The Mind Thing

“Autopsy? No, what for? Wasn’t any doubt he killed himself, slashing his wrists with a knife. No other marks, except scratches on his legs, from bushes, and the bottoms of his feet cut and bloody.”

Doc opened his mouth and closed it again.

The sheriff said, “Say, I been trying to place where you’d be staying or living out that road. House at the very end of it, about ten miles out?”

“That’s right,” Doc said. “The old Burton place, they call it; used to be a farm but it’s gone wild now. Friend of mine back in Boston bought it to use as a summer vacation place. This summer he couldn’t get away and offered to let me use it.”

“Yeah, guy named—uh—Hastings. Met him a few times, summers. Wife with you, or staying alone out there?”

“I’m staying alone. Not married. I like to get a little solitude once in a while. When you teach—”

“What do you teach, Mr. Staunton?”

“Call me Doc, Sheriff. I teach physics at M. I. T.  Specialize in electronics. I’ve done some work on the satellite program, too. Spent the first half of my vacation working on that, but I’ve got the rest of it to myself.”

“You mean you work on rockets?” There was respect in the sheriff’s voice.

“Not rockets themselves. Mostly on the detectors and transmitting sets in the satellites that send back information on radiation, cosmic rays, things like that. I helped design the components for the paddlewheel satellite, for one thing. But right now I’m more interested in fishing. There’s a creek about a mile east of where I live that’s —”

“I know it; I’ve lived there. But you—and your friend that owns the house, Hastings—ought to come out here in the hunting season sometime. Plenty deer out that way, in the woods north of you.”

“Afraid I’m not much of a hunter, Sheriff. Brought along a rifle and a pistol, but just for some target practice. And a shotgun because Hastings said there might be rattlers around the place, but I haven’t seen any yet. Have another beer?”

“Okay,” the sheriff said; he held up two fingers to the bartender.

“Had any other strange deaths here, Sheriff?” Doc asked.

The sheriff looked at him curiously. “Don’t know what you mean by ‘strange,’ ” he said. “Couple of unsolved killings in the last few years, but they were robbery kills, nothing strange about them.”

“No other case of anyone going suddenly suicidally—or homicidally—insane?”

“Ummm—not since I’ve been in office, six years almost. But what’s strange about it? People do go crazy, don’t they?”

“Yes, except that insanity usually follows certain patterns, and Tommy Hoffman’s—well—”

“You’re not suggesting it wasn’t suicide, are you?”

“Of course not. Just wondering what kind of a psychosis he had, and why it hit him so suddenly, and right then. While he was, or should have been, happy and relaxed, taking a nap after—after what should have been a pretty pleasant experience. It just doesn’t make sense. Well, let’s skip it. You say you’ve fished my creek, Sheriff. What kind of fly do you use for trout?”

After he finished his second beer the sheriff said he’d better get back to Wilcox, and left. Doc ordered himself a third, and over it, and over a pipe that kept going out because he couldn’t remember to keep puffing on it he lost himself in thought. Was he going overboard in thinking that the three deaths—the field mouse, the boy, the dog— formed an almost incredible sequence? The sheriff hadn’t seemed to think so, but—

Or was he making much ado about nothing? A field mouse had acted strangely. First it had sat up and pawed at the boy and girl as though to warn them away. Then it had let the girl pick it up but had nipped her. When she dropped it it had started to run away and then had run back and attacked the boy, thereby in effect committing suicide.

Then the boy, Tommy Hoffman. Again, suddenly insanity starting while he was asleep or just after he awakened beside the girl, and again ending in suicide. Doc admitted that people do go insane and do commit suicide while in that state. But he’d read quite a bit about abnormal psychology and had never yet heard of a case of a person going suddenly and completely insane without having shown any preliminary symptoms and without there being some inciting cause, some traumatic experience, at the time of the onset of insanity.

Then the dog, which was where Doc had come in. Of course the dog could have had rabies, could have been running blindly and deafly—but if it hadn’t, if it had been normal, then it too had in effect committed suicide by running in front of his car, especially since it had been car-shy. That was the one bit of new information he’d picked up from the sheriff, and it certainly did not make Buck’s death seem more natural.

But animals, except possibly lemmings, simply do not commit suicide.

Suddenly Doc downed what little was left of his beer and knocked the dottle out of his pipe as he stood up. There were laboratories in Green Bay which could tell him whether or not Buck had been rabid; Green Bay was only forty-five miles away and it was only three o’clock in the afternoon: He had the dog’s body in the station wagon and could get it there in plenty of time. Besides, he hadn’t been farther from the house than the ten miles to Bartlesville in a week, and an evening in Green Bay would be a pleasant change. He could eat in a good restaurant and take in a movie if anything worth while was playing.

He did all of those things and, between leaving the dog at the laboratory—he paid in advance so he could get the report by telephone from Bartlesville late the next day—and having dinner, he picked up a dozen or so paperbacks for light reading. Strictly mystery novels. He did his serious reading at times when he was working, and read only escape literature while he was on vacation. The dinner was good; it was a change from his own cooking and better than anything he could get in Bartlesville. The movie he saw was a French farce featuring Brigitte Bardot; he had trouble following the plot but after a while gave it up and just watched Brigitte; he enjoyed the rest of it very much.

He got back a little after ten o’clock to the house at the end of the road, the house he had borrowed from his friend Hastings. It was a fair-sized house that had been a farmhouse once. There were three bedrooms upstairs, although only two of them were furnished, and a bath; there were three rooms downstairs, a big kitchen, a big living room, and an extra room used only for storage, in which he kept his guns and fishing equipment. Electricity was provided by a generator in the basement, run by a small gasoline engine, and the same engine could be used periodically to pump water from a well to a tank on the roof. There was no telephone, but he didn’t mind that; in fact, be preferred it. The area around the house and to the south of it had once been a farm, but for whatever reason it had been abandoned it had not been farmed for at least twenty years. All of it except a yard immediately around the house had gone back to brush and woods, distinguishable from the wild country north of the road only in that trees were fewer and not so tall.

It had seemed a friendly, comfortable place, until tonight.

Doc got himself a can of beer from the refrigerator and sat down to read one of the books he’d brought back, but he couldn’t get interested in it. For some reason he felt uneasy. For the first time since he’d been here, he felt his isolation. He fought an impulse to pull down the shades so he couldn’t he seen by anything or anybody watching from outside.

But why would anybody have any reason for coming way out here to the last house to look through his windows? And what did he mean by anything? Anything capable of looking through a window could only be an animal, and why should he care how many animals might be watching him? He charged himself with being ridiculous, found himself guilty as charged, and sentenced himself to opening another can of beer and trying harder to concentrate on the mystery novel.

Going back to it, he discovered that it was open at page twenty, but he couldn’t remember a single thing about the previous pages he had presumably read. He started over again. It was, or should have been, an exciting mystery; there was a murder on the very first page. But he just couldn’t get interested in it; between the book and his mind there interposed the story of Tommy Hoffman… Getting up naked, except for blue socks, from lying beside his sweetheart, and running off to a sand-floored cave; crouching in it until he saw the lanterns approaching carried by his father and his sweetheart’s father, and hearing the barking of Buck, the hound. Running away from them again, circling back to a point near where he had started, picking up a rusty, broken-bladed knife and slashing his wrists, both of them.

The book was open to page fifteen now, but again he had no recollection of anything beyond the first page. He tossed it down in despair and let himself think.