Charnel House (3 page)

“I hear the noises in here more than in any other room,” Wallis explained. “It comes at night mostly, when I'm sitting here writing letters, or finishing my accounts. At first there's nothing, but then I start straining my ears and I'm sure I can hear it. Soft breathing, just as if somebody's walked into the room, and is standing a little ways away watching me. I try, well, I've
tried
, not to turn around. But I'm afraid that I always do. And of course there's nobody there.”

Dan walked across the worn-out rug. The floorboards creaked under his feet. He picked up an astral calendar from Seymour Wallis's desk, and examined it for a moment or two. “Do you believe in the supernatural, Mr. Wallis?”

“It depends what you mean by the supernatural.”

“Well, ghosts.”

Wallis glanced at me and then back to Dan. I think he was afraid that we were putting him on. In his maroon bathrobe, he looked like one of those elderly men who insist on taking a dip in the ocean on Christmas Day.

“I was telling my colleague here that some houses act as receivers for sounds and conversations from the past. If anything particularly stressful has happened inside them, they kind of store up the sound in the texture of their walls, and play it back like a tape recorder, over and over again. There was a case in Massachusetts, only last year, where a young couple claimed to have heard a man and a woman arguing in their living room at night, but whenever they went downstairs there was nobody there. They heard actual names being shouted, though, and when they went to their local church register and looked them up, they found that the people they could hear had lived in their house in 1860.”

Seymour Wallis rubbed his bristly chin. “You're trying to say that when I hear breathing, it's a ghost?”

“Not exactly a ghost,” said Dan. “It's just an echo from the past. It might be frightening, but it's no more dangerous than the sound you can hear from your television. It's just
sound
, that's all.”

Wallis sat slowly down on the old stockbroker's chair and looked at us gravely. “Can I get it to leave me alone?” he asked. “I mean, can you exorcise it?”

“I don't think so,” said Dan. “Not without knocking the house down. What you're hearing is within the fabric of the house itself.”

I coughed and said politely, “I'm afraid there's a city ordinance against knocking down these old houses for meretricious reasons. Sub-section eight.”

Seymour Wallis looked very tired. “You know something,” he said, “I've wanted one of these houses for years. I used to walk by here and admire their age and their character and their style. At last I've managed to get one. It means a great deal to me, this house. It represents everything I've done in my life to maintain the old true standards against the easy, false, beguiling modern world. Look at this place. There isn't a foot of Formica, an ounce of plastic, or a scrap of fiberglass. Those moldings around the ceiling are real plaster, and these floorboards came from an old sailing ship. Look how wide they are. Now look at those doors. They're solid and they hang true. The hinges are brass.”

He raised his head, and when he spoke there was a great deal of emotion in his voice.

“This house is mine,” he said. “And if there's a ghost in it, or a noise in it, I want it out. I'm the master of this place, and, by God, I'll fight any supernatural oddity for the right to say that.”

“I don't like to sound as if I don't believe you,” I said, “because I'm sure you heard what you say you did. But don't you think you've been over-working? Maybe you're just tired.”

Seymour Wallis nodded. “I'm tired, all right. But I'm not so tired that I won't fight to keep what's mine.”

Dan looked around the room. “Maybe you could come to some arrangement with this breathing. You know, strike some kind of compromise:”

“I don't understand.”

“Well, I'm not sure that I do, either. But lots of spiritualists seem to believe that you can do deals with the spirit world to have yourself left alone. I mean, the whole reason a place gets itself haunted is because the spirit isn't free to get itself off to wherever spirts hang out. So maybe this breathing spirit is trying to get you to help it accomplish something. I don't know. It's just a thought. Maybe you ought to try and talk to it.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“What do you suggest I say?” asked Wallis cautiously.

“Be blunt. Ask it what it wants.”

“Oh, come on, Dan,” I butted in. “This is ridiculous.”

“No, it isn't. If Mr. Wallis here can hear the breathing, then maybe whatever's doing the breathing can hear him.”

“We don't yet know that there
is
any breathing.”

“But supposing there is.”

Wallis stood up. “I guess the only way I'm going to convince you is if you hear it for yourself. Why not have a glass of Scotch? Then maybe we can sit down here for a half hour, if you can spare it, and we'll listen.”

“Sure, I'd love to,” said Dan.

Wallis shuffled out of the room and came back a few moments later with two bentwood chairs. We sat down, upright and uncomfortable, while he shuffled off again to fetch his decanter.

I sniffed the musty air. It was hot and stuffy in that tiny library, and I was beginning to wish I was back in the Assay Office drinking a cold Coors. Dan rubbed his hands together in a businesslike kind of way. “This is going to be wild.”

“You mean you think we're going to hear it?”

“Sure I think we're going to hear it. I told you. I believe in this stuff. I nearly saw a ghost once.”

“You
nearly
saw it? What does that mean?”

“I was staying at an old hotel in Denver, and I was going back to my room one night when I saw the maid coming out of it. I put my key in the door, and she said, ‘Are you sure you have the right room, sir? There's a gentlemen taking a bath in there.' Well, I checked my key number, and it was the right room, so I went inside. The maid followed just to check, and when I looked in the bathroom there was nobody taking a bath, no water in the tub, no nothing. Hotels are great places for ghosts.”

“Sure, and the sanitation department is a great place for liars.”

Right then, old man Wallis came back with a tarnished silver tray, bearing a decanter of whisky and three tumblers. He sat them down on the table and poured us each a generous glassful. Then he sat in his chair and sipped the Scotch as if he was testing it for hemlock.

Outside in the hallway, a clock that I hadn't seen when I walked in struck ten.
Bong-chirr-bong-chirr-bong-chirr
.…

“Do you have any ice, Mr. Wallis?” Dan asked.

Wallis looked at him in confusion, then shook his head. “I'm sorry. The icebox is broken. I've been meaning to have it fixed. I eat out mostly, so I haven't felt the need.”

Dan lifted his glass. “Well, here's to the breathing, whoever it is.”

I swallowed warm, neat Scotch and grimaced.

We waited there in silence for almost ten minutes. It's surprising how much noise you can make drinking whisky in total quiet. After a while, I could hear that invisible clock ticking out there in the hallway, and even the distant murmur of traffic on Mission. And there was that rushing sound of my own blood circulating in my ears. Wallis suppressed a cough, “More whisky?”

Dan held his glass out, but I said, “If I have any more, I'll be hearing bells, not breathing.”

We settled back on our chairs again, with an awkward creaking of wood. Dan asked, “Do you know anything about the history of this house, Mr. Wallis? Anything that might help you identify who this mystery breather might be?”

Seymour Wallis nervously rearranged the things on his desk—pen, letter opener, calendar—then looked at Dan with that same defeated look he'd had on his face when he first came into my office.

“I looked at the deeds and they go back to 1885, when the house was built. It was owned by a seed merchant and then by a naval captain. But there wasn't anything unusual. Nothing to make you think there might have been stress here. No murders or anything like that.”

Dan swallowed some more whisky. “Maybe the breather sticks around because he was happy here. That sometimes happens. A ghost haunts a house trying to recapture its old joy.”

“The happy breather?” I asked in disbelief.

“Sure,” retorted Dan defensively. “It's been known.”

We lapsed into silence again. Both Dan and I sat there reasonably still, but Seymour Wallis seemed to twitch and scratch, as if he was really unsettled. The clock struck the half hour, and still we waited, and still we heard nothing. All around us, the dark bulk of the old house remained hushed, with not even the sound of a roof timber creaking or a window rattling. Over a hundred years, this building had done all the settling it was going to, and now it was dead, immobile, and quiet.

I laid down my whisky glass on the edge of Seymour Wallis's desk. He glanced up at me briefly, and I smiled, but he simply turned away, biting his lip. Perhaps he was worried that there wouldn't be any breathing tonight, in which case he was either lying or going out of his mind.

Just then, Dan said, “Ssshh.”

I froze and listened. “I don't hear anything.”

Wallis lifted his hand. “At first it's very soft,” he said, “but it grows louder. Listen.”

I strained my ears. There was still the ticking of the clock outside, still the distant murmur of traffic. But there was something else, too, something so faint that all of us were frowning in concentration as we tried to hear it.

It was like a sibilant whispering at first, like the wind tossing a piece of soft tissue across a room. But gradually it grew more distinct, and all I could do was turn to look at Dan to see if he was hearing what I was hearing, to make sure that it wasn't auto-suggestion or a trick of the wind.

It was breathing. Slow, deep breathing, like the breathing of someone asleep. It went in and out, in and out, with measured respiration, as if lungs were being endlessly filled and emptied with hopeless regularity, the breathing of someone who slept and slept and would never reach morning.

Now I knew why Seymour Wallis was frightened. This sound, this breathing, could make your skin prickle with cold. It was the breathing of someone who could never wake up. It had more to do with death than with life, and it went on and on and on, louder and louder, until we no longer had to strain our ears, but simply sat there, staring at each other in horror and fright.

It was impossible to say where the breathing came from. It was all around. I even looked at the walls to make sure that they weren't sagging in and out with every breath. Wallis was right. The house was breathing. The house itself was not dead, as it had first appeared, but asleep.

I whispered, “Dan,
Dan
!”

“What is it?”

“Challenge it, Dan, like you said. Ask it what it wants!”

Dan licked his lips. All around us, the breathing went on, slow and heavy. Sometimes I thought it was going to stop, but then another deep breath would come, and another, and if it had been breathing like this for more than a hundred years, it was probably going to go on forever.

Dan coughed. “I can't,” he said hoarsely. “I don't know what to say.”

Wallis himself just sat there, tense and still for the first time this evening, his whisky untouched in his hand.

Slowly, cautiously, I stood up. The breathing didn't falter. It was as loud now as if I was sleeping next to someone in the same bed and they had turned to face me in the darkness.

“Who's there?” I asked.

There was no response. The breathing went on.

“Who's there?” I said, louder. “What do you want? Tell us what you want and we'll help you!”

The breathing continued, although for some reason I thought it sounded harsher. It was quicker, too.

“Don't, for God's sake!” Dan pleaded.

I ignored him. I walked into the center of the room and called out. “Whoever's breathing, listen! We want to help you! Tell us what to do and we'll help you. Give us a sign! Show us that you know we're here!”

Seymour Wallis said, “Please, I think this is dangerous. Let's just listen and leave it alone.”

I shook my head. “How can we? Dan here believes in ghosts, and you say it scares you. Well, I can hear it, too, and if I can hear it that means there's something there, because I don't believe in ghosts and I'm not particularly scared.”

The breathing grew quicker and quicker. It was still the breathing of a sleeper, but of a sleeper who dreams, or a sleeper who is going through nightmares. Wallis stood up, his face drawn and pale. “My God, it's never been as loud as this before. Please, don't say any more. Just leave it alone, and it'll go away.”

“Whoever's breathing!” I called crisply. “Whoever's there! Listen! We can help you! We can help you leave this house!”

The breathing was almost frantic now, panting, whining. Seymour Wallis, terrified, put his hands over his ears, and Dan was sitting rigid in his chair, his face white. As for me, I may not have been scared before, but this was insane. It was like a hideous fantasy. The breathing was mounting and mounting as if it was working up toward a climax, the peak of some grotesque effort.

Soon it was the screaming breath of a runner who runs too far and too fast, the breath of a terrified animal. And then suddenly, there was a roar of sound and energy that made me cover my eyes, and sent Dan Machin hurtling off his chair and halfway across the room. Seymour Wallis shrieked like a woman and dropped to his knees. I heard a blizzard of splintering glass from someplace in the house and things clattering and falling. Then there was silence.

I opened my eyes. Wallis was crouched on the floor, shaken but unhurt. It was Dan I was worried about. He was lying on his back, unmoving, and his face was a ghastly white. I picked up his fallen chair, then knelt beside him and patted his cheek.