Charnel House (10 page)

A young intern standing next to us said, “He can't hold out very much longer, sir. He's real sick.”

Dr. Jarvis shrugged. “He's not just sick, Perring. He's dead. Or at least he should be.”

I stared at Bryan's white and glistening head for four or five minutes. The vacant eye sockets looked like dark mocking eyes, and the jaws were bared in a bony grin. Beside me, Dr. Jarvis, said nothing, but I could see his hands out of the corner of my eye, twisting a ballpen around and around his fingers in nervous tension.

And in the depths of that blue-lit room, the heartbeat went on and on, the blips coursing ceaselessly across the screen, keeping Bryan Corder alive in a hideous aquamarine hell that he could never see nor understand
.

“I have some kind of a theory. Do you want to hear it?” Dr. Jarvis said hoarsely.

I was glad to turn away from that glass inspection panel, and keep my eyes and my mind off that living skull. “Sure. Go ahead. Jane's got herself some theories, too, although I have to tell you that they're pretty wild.”

“I don't suppose mine are any less wild than hers.”

I took his arm. “Is there any way of getting a drink around here? I could sure use one.”

“I have an icebox in my office.”

We left the observation room thankfully, and walked along the corridor to Dr. Jarvis's office. It was pretty cramped, with just space enough for a desk and a tiny icebox and a narrow settee, and the view was only impressive if you liked staring at the backs of buildings. Apart from a cheap desk-lamp and a stack of medical journals, and a photograph of Dr. Jarvis standing on a rustic bridge with a freckly young girl—“my daughter by my ex-wife, God bless her”—the room was undecorated and bare.

“I call this the broom closet,” explained Dr. Jarvis, with a wry grin. “The best offices are all along the west wall, overlooking the ocean, but you have to work here for at least a century before you get one.”

He took a bottle of gin from his desk drawer and produced tonic and ice from his diminutive fridge. He mixed us a couple of g-and-t's, and then sat back and propped his feet on his desk. One of his shoes was worn through to the cardboard lining.

“Jane thinks that what's happening at Wallis's house is something to do with Red Indian legends,” I said. “Apparently Mount Taylor used to be the home of some giant dude called Big Monster, and Cabezon Peak is his head. He had it knocked off by lightning.”

Dr. Jarvis lit a cigarette and passed me one. I didn't smoke very much these days, but right then I felt like smoking the whole pack. There was a pool of nausea someplace down in my stomach, and every time I thought of Bryan Corder's sightless eyes, it stirred itself around and around.

“Well, I don't know about legends,” said Dr. Jarvis, “but there seems to be some kind of connection between what happened to Machin and what happened to Corder. When you think about it, both of them were investigating some kind of noise at 1551 Pilarcitos, and both of them came away from that investigation acually producing the sound that they'd heard. Machin is breathing like the breathing he heard in Seymour Wallis's study, and Corder's heart is beating just like the beat he heard up Wallis's chimney.”

I sipped my gin-and-tonic. “So what's the theory?”

Dr. Jarvis pulled a face. “That's it. That's the whole theory. The theory is that whatever influence or power is dominating that house, it's kind of smuggling itself out of there in bits and pieces.”

“Oh, sure,” I said laconically. “What do we get next? Legs and arms? Noses and ears?”

But right at the very moment I was saying those words with my lips, my mind was saying something else. Reminding me of what Jane had said on the telephone only an hour or two ago.
A Navaho word which I can't pronounce which means ‘to come back by the path of many pieces.'

And on the doorknocker, it said:
“Return.”

“What's the matter?” asked Dr. Jarvis. “You look sick.”

“I don't know. Maybe I am. But something that Jane said about her Indian legend kind of ties up with something that you said. There was a demon or something that was capable of besting this Big Monster, even though Big Monster was almost indestructible by humans and demons and almost everyone else. This demon was called the First One to Use Words for Force, something like that.”

Dr. Jarvis finished his gin-and-tonic and poured himself another. “I don't see the connection,” he said.

“The connection is that this demon's motto was some Indian word that means ‘coming back by the path of many pieces.'”

Dr. Jarvis frowned. “So?”

“So everything! So what
you
said was that whatever power was possessing Wallis's house, it's smuggling itself out of there in bits and
pieces
! First it's breathing and now its heartbeat.”

Dr. Jarvis looked at me long and level, and didn't even lift his drink from the table. I said, almost embarrassed, “It's a thought, anyway. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence.”

“What you're trying to suggest is that these noises in Wallis's house are something to do with a demon who's gradually taking people over? Bit by bit?”

“Isn't that what
you're
suggesting?”

Dr. Jarvis sighed, and rubbed his eyes. “I don't exactly know
what
I'm suggesting. Maybe we ought to call at the house again, and ask Mr. Wallis if the heartbeat's vanished, too.”

“I'm game if you are. I haven't heard from him all day.”

“He left a message that he telephoned here,” said Dr. Jarvis. “He was probably asking about Corder.”

Dr. Jarvis found the message on the pad and punched out Wallis's number. It rang and rang and rang. In the end he put the receiver back and said, “No reply. Guess he did the wise thing and went out.”

I finished my drink. “Would
you
stay there? I wouldn't. But I'll call around there later this afternoon. I decided to take the day off work.”

“Won't San Francisco miss its most talented sanitation officer?”

I crushed out my cigarette. “I was thinking of a change anyway. Maybe I'll go into medicine. It seems like an idle kind of a life.”

He laughed.

I drank some more. “Did you see the birds?”

“Birds? What birds? I've been shut up with Corder all night.”

“I'm surprised nobody mentioned it. Your whole damned hospital looks like a bird sanctuary.”

Dr. Jarvis raised an eyebrow. “What kind of birds?”

“I don't know. I'm not Audubon the Second. They're big, and kind of gray. You should go out and take a look. They're pretty sinister. If I didn't have better taste, I'd say they were buzzards, waiting for Elmwood's rich and unfortunate patients to pass away.”

“Are there many?”

“Thousands. Count 'em.”

Just then Dr. Jarvis's telephone bleeped. He picked it up and said, “Jarvis.”

He listened for a moment, then said, “Okay. I'm right there,” and clapped the phone down.

“Anything wrong?” I asked him.

“It's Corder. I don't know how the hell he's been doing it, but Dr. Crane says he's been trying to sit up.”

“
Sit up
? You have to be kidding! The guy's almost a corpse!”

We left our drinks and went quickly back down the corridor to the observation room. Dr. Crane was there, along with the bearded pathologist Dr. Nightingale, and a nicely proportioned black lady who was introduced to me as Dr. Weston, a specialist in brain damage. Nicely proportioned though she was, she spoke and behaved like a specialist in brain damage, and so I left well enough alone. One day, she'd find herself a good-looking neurologist and settle down.

It was what was happening behind the window, in the blue depths of the intensive-care unit that really stunned me. I had the same desperate breathless sensation you get when you step into a swimming pool that's ten degrees too cold.

Bryan Corder had turned his head away from us, and all we could see was the back of his skull and the exposed muscles at the back of his neck, red and stringy and laced with veins. He was moving, though, actually moving. His arm kept reaching out, as if it was trying to grasp something or push something away, and his legs stirred under the covers.

Dr. Jarvis said, “My God, can't we stop him?”

Dr. Crane, a bespectacled specialist with a head that seemed to be two sizes too large for his body, said, “We've already tried sedation. It doesn't appear to have any effect.”

“Then we'll have to strap him down. We can't have him moving around. It's bizarre!”

Dr. Weston, the black lady, interrupted him. “It may be bizarre, Dr. Jarvis, but it's quite unprecedented. Maybe we should just let him do what he wants. He's not going to survive, anyway.”

“For Christ's sake!” snapped Dr. Jarvis. “The whole thing's inhuman!”

Just how inhuman it really was, none of us really understood, not until Bryan suddenly lifted himself on one elbow, and slowly swung himself out of his bed.

Dr. Jarvis took one look at that stocky figure in its green robes, with its ghastly skull perched on its shoulders, standing alone and unaided in a light as blue as lightning, as blue as death, and he shouted to his intern,
“Get him back on that bed! Come on, help me!”

The intern stayed where he was, white and terrified, but Dr. Jarvis pushed open the door between the observation room and the intensive-care unit, and I went in behind him.

There was a strange, cold smell in there. It was like a mixture between ethyl alcohol and something sweet. Bryan Corder—what was left of Bryan, stood only four or five feet away from us, silent and impassive, his skull fixed in the empty, revenous look of death.

“John,” said Dr. Jarvis quietly.

“Yes?”

“I want you to take his left arm and lead him back to the couch. Force him to walk backward, so that when he reaches the couch, we can push against him and he'll have to sit back. Then all we have to do is swing his legs across, and we'll have him lying flat again. See those straps under the couch? As soon as we get him down, we buckle him up. You got me?”

“Right.”

“You frightened?”

“You bet your ass.”

Dr. Jarvis licked his lips in nervous anticipation. “Okay, John, let's do it.”

Bryan's heartbeat, monitored in steady blips through the wires that still trailed from his chest, was still at a slow twenty-four beats to the minute. But right then, my own heartbeat felt even slower. My mouth was dry with fear, and my legs were the bent wobbly legs of someone who wades into clear water.

Dr. Jarvis and I both inched closer, our hands raised, our eyes fixed on Bryan's skull. For some reason I felt that Bryan could still see, even though his eye-sockets were empty. He took a shuffling step toward us, and the raw muscle that held his jaw in place started to twitch.

“My God,” whispered Dr. Jarvis,
“he's trying to say something!”

For a moment I thought that I probably wasn't going to have the nerve to grab hold of Bryan's arm and force him back on the bed. Supposing he fought back? Supposing I had to touch that naked, living skull? But then Dr. Jarvis snapped,
“Now!”
and I went forward awkward and clumsy, with my courage as weak as a girl's. I think I even shrieked out loud. I'm not ashamed of it. At least I tried.

Bryan collapsed in our arms. Instead of forcing him back, we had to drag him, and we heaved him up on to the couch like a sack of meal. Dr. Jarvis held the back of his skull to prevent any injury, and we laid him carefully down with his arms by his sides and strapped him tight with restraining bands. Then we stood and looked at each other across his supine body, and all we could do was smirk with suppressed fear.

Dr. Jarvis checked Bryan's heartbeat and vital signs, and they were still the same. Twenty-four beats a minute and continuing strong. Respiration slow but steady. I took a deep breath and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. I was sweating and shaking, and I could hardly speak.

Dr. Jarvis said, “This beats everything. This guy is supposed to be dead. Every rule in the book says he's dead. But here he is living and breathing and even walking about.”

At that moment Dr. Weston came in. She looked down at Bryan Corder and said, “Maybe it's a miracle.”

“Well, maybe it is,” said Dr. Jarvis. “But maybe it's a damned evil piece of black magic, too.”

“Black magic, Dr. Jarvis?” said Dr. Weston. “I didn't think you white folks believed in that.”

“I don't know what to believe,” he muttered. “This whole thing is totally insane.”

“Insane or not, I have my tests to run,” she said. “Thank you for restraining him so well. And thank you, too, Mr. Hyatt.”

I coughed. “I won't say it's been a pleasure.”

We left Dr. Weston and her interns to run through their brain-damage tests on Bryan Corder's exposed skull, and we went out into the corridor. Dr. Jarvis stood for a long time by the window, staring out across the hospital parking lot. Then he reached into the pocket of his white medical coat and took out a pack of cigarettes.

I stood a little ways away, watching him and keeping quiet. I guessed he wanted to be alone right then. He was suddenly faced with something that turned his most basic ideas about medicine upside down, and he was trying to rationalize a bizarre horror that, so far, could only be explained by superstition.

He lit his cigarette. “You were right about the birds.”

“They're still up there?”

“Thousands of them, all along the roof.”

I stepped up to the window and looked out. They were there, all right, ragged and fluttering in the Pacific wind.

“They're like some kind of goddamned omen,” he said. “What's the matter with them? They don't even
sing
.”