Charnel House (2 page)

He rubbed his forehead wearily, and then he stood up. “All right,” he said, in a defeated voice. “I can understand your priorities.”

I walked around my desk and opened the door for him. He put on his old Panama hat, and stood there for a moment, as if he was trying to find the words to say something else.

“If you hear anything else, like pattering feet, or if you find excrement—” I told him.

He nodded. “I know, I'll call you. The trouble with the way things are these days, everybody specializes. You can clean out sewers but you can't listen to something as strange as a house that breathes.”

“I'm sorry.”

He reached out and gripped my wrist. His bony old hand was surprisingly strong, and it felt as if I'd been suddenly seized by a bald eagle.

“Why not stop being sorry and do something positive?” he said. He came so close I could see the red tracery of veins in his cloudy eyes. “Why not come around when you're finished up here, and just listen for five minutes? I have some Scotch whisky my nephew brought back from Europe. We could have a drink, and then you could hear it.”

“Mr. Wallis—”

He let go of my wrist, and sighed, and adjusted his hat. “You'll have to forgive me,” he said flatly. “I guess it's been kind of a strain on the nerves.”

“That's okay,” I said. “Listen, if I find a few spare minutes after work, I'll come by. I can't promise, and if I don't make it, don't worry. I have a late meeting this evening, so it won't be early. But I'll try.”

“Very well,” he said, without looking at me. He didn't like losing control of his feelings and right now he was doing his best to gather them up, like a tumbled skein of loose wool.

Then he said, “It could be the park, you know. It could be something to do with the park.”

“The park?” I asked blankly.

He frowned, as if I'd said something totally irrelevant. “Thanks for your time, young man,” and walked off down the long polished corridor. I stood at my open door watching him go. All of a sudden in the air-conditioned chill, I began to shiver.

As usual, the evening's meeting was dominated by Ben Pultik, the executive in charge of garbage disposal. Pultik was a short, wide-shouldered man who looked like a small wardrobe in a plaid jacket. He had been in garbage ever since the general strike of 1934, and he considered its collection and eventual disposal to be one of the highest callings of mankind, which in some ways it was, but not in the sense of “highest” that he meant it.

We sat around the conference table and smoked too much and drank stale coffee out of styrofoam cups, while outside the windows the sky was curtained with purple and faded gold, and the towers and pyramids of San Francisco settled into the glittering grainy Pacific night. Pultik was complaining that the owners of ethnic restaurants were failing to wrap kitchen refuse in black plastic garbage bags, and that his clean-up crews were having their coveralls soiled by exotic foods.

“Some of my men are Jewish,” he said, relighting his burned-down stogie. “The last thing they want is to be soiled all over with food that ain't kosher-prepared.”

Morton Meredith, the head of the department, sat in his chair at the top of the table with a wan, twitchy smile on his face, and stifled a yawn behind his hand. The only reason we convened these meetings was because city hall insisted on inter-staff stimulation, but the idea of being stimulated by Ben Pultik was like the idea of ordering
moules farcies
at McDonald's. It just wasn't on the menu.

Eventually, at nine o'clock, after a tedious report from the extermination people, we left the building and walked out into the warm night air. Dan Machin, a young beanpole of a guy from the health research laboratory, came pushing across the plaza toward me and clapped me on the back.

“You fancy a drink?” he asked me. “Those meetings are enough to turn your throat into a desert preservation zone.”

“Sure,” I told him. “All I have to kill is time.”

“Time
and
fleas,” Dan reminded me.

I don't particularly know why I liked Dan Machin. He was three or four years younger than me, and yet he had his hair crew cut like a Kansas wheatfield, and he wore big unfashionable eyeglasses which always looked as if they were about to drop off the end of his snubbed-up nose. He wore loose-fitting jackets with patched leather elbows, and his shoes were always scuffed, yet he had a funny oblique sense of humor which tickled me, and even though his face was pallid from spending too many hours indoors, he played a good game of tennis and he knew as many old facts and figures as the editors of Ripley.

Maybe Dan Machin reminded me of my safe suburban upbringing in Westchester, where all the houses had coachlamps, and all the housewives had blonde lacquered hair and drove their children around in Buick station wagons, and every fall the smell of burning leaves would signal the season of roller-skating and trick-or-treat. A lot of hard things had happened to me since then, not the least of which was a messy divorce and a fierce but absurd affair, and it was nice to know that such an America still existed.

We crossed the street and walked up the narrow sidewalk of Gold Street to Dan's favorite bar, the Assay Office. It was a high-ceilinged room with an old-style balcony, and the wood-and-brass furniture of a long-gone San Francisco. We found a table next to the wall, and Dan ordered us a couple of Coors.

“I meant to go up to Pilarcitos this evening,” I told him, lighting a cigarette.

“Fun or business?”

I shrugged. “I'm not sure. Not much of either.”

“Sounds mysterious.”

“It is. An old guy came into the office today and said he had a house that breathed.”

“Breathed?”

“That's right. In fact, it panted like Lassie. He wanted to know if I could do something about it.”

The beers arrived and Dan took a long swallow, leaving himself with a white foamy moustache that quite suited him.

“It isn't a downdraft in the chimney,” I told him. “Nor is it any kind of creature trapped inside the wall cavities. In fact, it's a genuine case of inexplicable respiration.”

That was meant to be a wisecrack, but Dan seemed to take it seriously. “Did he say anything more? Did he tell you when it happened? What time of day?”

I sat down my glass. “He said it was all the time. He'd only lived in the place for a few months, and it's been happening ever since he moved in. He's real frightened. I guess the old coot thinks it's some kind of a ghost.”

“Well, it could be,” said Dan.

“Oh, sure. And Ben Pultik's grown tired of garbage.”

“No, I mean it,” insisted Dan. “I've heard of cases like that before, when people have heard voices and stuff like that. Under certain conditions, the sounds that were uttered in an old room can be heard again. Sometimes, people have claimed to hear conversations that could only have been spoken a century before.”

“Where did you find all this out?”

Dan tugged at his tiny nose as if he was trying to make it grow longer, and I could swear that he faintly blushed. “As a matter of fact,” he said, embarrassed, “I've always been pretty interested in spirit manifestations. It kind of runs in the family.”

“A hard-boiled scientist like you?”

“Now, come on,” said Dan, “it's not as nutty as it seems, all this spirit-world stuff. There have been some pretty astounding cases. And anyway, my aunt used to say that the ghost of Buffalo Bill Cody came and sat by her bedside every night to tell her stories of the Old West.”

“Buffalo Bill?”

Dan pulled a self-deprecating face. “That's what she said. Maybe I shouldn't have believed her.”

I sat back my chair. There was a friendly hubbub of chatter in the bar, and they were bringing out pieces of fried chicken and spare ribs, which reminded me that I hadn't eaten since breakfast.

“You think I should go up there?” I asked Dan, eyeing a girl in a tight white T-shirt with “Oldsmobile Rocket” printed across her breasts.

“Well, let's put it this way,
I'd
go. In fact, maybe we should go up there together. I'd love to hear a house that breathes.”

“You would, huh? Okay, if you want to split the taxi fare, we'll go. But don't think I can guarantee this guy. He's very old, and he may be just hallucinating.”

“An hallucination is a trick of the eyes.”

“I'm beginning to think that girl in the T-shirt is a trick of the eyes.”

Dan turned around, and the girl caught his eye, and he blushed a deep shade of red. “You always do that,” he complained irritably. “They must think I'm some kind of sex maniac in here.”

We finished up our beers and caught a taxi up to Pilarcitos Street. It was one of those short sloping streets where you park your car when you're visiting a Japanese restaurant on the main drag, and which, queasy on too much tempura and sake, you can never find again afterward. The houses were old and silent, with turrets and gables and shadowy porches, and considering that Mission Street was only a few yards away, they seemed to be strangely brooding and out of touch with time. Dan and I stood outside 1551 in the warm evening breeze, looking up at the Gothic tower and the carved balcony, and the grayish paint that flaked off it like the scales from a dead fish.

“You don't believe a house like this could breathe?” he asked me, sniffing.

“I don't believe
any
house can breathe. But it smells like he needs his drains checked.”

“For Christ's sake,” Dan complained. “No shop talk after hours. You think I go round cocktail parties looking through my guests' hair for lice?”

“I wouldn't put it past you.”

There was a rusted wrought-iron gate, and then five angled steps that led up to the porch. I pushed the gate open, and it groaned like a dying dog. Then we went up the steps and searched around in the gloom of the porch for the front doorbell. All the downstairs windows overlooking the street were shuttered and locked, and so there didn't seem much point in whistling or calling out. Down the hill, a police car sped past with its siren warbling, and a girl was laughing as she pranced along the street with two young boys. All this was happening within sight and earshot, and yet up here in the entrance of 1551, there was nothing but shadowy silence, and a feeling that lost years were eddying past us, leaking out of the letter box and from under the elaborate front door like sand seeping out of a bucket.

“There's a knocker here,” Dan said. “Maybe I should give it a couple of raps.”

I peered into the darkness. “As long as you don't quote ‘Nevermore' at the same time.”

“Jesus,” said Dan. “Even the knocker's creepy.”

I stepped forward and took a look at it. It was a huge old knocker, black with age and weathering. It was fashioned like the head of a strange snarling creature, something between a wolf and a demon, and I didn't find it at all encouraging. Somebody who could happily hang something like that on his front door couldn't be altogether normal, unless he actually enjoyed having nightmares. Under the knocker there was engraved the single word:
“Return.”

While Dan was hesitating, I took hold of the knocker and banged it two or three times. The sound echoed flatly inside the house, and we waited patiently on the porch for Seymour Wallis to answer.

“What do you think that is? That thing on the knocker?” Dan asked.

“Don't ask me. Some kind of a gargoyle, I guess.”

“It looks more like a goddamned werewolf to me.”

I reached in my pocket for a cigarette. “You've been watching too many old horror pictures.”

I was just about to bang the knocker again, when I heard footsteps shuffling toward us from inside the house. Bolts were pulled back at the top of the door, and at the bottom, and then it shuddered open an inch or two, until it was stopped by a security chain. I saw the pale face of Seymour Wallis peering around it cautiously, as if he was expecting muggers, or Mormons.

“Mr. Wallis?” I said. “We came to hear the breathing.”

“Oh, it's you,” he said, with obvious relief. “Just hold on a moment there and I'll open the door.”

He slipped the chain and the door shuddered wider still. Seymour Wallis was wearing a maroon bathrobe and slippers and his thin, bare, hairy legs were showing. “I hope we haven't caught you at a bad moment,” Dan said.

“No, no. Come in. I was only getting ready to take a bath.”

“I sure like your knocker,” I said. “It's kind of scary, though, isn't it?”

Seymour Wallis gave me a flicker of a smile. “I suppose so. It came with the house. I don't know what it's meant to be. My sister thinks it might be the devil, but I'm not so sure. And why it should say
‘Return'
I shall never know.”

We found ourselves in a high, musty hallway, carpeted in threadbare brown, and with dozens of yellowing prints and engravings and framed letters all over the walls. Some of the frames were empty and others were cracked, but most of them contained sepia views of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak, or foxed and illegible maps, lists of statistics written in crabbed and faded handwriting.

Beside us, the newel-post of the stairs was carved out of dark mahogany, and on top of it was a bronze bear, standing upright, with a woman's face instead of a snout. The stairs them-selves, tall and narrow, rose toward the darkness of the second floor like an escalator into the gloomiest recesses of the night.

“You'd better come this way,” Seymour Wallis said, leading us down the hall toward a door at the end. There was a shabby stag's head hanging over it with dusty antlers and only one eye. Dan said, “After
you
,” and I wasn't sure if he was joking about the house or not. It couldn't have been much creepier.

We entered a small, airless study. There were shelves all around that must have been lined with books at one time, but were now empty. The brownish-figured wallpaper behind them was marked with the shadows of where they had once been. In the corner, under a doleful painting of early San Francisco, was a stained leather-topped desk and a wooden stockbroker's chair with two slats missing. Seymour Wallis had kept the shutters closed, and the room was suffocating and stale. It smelled of cats, lavender bags, and roach powder.