Charnel House (4 page)

“Dan? Are you okay?
Dan!
”

“Maybe I'd better call an ambulance,” Wallis offered.

I raised one of Dan's eyelids with my thumb. His twitching eyeball showed that he was still alive, but he must have been in a deep state of concussion or shock. They'd taught me that much in the Army, apart from how to blow up paddy fields and defoliate twenty-five acres in just as many minutes.

While Wallis called the emergency service, I covered Dan with my jacket, and switched on the beat-up old electric heater to keep him warm. Dan didn't tremble or shake. He just lay there flat on his back, white and still, and when I listened close to his lips I could only just hear his breathing. I slapped him a couple of times, but it was just like slapping a lump of baker's dough.

“They'll be right here,” reported Wallis, setting down the phone.

I lifted my head. For a moment, I thought I heard that breathing again, that soft, rustling breath. But it was only Dan, struggling to keep himself alive. The house itself seemed to have gone back to its ancient secret sleep.

Wallis knelt slowly and arthritically down beside me. “Do you have any idea what that was?” he asked me. “That noise? All that power? I couldn't believe it. It's never happened before.”

“I don't know. Maybe some kind of pressure release. Maybe you've got some kind of air pressure that sometimes needs to get free. I don't know what the hell it is.”

“Do you still think it's a ghost?”

I glanced at him. “Do you?”

Wallis thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “If it's a ghost, then it's a damned powerful ghost. I never heard of a ghost that could lay people flat.”

He looked down at Dan's pallid face and bit his lip. “Do you think he's going to be all right?” he asked me.

I didn't know what to say. All I could do was shrug, and kneel in that dingy library, and wait for the ambulance.

He was sitting propped up in bed when I went to visit him the following morning. He had a bright green-painted private room overlooking the Bay, and the nurses had filled the room with flowers. He was still pale, and the doctors were keeping him under observation, but he was cheerful enough. I gave him a copy of
Playboy
and that morning's
Examiner
, and I pulled up a tubular steel-and-canvas chair.

He opened the
Playboy
centerspread and took a quick and critical look at a brunette with gigantic breasts.

“Just what I need,” he said dryly. “A short burst of over-adrenalization.”

“I thought it might work better than Benzedrine,” I told him. “How do you feel?”

He laid the magazine down. “I'm not sure. I feel okay, in myself. No worse than if someone had knocked me on the head with a baseball bat.”

He paused, and looked at me. The pupils of his eyes, even behind his Clark Kent glasses seemed unusually tiny. Maybe it was just the drugs they'd given him. Maybe he was still in a mild state of concussion. But somehow he didn't look quite like the same Dan Machin that I had met for a drink the previous evening. There was something
starey
about him, as if his mouth was saying one thing but his mind was thinking another.

“You don't look yourself,” I told him. “Is that what you mean?”

“I don't
feel
myself. I don't know what it is, but I feel definitely odd.”

“Did you feel anything strange when that explosion happened?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I don't even remember. I remember the breathing, and the way it built up, but after that, well, I just don't recall. I get the feeling I was attacked.”

“
Attacked
? By what?”

“I don't know,” said Dan. “It's real hard to explain. If I knew how to tell you, I would. But I can't.”

“Do you still think it was a ghost, or a spirit?”

He ran his hand through his crew cut. “I'm not too sure. It could have been some kind of poltergeist, you know, the kind of spirit that hurls things around. Or it may even have been an earth tremor. Perhaps there's a fault directly under the house.”

“Suddenly you're looking for rational explanations again,” I told him. “I thought of that, and there's no tremor reported in the paper today. I asked around at the office, too, and nobody else felt one.”

Dan reached over and helped himself to a glass of water.

“In that case I haven't a clue. Maybe it was a ghost. But I always believed that ghosts were pretty harmless, on the whole. You know, they walk around with their heads under their arms, clanking their chains, but that's about it.”

I walked over to the window and looked down at the midmorning traffic crossing the Golden Gate. The fog had lifted but a last haze still clung around the uprights of the bridge, smudging them like a watercolor painting.

“I've arranged to go back to the house this evening,” I said. “I really want to take a good look all around, and see what's going on there. I'm taking Bryan Corder from the engineering department, too. I had a talk with him this morning, and he guessed it might be some kind of katabatic draft.”

Dan, when I turned around again, didn't appear to have heard. He was sitting up in bed, staring absentmindedly across the room, and his lower jaw had dropped open slack.

“Dan?” I said. “Did you hear that?”

He blinked at me.

“Dan?”

I walked quickly across to the bed and took his arm.

“Dan, are you okay? You look real ill.”

He licked his lips as if they were very dry. “Sure,” he said uncertainly. “I'm okay. I guess I need some rest, that's all. Once I came out of the concussion, I didn't sleep too good. I kept having dreams.”

“Well, why don't you ask the nurse for a sleeping pill?”

“I don't know. I just kept having these dreams, that was all.”

I sat down again, and looked at him intently.

“What kind of dreams? Nightmares?”

Dan took off his eyeglasses and rubbed his eyes. “No, no, they weren't nightmares. I guess they were kind of scarey, but they didn't seem to frighten me. I dreamed about that doorknocker, you know, that one at old man Wallis's house. But it wasn't a doorknocker at all. I dreamed it was hanging on the door, but it was talking to me. Instead of metal, it was made of real hair and real flesh, and it was talking to me, trying to explain something to me, in this kind of quiet, whispery voice.”

“What was it saying? Don't light fires in the forest?”

Dan didn't seem to see the joke. He shook his head seriously. “It was trying to tell me to go somewhere, to find something, but I couldn't make out what it was. It kept explaining and explaining, and I could never understand. It was something to do with that bear on Mr. Wallis's stairs, you know, that little statue of the bear with a face like a woman. But I couldn't get the connection at all.”

I frowned at Dan's white, grave face for a while, but then I grinned and gripped his wrist in a friendly squeeze.

“You know what you're suffering from, Dan old buddy? Post-ghost delusion. It's an occult type of post-natal depression. Have a few days' rest and you won't even remember what you were worried about.”

Dan grimaced. He didn't seem to believe me at all.

“Listen,” I told him, “we're going to go over that house tonight with a fine-tooth comb, and whatever it was that laid you out, we'll find it. We won't only find it, we'll bring it back alive, and you can keep it in a jar in your laboratory.”

Dan attempted a smile, but it wasn't much of one. “Okay,” he said quietly. “Do what you like.”

I sat there for a few more minutes, but Dan didn't seem to be in a conversational mood. So I gave him one more friendly squeeze of the hand. “I'll drop in tomorrow. 'Round about the same time.”

Dan nodded, without looking up.

I left him, and went out into the hospital corridor. A doctor was on his way to Dan's room, and he brushed past me as I came out. As he opened the door, I said, “Doctor?”

The doctor looked at me impatiently. He was a short, sandy-haired man with a pointed nose and purple bags under his eyes like the drapes of an old-fashioned theater curtain. A badge on his lapel said
Doctor James T. Jarvis
.

I nodded toward Dan's room. “I don't like to intrude. I'm only a friend of Mr. Machin's, not a relative or anything. But I just wanted to know if he was okay. I mean, he seemed pretty strange today.”

“What do you mean by strange?”

“Well, you know. Not quite himself.”

Doctor Jarvis shook his head. “That's not unusual after severe concussion. Give him a few days to get over it.”

“Was that really all it was? Concussion?”

The doctor lifted his clipboard and checked it out. “That's all. Apart from the asthma.”

“Asthma? What asthma? He doesn't have asthma.”

The doctor stared at me baldly. “You're trying to tell me my job?”

“Of course not. But I play tennis with Dan. He doesn't suffer from asthma. He never has, as far as I know.”

The doctor kept his hand on the handle of Dan's door. “Well, that's your view, Mr.—”

“What's
your
view?” I asked him.

The doctor smirked. “I'm afraid that's confidential between me and my patient. But if he doesn't have asthma, he certainly does have a severe respiratory complaint. It was exacerbated by the concussion, and he spent three or four hours last night with a breathing mask on. I don't think I've ever come across a case quite as severe.”

A pretty brunette nurse in a tight white uniform came along the corridor with a tray of hypodermic syringes and bottles of medicine. “I'm sorry I'm behind, Dr. Jarvis,” she said. “Mrs. Walters needed changing again.”

“That's all right,” said Dr. Jarvis. “I've just been having a top-level medical conference with Mr. Machin's learned friend here. I'm learning so much, I'm almost reluctant to drag myself away.”

He opened Dan's door wider. But I said, “Please, just one thing,” and held his arm. He paused, and looked down at my hand as if something nasty had just dropped on his sleeve from a passing buffalo.

“Listen,” he said sourly, “I don't know what kind of native expertise you have in the field of diagnostic medicine, but I have to continue with your friend's treatment program right away. So please excuse me.”

“It's just the breathing,” I said. “It could be important.”

“Of course it's important,” retorted Dr. Jarvis sarcastically. “If our patients don't breathe, we get seriously concerned.”

“Will you hear me out?” I snapped. “Last night, Dan and I got ourselves involved with something to do with breathing. I need to know what made you think he had an asthma attack.”

“What the hell are you talking about? Something to do with breathing? You mean you were sniffing glue, something like that?”

“I can't explain. It wasn't drugs. But it could be real important.”

Dr. Jarvis closed the door again, and sighed with exaggerated exasperation. “All right. If you really need to know, Mr. Machin was panting and gasping. Every ninety minutes or so, he began to breathe heavily, finally working up to a real climax of panting. That was all. It was severe, and it was unusual, but there was nothing to suggest that it wasn't a regular attack of asthma.”

“I've just told you. He doesn't have asthma.”

Dr. Jarvis lowered his head. “Will you get out of here?” he said quietly. “Visiting time is over, and the last thing I need is homespun advice. Okay?”

I was about to say something else, but then I checked myself. I guess I would have been just as irked if somebody had strayed into my office and tried to tell me how to exterminate bugs. I raised my hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Okay. I get you. I'm sorry.”

The nurse opened the door and went in, while I turned to leave. “I really didn't mean to be rude,” Dr. Jarvis apologized. “But I do know what I'm doing. You can come back again at five if you want to. We should know some more by then.”

At that second, there was a shrill and horrified shriek from inside Dan's room. Dr. Jarvis looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both banged the door wide open and pushed our way inside. What I saw right then I couldn't believe. It was there, in front of my eyes, but I couldn't believe it.

The nurse was standing, rigid with shock, by the side of Dan Machin's bed. Dan himself was sitting upright in bed, in his blue-striped hospital pajamas, as normal and ordinary as you could think of. But his eyes were terrifying. His glasses had fallen to the floor, and his eyes were total blazing red, the eyes of a vicious dog caught in a searchlight at night, or the eyes of a demon. What's more, he was breathing, in and out, in and out, with the deep groaning breaths that we had all heard in Seymour Wallis's house only last night, those heavy endless breaths of a sleeper who could never wake. He was breathing like the house itself, like everything that had chilled and frightened us in the gloomy and ancient rooms,” and it seemed as if the hospital room itself went deathly cold with every breath.

“My God!
What is it
?” Dr. Jarvis gasped.

TWO

One of the worst things you can ever discover in life is that some of us have it and some of us don't. I guess it's just as well, in a way. If every young boy had the talent to fly airplanes, or drive racing cars, or make love to twenty women in one night, there wouldn't be many volunteers for clearing out backed-up sewers on Folsom. But it's still tough when you discover that it's
you
who doesn't have it, and that instead of living a luxurious life of fun and profit in Beverly Hills, you're going to have to take a nine-to-five job in public works, and cook on a hot plate.

I was born of reasonably well-shod parents in Westchester, New York, but when my father suffered a stroke, I left my mother with her house and her insurance money, and I headed West. I think I wanted to be a TV anchorman, or something grandiose like that, but as it turned out I was lucky to eat. I married a woman who was seven years older than me, mainly because she reminded me of my mother, and I was fortunately broke when she discovered me in bed with a waitress from the Fox commissary and sued me for divorce. My affair broke up, too, which left me high and dry and stranded, and having to look for the first time in my life at myself, at my own identity, and having to come to terms with what I could achieve and what I couldn't.