Charnel House (6 page)

“You're looking good,” I told her. “Time passes, and you grow tastier with each hour.”

She sipped her capuccino. “You didn't come around to flatter me.”

“No, I didn't. But I don't like to miss an opportunity.”

“You look worried.”

“Does it show?”

“Blatantly.”

I sat back on my rush-seated chair, and blew out smoke. Up above Jane's head, on the wall, was a poster demanding the legalization of pot, but judging from the underlying aroma in Prokic's Deli, nobody was that impressed by the laws anyway. You could have gone in there for nothing more than a glass of milk and a salami sandwich, and come out high.

“Did you ever in your whole life come across something so consistently weird that you didn't know how to understand it?” I asked.

“What do you mean,
consistently
weird?”

“Well, sometimes weird things happen, right? You see someone in the street you thought was dead, or something like that. Just an isolated incident. But when I say
consistently
weird, I mean a situation that starts off weird and keeps on getting weirder.”

She brushed back her hair with her hand. “Is that what's bugging you?”

“Jane,” I said, in a husky voice, “it's not bugging me. It's scaring me stupid.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“It sounds pretty ridiculous.”

She shook her head. “Tell me, all the same. I like pretty ridiculous stories.”

Slowly, with a lot of interruptions and explanations, I told her what had happened at Seymour Wallis's house. The breathing, the burst of energy, the way that Dan Machin had been knocked out. Then I described the incident at the hospital, and Dan's eerie luminous eyes. I also told her about his strange whispered words:
“It's the heart, John, it's still beating!”

Jane listened to all this with a serious expression. Then she laid one of her long-fingered hands over mine. “Can I ask you just one thing? You won't be offended?”

I could guess what she was going to say. “If you think I'm shooting a line, trying to get us involved again, you're wrong. Everything I just told you happened, and it didn't happen last month or last year. It happened here in San Francisco last night, and it happened here in San Francisco this morning. It's real, Jane, I swear it.”

She reached over and took one of my cigarettes. I held out my own and she lit it from the glowing tip. “It sounds like this, thing, this ghost or whatever it is, actually possessed him. It's like
The Exorcist
or something.”

“That's what I thought. But I felt so dumb trying to suggest it. I mean, for Christ's sake, these things just don't happen.”

“Maybe they do. Just because they never happened to anyone we know, that doesn't mean they don't happen.”

I crushed out my cigarette and sighed. “I saw it with my own eyes, and I still don't believe it. He was sitting up there in bed, and I tell you, Jane, his eyes were
alight
. He's just an ordinary young guy who works for the city and still wears crew cuts, and he looked like a devil.”

“What can I do?” Jane asked.

I looked out of the deli window at the shoppers sheltering from the rain. The sky was a curious gun-metal green, and the clouds were moving fast across the rooftops of Brannan Street. Early that morning, before I went to see Dan, I had telephoned Seymour Wallis to make an appointment to view the house again, and he had asked me that very same question.
“What can I do? For land's sakes, tell me, what can I do?”

“I don't really know,” I told Jane. “But maybe you could come along tonight when we look over the house. You know something about the occult, don't you? Spirits and ghosts and all that kind of thing? I'd like you to take a look at old man Wallis's front doorknocker, and some of the stuff inside. Maybe there's some kind of clue there. I don't know.”

“Why me?” she asked calmly. “Surely there are better occult experts than me. I only sell books about it.”

“You read them as well as sell them, don't you?”

“Sure, but—”

I held her hand. “Please, Jane, just do me a favor and come along. It's nine o'clock tonight, on Pilarcitos Street. I don't know why, I need you along, but I feel that I do. I really feel it. Will you come?”

Jane touched her face with her fingertips as if gently reassuring herself that she existed, and that she was still twenty-six years old, and that she hadn't changed into anyone else overnight. “All right, John, if you really want me to. As long as it's not a line.”

I shook my head. “Can you imagine a couple called John and Jane? It would never work out.”

She smiled. “Just be thankful your name isn't Doe.”

I went around a little early to Pilarcitos Street that night. Because of the overcast weather, it had grown dark much sooner than usual, and the heavy-browed house was clotted with shadows and draped with rain. As I stood in the street outside, I heard its gutters gurgling with water, and I could see the scaly shine of its wet roof. In this kind of weather, in this kind of gloom, number 1551 seemed to draw in on itself, brooding and uncomfortable in the rainswept city.

I had called briefly at the hospital again, but the nurse had told me that Dan was still sleeping, and that there was no change. Dr. Jarvis had been away on a break, so I hadn't been able to discuss Dan's progress with him any further. Still, with any luck, he would turn up tonight, and see what had happened for himself.

Across the Bay, lightning walked on awkward stilts, and I could hear the faraway mumbling of thunder. The way the wind was blowing, the storm would move across the city in a half hour, and pass right overhead.

I opened the gate and climbed the steps to the front door. In the dense shadows, I could just make out the shape of the doorknocker, with its grinning wolfish face. Maybe I was just nervous, and thinking too much about Dan Machin's dream, but that doorknocker almost seemed to open its eyes and watch me as I came nearer. I was half expecting it to start talking and whispering, the way Dan had imagined it.

Reluctantly, I put my hand out to touch the knocker and bang on the door. The moment I grasped it I recoiled, because for one split second, one irrational lurching instant,
it seemed as if I had touched bristles instead of bronze
. But I held it again, and I knew that I was imagining things. The doorknocker was grotesque, its face was wild and malevolent, but it was nothing but cast metal, and when I banged on the door, it made a loud, heavy knock that echoed flatly inside the house.

I waited, listening to the soft rustle of the rain, and the swish of passing cars on Mission Street. Thunder grumbled again, and there was more lightning, closer this time. Inside the house, I heard a door open and shut, and footsteps coming up to the door.

The bolts and the chains rattled, and Seymour Wallis looked around the gap. “It's you,” he said. “You're early.”

“I wanted to talk before the others arrived. Can I come in?”

“Very well,” he said, and opened the solid, groaning door. I stepped into the musty hall. It was just as ancient and suffocating as it had felt yesterday, and even though their frames had been cracked and broken by last night's burst of power, the doleful pictures of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak still hung on the dingy wallpaper.

I went across to the strange figure of the bear that stood on the newel-post of the banister. I hadn't looked at it particularly closely last night, but now I could see that the woman's face on it was quite beautiful, serene and composed, with her eyes closed. I said, “This is a real odd piece of sculpture.”

Wallis was busy bolting the door. He looked older and stiffer tonight, in a loose, gray cardigan with unraveled sleeves, and baggy gray pants. He smelled of whisky.

He watched me run my hand down the bear's bronze back.

“I found it,” he said. “That was years ago, when I was working over at Fremont. We were building a traffic bridge for the park, and we dug it up. I've had it with me ever since. It didn't come with the house.”

“Dan Machin had a dream about it this morning,” I told him.

“Really? I can't think of any special reason why he should. It's just an old piece of sculpture. I don't even know how old. What would you think? A hundred, two hundred years?”

I peered closely at the bear-lady's passive face. I don't know why, but the whole idea of a bear with a woman's face made me feel uneasy and creepy. I guess it was just the whole atmosphere of Wallis's house. But who had sculpted such an odd figure? Did it mean anything? Was it symbolic? The only certainty was that it hadn't been modeled on life. At least, I damned well hoped not.

I shook my head. “I'm not an expert. All I know is sanitation.”

“Is your friend coming? The engineer?” asked Wallis, leading me through to his study.

“He said so. And there's a doctor, too, if you don't mind, and a friend of mine who runs an occult bookstore on Brannan.”

“A doctor?”

“Yes, the one who's treating Dan. We had a bit of an incident there today.”

Wallis went across to his desk and unsteadily poured two large glasses of Scotch, “Incident?” he asked, with his back turned.

“It's hard to describe. But I get the feeling that whatever we heard in here last night has really got Dan upset. He's even been breathing in a similar kind of way. The doctor thought he had asthma at first.”

Wallis turned around, a glass of amber Scotch in each hand, and his face in the green-shaded light of his desklamp was strained and almost ghastly. “Do you mean to tell me that your friend has been breathing the same way as
my
breathing here?”

He was so intense that I almost felt embarrassed. “Well, that's right. Dr. Jarvis thought it might be psychosomatic. You know, self-induced. It sometimes happens after a heavy concussion.”

Seymour Wallis gave me my whisky and then sat down. He looked so troubled and thoughtful that I couldn't help asking, “What's wrong? You look like you lost a dollar and found a nickel.”

“It's the breathing,” he said. “It's
gone
.”

“Gone? How do you know?”

“I don't know. Not exactly. Not for sure. But I didn't hear it all last night, and I haven't heard it at all today. Apart from that, well, I
sense
it's gone.”

I sat on the edge of his desk and sipped my Scotch. The whisky was nine years old, and it tasted mature and mellow, but it didn't mix too well with half-digested alfalfa sandwich, and I began to think that I ought to have had something solid to eat before I went out ghost hunting. I burped quietly into my fist while Wallis fidgeted and twitched and looked even more unhappy.

“You think that the breathing might have somehow transferred itself out of the house and into Dan?” I asked him.

He didn't look up, but he shrugged, and twitched some more. “It's the kind of thing that enters your mind, isn't it? I mean, if ghosts are really capable of haunting a
place
, why shouldn't they haunt a
person
? Who's to say what they can do and what they can't do? I don't know, Mr. Hyatt. The whole damned thing's a mystery to me, and I'm tired of it.”

For a while, we sat in silence. Seymour Wallis's study was as close and airless as ever, and I almost felt as if we were sitting in some small dingy cavern at the bottom of a mine, buried under countless tons of rock. The house on Pilarcitos gave you that kind of a sensation, as if it was bearing down on you with the weary weight of a hundred years of suffering and patience. It wasn't a feeling I particularly cared for. In fact, it made me feel depressed and edgy.

“You said something about the park,” I reminded him. “When you first came to see me, you mentioned the park. I didn't know what you meant.”

“The park? Did I?”

“Well, it sounded like it.”

“I expect I did. Ever since I worked on that damned park I've had one lousy piece of luck after another.”

“That was the park at Fremont? Where you found the bear-lady?”

He nodded. “It should have been the easiest piece of cantilever bridging ever. It was only a pedestrian walkover, nothing fancy. I must have built twenty or thirty of them for various city facilities all the way down the coast. But this one was a real bitch. The foundations collapsed six or seven times. Three wetbacks got themselves seriously hurt. One was blinded. And nobody could ever agree on how to site the bridge or handle it. The arguments I had with city hall were insane. It took four months to put up a bridge that should have been up in four days, and of course it didn't do my reputation any good. I can tell you something, Mr. Hyatt, ever since Fremont I've felt dogged.”

I lifted my whisky glass and circled it around to take in the study and the house. “And this,” I said, “all this breathing and everything, you thought it could have been part of your bad luck?”

He sighed. “I don't know. It was just a thought. Sometimes I wonder if I'm going crazy.”

Just then, the doorknocker banged twice. “I'll answer it,” I said, and I went out into the shadowy hallway to open the front door. As I pulled back the bolts and the chains, I couldn't help glancing over at the bear-lady on the banister. In the dark, she seemed larger than she had with the light on, and shaggier, as if the shadows that clung around her had grown into hair. And all around me, on every wall, were these dim and uninspiring views of Mount Taylor and Cabezon Peak, engravings and etchings and aquatints, but all apparently executed in the dullest weather. All I knew about either mountain was that they were in sunny New Mexico, which made it strange that every one of these dozens of views should have been drawn on overcast days.

The doorknocker banged again. “All right! All right!” I snapped, “I can hear you!”