itself in the tub. It soaked briefly, used soap and washcloth somewhat clumsily but to good effect, then climbed out to dry itself on a bathtowel and put on the clean underwear.

Then it walked back to Dan's bedroom and tumbled itself onto the big bed and made his limbs relax. Dan's eyes were closed for him, and he was held there in a silence that lasted for eternity before approaching sleep.

SEVEN.

On Tuesday night, Dan's fourth night in the old house, he was swept back into the Indian vision, which ran its course exactly as before, and then continued beyond the point at which its first-run showing had degenerated into a more or less ordinary and confused dream. This time while in the shaman's body he saw the crab-machine (he still thought of it that way, it was too big for his imagination to accept it as an ant) descend from the flame-walled tower through its doorway, which he saw now was the same size and shape as the dark doorway at the end of the vaulted tunnel in his bas.e.m.e.nt. And still in the shaman's body, Dan knelt before the crab and anointed it with the foul contents of his bark cup . . .

. . . then befeathered warriors finished binding the stripped and painted maiden to the frame of logs, and his sinewy brown arm signalled, and the arrows flew.

The crab looked on, disdainfully perhaps; not what it wanted, really, though it would let the people serve it sacrifice of this kind if they wished. But this time as the girl became an ugly corpse Dan felt only curiosity rather than terror. Reality worse than nightmares had left him numb . . .

. . . Dan came up from an unconsciousness that scarcely felt like sleep as he pulled free of its last grip to find himself in physical control of his own movements once again.

He was lying on his belly with his head turned sideways on the pillow, and there on the sheet nearby were the fingers of his outstretched hand in view. He flexed the fingers and they worked. Stupidly he brushed with them at a spot of sunlight that angled below an undrawn shade to lie upon the bed. He just lay there keeping his eyes fixed on this phenomenon.

He had not forgotten a single detail of what had happened to him the night before.

Neither could he believe for a moment that it had all really taken place.

But terrible things of some kind had happened. He felt sure of that, would have felt sure of it even if there were not such a deafening silence reverberating from the children's bedrooms down the hall.

Dully and hopelessly he rolled over in the bed, and slowly got to his feet in his clean underwear. It was his own face, however shocked and dazed, his own face and not an alien mask, that looked back at him from the dresser mirror.

Shuffling in a daze, he went to the bathroom to relieve the painful bladder pressure that had awakened him. The light was still burning in the bathroom and he flipped it off.

His mouth was very dry and there was no gla.s.s or cup in sight and he drank from the cold water faucet at the basin, and splashed some on his face. Then he walked down the silent hall and stood for some unjudgeable period of time looking at each of the children's beds, Sam's still made neatly from yesterday and unused during the night, Millie's still made but rumpled. In each room the litter of their toys and clothes and junk confronted him silently.

His own grimy clothes of yesterday were' on the bathroom floor, and mechanically he picked them up and threw them in the hamper. Back in his own bedroom he found and put on a pair of clean pants, and clean socks and a different pair of shoes. Into his pants pockets he put keys and change and billfold, with some vague idea of getting himself ready to deal with the world, to face its reckoning for his crimes.

... his crimes. He knew that he was going to have to go down and look in the bas.e.m.e.nt, but he couldn't face it just yet. If he even allowed himself to think about it just yet he would collapse. And collapsing now was the one thing he must not do - just why such a comfortable slide into irresponsible madness was not now allowable was another point about which thinking would have to be postponed.

Still moving like a sleepwalker, he walked down to the first floor. All around him the house was silent, warm and bright with the sun coming in under the unlowered shades.

He proceeded steadily until he reached the bas.e.m.e.nt door, which was standing just slightly ajar. He stood there for some time with his hand on the doork.n.o.b, unable to move the door or let it go. For the time being he was perfectly convinced of what he would see when he went down. No fantasy of ceramic silo or of crystal coffins bathed in a greenish light. No dream-stuff of crab-like machines, and blunt needles that did not pierce the body but still brought it to miraculous sleep. None of that. He knew with stark certainty that he was going to see the bodies of his murdered family where he had flung them in his raging madness of the night before. Or maybe he had broken up the bas.e.m.e.nt floor or wall and crudely buried them. When he went down he might see only the mound of rubble under which their corpses lay.

At last he jerked the door wide and went quickly down the steps to see what he had done. There was the old wall, the shattered opening he had made to the vaulted tunnel, the piled debris, the trouble light still plugged in and with its caged bulb lying on the floor. His knees were beginning to quiver as he picked up the light and switched it on and took it with him into the dark tunnel with the dark door at its farther end.

His fingers punched hard at the door in the remembered pattern, and it clicked and swung back and the green light washed out from inside. Dan's knees would hardly hold him now, and it took him a moment to identify the causative emotion as relief. What he remembered was all true. It was a nightmare, but he had not killed them. In fact he did not think that they were dead. And now he realized why he must not let himself collapse.

Holding the black door open, he stepped in on the fire-escape platform. In the rays of his own light, more normal for his eyes, he saw again the spiraled ranks of crystal coffins, and the incredible machinery, all of it as real and solid as the peeling vinyl wallpaper on his suburban kitchen walls above. He saw his children where they lay encased.

Ten feet behind him in the bas.e.m.e.nt were his sledge and wrecking bar. He put down the light and lunged back through the low-roofed tunnel, scrambling for a moment on all fours like some attacking predator. With snarling lips drawn back from his clenched teeth, he grabbed up the ma.s.sive hammer, turned - - and suddenly control was on him once again, an iron vise. No, stronger man that.

Against iron a man could at least try to fight; he could no more struggle against this alien domination than he could escape from his own flesh.

His fingers were opened for him so the hammer-handle slid away through them, and the heavy iron head clanged on the floor beside his foot. Then his controlled body stooped and descended through the slanted tunnel again, propping the dark door open slightly with a brick, so that the trouble light could be brought in on its cord. It was left on the upper platform, filling the interior of the silo with its glare, while Dan was walked down the stairs once more, to make another inspection of the collected specimens.

Nearest the top his own children still looked as if they merely slept within their tailored coffins. Dan's eyes were not allowed to linger on them in search of signs of life, but he felt sure that their positions were at least slightly different than they had been the night before.

What he saw in Oriana's case confirmed beyond all doubt the possibility of movement among the specimens; he remembered that last night she had been lying on her back, and now she was on her right side with her knees drawn up.

Not dead, not dead. Whatever else was going on, they were not dead. Some kind of hope remained.

The inspection continued downward. Today his controller took time to study the plant and animal specimens in some detail, as well as the people, through Dan's eyes.

Here was an antlered deer that Dan in his shock had somehow failed to register on his previous tour. Its head was turned in toward the wall in an expanded casket, its white- flagged rump turned out toward the stair, its brown flanks as motionless as if stuffed.

And some of the smaller cases held mere twigs and leaves, in containers too small to allow for growth. These collections had no soil or water with them, nor, apparently, any steady source of light to power photosynthesis. Yet the specimens looked fresh and green enough to have just come down from daylight.

At the bottom the gimbaled preparation table waited, flat and empty and ready for more work. The thought occurred to Dan: my turn? But he was walked right past the table and made to once more open the cabinet in which the crab-machine reposed.

Now his eyes could get a better look at it, in the clear white brightness of the trouble light that shone down from above. Its body was about as big as a man's torso, and shaped like a short thick cigar. Its six legs were nowhere much thicker than Dan's thumb, and each one was segmented to be flexible throughout its length; each was two or three feet long and ended in a hall-like k.n.o.b that did not seem well adapted as a foot.

And Dan saw now that there was a sort of head, or at least a low, mushroom-shaped dorsal protuberance, now almost hidden behind the body as the thing stood upright on its hind legs in its case.

Today, after Dan's fingers had been made to brush at the cold, inanimate body once again, and tug testingly at one of the folded limbs - like steel cable, the leg flexed only slightly under a firm pull - they brought out his pocket knife and used it to sc.r.a.pe hard at several places on the crab's metal sh.e.l.l. The knifeblade removed nothing but traces of an old dried film, which crumbled away into faintly greasy dust when it was rubbed as if thoughtfully between Dan's fingers.

Then his hands put the knife away and closed up the cabinet again, and the puppet- strings were pulled to set him walking back up the surrealistic stair.

Gradually he was regaining his powers of thought and observation, coming out of the worst of his shock. He noted now that the progress of his controlled body was still a little like that of a cautious drunk, being made slow enough to allow for small uncertainties in the clearance of his feet on the steps, and in the pressure of his hand that gripped the slightly oily-feeling rail.

His master made him shut off the trouble light and close the silo's door, then took him out into the middle of the bas.e.m.e.nt, where he was made to stand for a while looking over the confusion of excavated rubble, cardboard moving cartons, tools, wine rack, and other miscellany. He was just being made to start poking into some of the boxes when the front door's chimes sounded from above.

Without hesitation his body walked to the bas.e.m.e.nt stairs and up. On the ground floor his ears got a good directional fix on the chime itself when it sounded again, and Dan was made to stand in the hall for a few moments, looking steadily up at the brown plastic box high on the wall. Then Dan was steered unavailingly to the kitchen and at last into the living room, where he saw Mrs. Follett's nicely weathered face peering in through one of the small gla.s.s panels beside the front door.

Dan's body walked to the door, fumbled briefly to release a latch whose type was evidently unfamiliar to his controller, then pulled the door open and stood there with a blank expression, waiting for whatever the woman who confronted him might do.

"h.e.l.lo, Mr. Post. . . is everything all right? "Mrs. Follett, dressed for gardening as usual, blinked at him uncertainly. He could see her eyes going over him, no doubt inventorying changes substantial and small, lingering momentarily upon his damaged cheek.

"I feel slightly ill," he heard his own voice saying. No, it was not quite his own, but pretty close. "In the main, everything is well." With faintly rising hope Dan noted that the words, like the tone, were just not right. Anyone who knew him at all well must have grave doubts that this was Dan Post speaking.

Even Mrs. Follett, near-stranger that she was, peered at him closely and gave no sign of being rea.s.sured. She asked: "Are the children all right?" Meanwhile she kept darting quick little glances past him into the house.

"Yes."

She gave a little nervous, half-apologetic smile at the unsatisfying monosyllable. "I only ask because I thought I heard one of them crying out last night, well, as if in pain."

"They've gone, for a time. To school."

If this was very surprising news, in mid-July, Mrs. Follett did not show it. A subtle mask of her own control had come over her face now, or so Dan thought.

"Oh, my goodness," she commented, in guarded tones. "Well, that must have been a sudden decision ..." She studied him in silence a moment longer, then raised what she had been carrying in her right hand, something Dan had not noticed earlier. "Nancy was so interested in that other arrowhead I gave her that I thought I'd bring this one over as well. I've been really keeping my eyes open for the last few days, and this turned up ... at least I think it's probably an arrowhead, a rather strangely shaped little stone. How is Nancy, by the way?

"Quite well, thank you." His hand went out and took the thing without his looking at it. ''I'll see that she gets this."

Mrs. Follett exchanged a few more friendly words, or tried to. She was smiling uneasily when she broke off her visit and started a retreat.

''Thank you for stopping by," Dan's controller told her in farewell. After closing the front door it could still watch her through the small gla.s.s panels beside the door, and after that through the kitchen windows on the west side of the house as she moved down the edge of Benham Road and then across her own immaculate lawn to her front door.

Don't accept it, Mrs. Follett, please, don't just let it go at that. In the prison of his own body, his thoughts if nothing else were still his property.

His body was turned away from the window, but kept in the kitchen. His fingers were made to open and close the various drawers and cabinets while his eyes inventoried the contents briefly. His hands also tested the controls of the refrigerator, and the stove controls that brought blue gas flames into existence.

At the sink, his fingers turned the water on and off, on and off, playing briefly with the stream. His controller tried the spray attachment and got a small puddle on the floor, After a hesitation of some seconds it returned him to a roll of paper towels examined earlier, thoughtfully detached one sheet, and used it to mop up the spill.

Water was squeezed from the wet towel into the sink and the soggy paper then smoothed out as well as possible. It was left spread out on the countertop, as if to dry it for a frugal second use at some time in the future.

A routine itch had developed near Dan's left eye, and after it had bothered him for a few seconds his arm went up to root out the irritation with a precise small scratching.

The controller, then, must feel everything that he felt, as well as seeing through his eyes and speaking through his lips. But although it could rule his body so absolutely, there was no evidence as yet that it was capable of controlling his thoughts, or even listening in on them.

Who are you? He tried to project the mental question as strongly as he could. He waited for an answer, while his body went on looking into drawers and bins, but no answer came. Maybe his question had been registered and simply ignored.

Maybe, in the estimation of his enemy, his thoughts were not worth controlling. But as long as the power of thought remained to Dan, he intended to try to use it. Where to start?

His children were not dead, and therefore he might possibly be of some help to them.

He had got that far already. What next?

Dan once again considered, and then rejected permanently, the possibility that he was simply if terribly insane; mat he perhaps was only imagining he had children, or that he had really murdered them and buried them in the bas.e.m.e.nt. That all the rest, the puppet-control of his body, the green-lit cylindrical vault with all its crystal caskets, were insane delusions and nothing more. Even if there was no way he could prove to himself mat the insanity hypothesis was wrong, it was utterly useless. As well a.s.sume that he was dreaming somewhere and unable to awake. In either case there would be nothing he could do but helplessly endure whatever came.

There seemed to be little enough that he could do in any case, with his body so ruthlessly and rigidly controlled. But control had been interrupted once, to let his body rest in bed. Therefore some future period of freedom, some chance to act, might reasonably be expected.

a.s.sume that he was not insane. Then what in h.e.l.l was going on? The idea of possession leaped to mind. It was a subject that Dan Post had never given much thought. Possession was something that devils were supposed to do, at least according to some movies and some books that he had seen. Dan was no believer in devils, and hadn't been, at least not since he was very young. In G.o.d? Perhaps. At times he thought that he believed in G.o.d, a G.o.d that was beyond man's understanding, and who had no particular personal interest in mankind. But the devil . . .? Hardly.

From what he could recall of demons and devils in fiction, anyone genuinely possessed by these malignant, disembodied powers was supposed to throw fits, gibber obscenities, cavort like a monkey, display superhuman strength, and contort his or her body in impossible ways. What had happened to him so far didn't seem to fit the devil- hypothesis at all.

More, the strange things under his house had no connection that he could see with dark religion, magic, diabolism. They were unmistakably in the realm of technology, and it was a technology of a very advanced sort. Now before his thought there seemed to loom the domain of little green men, flying saucer stories, credulous cultists, to which he had previously given even less thought than to the supernatural.

It was still a fact, however, that he was very solidly possessed. Controlled. What did he really know about the controller? First, that he, or it, spoke English, though the speech was somewhat stilted and curious. . . .

His body in its restless tour of the kitchen had now come to a halt before the little cork bulletin board that Nancy had fastened to the wall to mark the spot where she wanted her kitchen phone, next to which the installer had obligingly placed the instrument. Now Dan's hand reached up to take down the little pad of paper with pencil attached that had come as adjunct to the board. Paper and pencil in hand, Dan was turned around and dropped into a chair at the kitchen table. At this point most of his puppet-strings were released with casual suddenness. Still maintaining their control, however, were the invisible strings moving his right hand and arm. Even as he enjoyed the first deep breath of partial freedom, he watched as his right hand tore off a piece of paper from the pad, dropped it on the Formica of the tabletop, and then took up the little pencil.

His hand printed, in odd-looking block capital letters that were not his: EAT. PREPARE AND CONSUME USUAL MORNING FOOD. BODY STRENGTH.

MUST BE MAINTAINED.

And that was that. His hand let go the pencil and was permitted to rejoin the rest of his body under his own control. Possession had left no numbness, no pain, no detectable after effect of any kind. He was simply his own man again. But freedom was an illusion, of course, because there lay the paper with its written orders for him.

Body strength must be maintained. For what purpose?

About six feet from where Dan sat, the back door waited. He could get up from the table, unlatch the door, and just walk out, straight to some neighbor's house, the Folletts' probably, where he could ask for help. Or he could run when he hit the outdoors, screaming terror and outrage until the world took notice. No need for such dramatics; there was the phone ready on the wall. He could calmly ask the operator for the police.

Remembering what had happened when he had grabbed up the sledgehammer in the bas.e.m.e.nt, he thought he knew just exactly how far he was going to get in trying to alarm the world. But of course the effort had to be made. He would try the door first, he decided; why educate his evil master prematurely in how to use the phone? He suspected that was something his invisible enemy did not know, if doorbells and flush toilets were novelties.

Dan got up and walked to the door that led outside and reached for the k.n.o.b, but precisely at that moment his hands refused to work for him. ''All right,'' he said aloud.

"All right, dammit, I'll eat." And at once the management of his hands was given back to him.

Moving methodically under his own control, he first put the water on for instant coffee. Should he simply fix himself coffee and toast, or a bowl of cereal? No, preparing bacon and eggs would give his hands a routine, time-consuming task and so provide more free time for his mind to try to think. Besides, his stomach had evidently been isolated from the emotional strains of the last twelve hours or so, was working on a pure brute survival level, and he was hungry for his delayed breakfast.

All right, the body strength would be maintained. Because eventually he was going to get the chance to use the body against the foe; it was an idea that he intended to hold on to, stubbornly.

Back to thought, then, while his hands were occupied with routine. His controller, whoever it was or whatever its nature, used English, but oddly. How was it odd? Well - maybe in the same way that the English spoken by the people in the dream of Oriana seemed odd to his modern senses: accent and choice of words both somewhat strange.

Clareson and his wife. Maybe she had been crazy, playing the piano like that, while . .

. And her husband perhaps had been under this same terrible compulsion when he lifted Oriana and carried her to living death. As other blacks had evidently gone before her, not to be missed from the invisible tracks that ran escaping slaves up from the deep South into Canada. As Peter and Red had gone before the blacks into crystal boxes, evidently in the days of the first white settlements; that would have been sometime in the early nineteenth century, probably before Clareson was born; someone else had served the Controller then - yes, Schwartz, a dark and distant figure standing beside a house on this hilltop. And before that, Indians had gone, long before . . .

What had Nancy said about that first arrowhead? That it was of a type thought to be five or six thousand years old. And he, Dan, had watched the makers of that arrowhead, or their contemporaries, construct the mound in which his enemy's base still lay concealed, into which the human specimens had vanished, not for hundreds of years but thousands.

His flow of ideas was stalled, temporarily at least, by the awesomeness of the problem he was facing. But he kept trying. When his food was ready he ate it mechanically and without haste, frowning at the wall or out the window, and now and then glancing at the table where lay the little white rectangle of paper with his orders printed on it. A visitor looking in the kitchen door would have seen nothing stranger than a preoccupied man consuming a somewhat delayed breakfast.

When he had finished eating he cleared the table and then began to wash the dishes, still moving methodically, trying to postpone the resumption of control that he suspected would come as these tasks of routine maintenance had been completed. He was still at the sink when the phone rang, precipitating a re-imposition of control so sudden that a plate slipped from his wet fingers to bound up unbroken from the light padding of the floor's synthetic tiles.

Completely puppetized again, his body put the dishcloth on the counter, and traced the repet.i.tious ringing sound to the white, complex object on the kitchen wall. His body walked over to the phone, which it had earlier looked at without touching, and his hand took the receiver down. The faint squawk of voice that followed was lifted to his right ear, whereupon the mouthpiece came more or less naturally into its proper place.

"Dan?" inquired Nancy's voice.

"I am Mr. Post," the controller answered, after a short delay.

''Well, good morning, Mr. Post. It's Nancy. Is this a bad connection or something?

You don't sound right.''

"Good morning, Nancy. Yes, I suppose it may be a bad connection."