Charnel House (7 page)

I pulled the door open, and there was Dr. Jarvis, standing on the porch with Jane. It was still raining and thundering out, but after being shut up in Seymour Wallis's study, the night air was cool and refreshing. Across the street, I could see Bryan Corder, his head bent against the sloping rain, his shoulders hunched as he walked quickly toward us.

“You two seem to have met,” I said to Jane and Dr. Jarvis as I ushered them inside.

“It was just one of those chance encounters across a gloomy porch,” said Jane.

Bryan came running up the steps, shaking rain from his hair like a wet dog. He was a solid, bluff man of almost forty, with a broad, dependable face that always reminded me of a worldly Pat Boone, if such a thing could exist. He gripped my arm. “Hi, John. Almost couldn't make it. How's things?”

“Spooky,” I said, and meant it. And before I closed the front door, I couldn't stop myself from taking a quick look at the doorknocker, just to see if it was still bronze, still inanimate, and still as fiercely ugly as ever.

I led everyone to Seymour Wallis's study, and introduced them. Wallis was polite but distracted, as if we were nothing more unusual than realtors who had come to value his property. He shook hands and offered whisky, and pulled up chairs, but then he sat back at his desk and stared at the threadbare carpet and said almost nothing.

Dr. Jarvis looked less medical in a navy blue sportcoat and slacks. He was sharp, short, and gingery, and I was beginning to like him. He took a swallow of whisky, coughed, and then said, “Your friend hasn't made much improvement I'm afraid. He hasn't had any more of those attacks, but he still has respiration problems, and we can't wake him out of his coma. We're running some EKGs and EEGs later tonight to see if there's any sign of brain damage.”

“Brain damage? But all he did was fall off a chair.”

“I've known people to die from falling off chairs.”

“Do you still think it's concussion?” Jane said. “What about his eyes?”

Dr. Jarvis turned in his seat. “If I thought it was concussion and nothing else, I wouldn't be here. But it seems like there's something else involved, and right now I don't have a dog's idea what.”

“Was this the room where it happened? The breathing and everything?” Bryan asked.

“Sure.”

Bryan stood up and walked around the perimeter of the study, touching the walls here and there, and peering into the fireplace. Every now and then he tapped the plaster with his knuckles to feel how solid it was. After a while he stood in the center of the room, and he looked puzzled.

“The door was closed?” he asked me.

“Door and windows.”

He shook his head slowly. “That's real strange.”

“What's strange?”

“Well, normally, when you get any kind of pressure build-up because of drafts or air currents, the fireplace is free and the chimney is unblocked. But you can put your hand here in the fireplace and feel for yourself. There's no downdraft here. The chimney is all blocked up.”

I went across and knelt on the faded Indian carpet in front of the fire. It was one of those narrow Victorian study fires, with a decorated steel hood and a fireclay grate. I craned my head around and stared up into the cold, soot-scented darkness. Bryan was right, there was no draft, no breath of wind. Usually, when you look up a chimney stack, you can hear the sounds of the night echoing down the shaft, but this chimney was silent.

“Mr. Wallis,” said Bryan, “do you know for certain that this chimney is blocked? Did someone have it bricked up?”

Wallis was watching us with a frown on his face. “That chimney isn't blocked. I had a fire in there just a few days ago. I was burning some old papers I wanted to get rid of.”

Bryan took another look up the chimney. “Well, Mr. Wallis, even if it wasn't blocked then, it's sure blocked now. It's possible that the blockage may have had something to do with the noises you heard. Do you mind if I take a look upstairs?”

“Be my guest,” said Wallis. “I'll stay here, if you don't mind. I've had enough of this for one day.”

The four of us trooped out into the hallway and switched on the dim light that illuminated the stairs. It was dim because of its olive-and-yellow glass shade, which was thick with dust and spiderwebs. Everything in the house seemed to be musty and faded and covered with dust, but then I suppose that's what Wallis called character. I was beginning to feel like a dedicated supporter of Formica and plastic and tacky modern building.

As Bryan mounted the first stair, Jane suddenly noticed the bronze statuette of the bear-lady.

“That's
unusual,” she said. “Did it come with the house?”

“No. Seymour Wallis dug it up in Fremont someplace when he was working on a bridge. He builds bridges, or at least he used to.”

Jane touched the serene face of the statuette as if she expected it to open its eyes at any moment.

“It reminds me of something,” she said softly. “It gives me the strangest feeling. It's almost like I've seen it before, but I couldn't have.”

She paused for a second or two, her hand touching the statuette's head, and then she looked up. “I can't remember. Perhaps I'll think of it later. Shall we get on?”

With Bryan leading the way, we trod as quietly as we could up the old, squeaking staircase. There were two flights of about ten stairs each, and then we found ourselves on a long landing, illuminated by another dingy glass shade, and carpeted in dusty red. It didn't look as if the house had been decorated for twenty or thirty years, and all around was that pervasive silence and that moldering smell of damp.

“The study chimney must come up through this room,” said Bryan, and led us across to a bedroom door that was set at an angle on the opposite side of the landing. He turned the brass handle and opened it up.

The bedroom was small and cold. It had a window that overlooked the yard, where dark wet trees rose and fell in the wind and the rain. There was pale blue wallpaper on the walls, stained brown with damp, and the only furniture was a cheap varnished wardrobe and a shabby iron bed. The floor was covered with old-fashioned linoleum that must have been green many years ago.

Bryan went across to the fireplace, which was similar to the fireplace in Seymour Wallis's study, except that someone had painted it cream. He knelt down beside it, and listened, and the rest of us stood there and watched him.

“What can you hear?” I asked him. “Is it still blocked?”

“I think so,” he said, straining his eyes to see up into the darkness. “I just need to see round the ledge and I might be able to …”

He shifted himself nearer and cautiously poked his head up under the hood of the fire.

Dr. Jarvis laughed, but it was a nervous kind of a laugh. “Can you see anything?” he asked.

“I'm not sure,” Bryan answered in a muffled voice. “There's a different kind of resonance here. Some sort of thudding noise. I'm not sure if it's echoing down the chimney or if it's vibrating through the whole house.”

“We can't hear anything out here,” I told him.

“Hang on,” he said, and shifted himself so that his whole head disappeared up the chimney.

“I hope you don't mind washing your hair before you come back to civilization,” said Jane.

“Oh, I've done worse than this,” said Bryan. “Sewers are worse than chimneys any day of the week.”

“Can you hear anything now?” I asked him, kneeling down on the floor next to the fireplace.

“Ssshh!” ordered Bryan. “There's some kind of noise building up now. The same kind of thudding.”

“I still don't hear it,” I told him.

“It's quite clear inside here. There it goes.
Thud-thud-thud-thud-thud
. It's almost like a heart beating.
Thud-thud-thud
—why don't you time it? Do you have a second hand on your watch?”

“I'll time it,” put in Dr. Jarvis. “If it's a pulse, then it's my line of country.”

“Okay,” said Bryan, with a cough. “I'm starting now.”

He kept his head right up inside the hood of the chimney, and groped his hand around until he could touch Dr. Jarvis's knee. Then as whatever he could hear began to thud in his ears, he beat out the time, and Dr. Jarvis checked it on his watch.

“It's not a pulse,” commented Dr. Jarvis, after a couple of minutes. “Not a human pulse, anyway.”

“Do you have enough?” coughed Bryan. “I'm getting kind of claustrophobic up here.”

“More like Santa Claustrophobic,” joked Jane. “Will you bring a sack of toys out with you?”

“Ah, nuts,” said Bryan, and started to shift himself out.

Abruptly, horribly, he screamed. I'd never heard a man scream like that before, and for a second I couldn't think what it was. But then he shouted,
“Get me out! Get me out! For God's sake, get me out!”
and I knew something terrible was happening, and it was happening to him.

Dr. Jarvis seized one of Bryan's legs, and yelled, “Pull! Pull him out of there!”

Freezing with fear, I grabbed hold of the other leg, and together we tried to tug him out. But even though it was only his head that was up inside the chimney, he seemed to be stuck fast, and he was shrieking and crying and his whole body was jerking in agonized spasms.

“Get me out! Get me out! Oh, God, oh God, get me out!”

Dr. Jarvis let go of Bryan's leg and tried to see what was happening up inside the chimney hood. But Bryan was nailing around and shrieking so much that it was impossible to understand what was going on. Dr. Jarvis snapped, “Bryan! Bryan, listen! Don't panic! Keep still or you'll hurt yourself!”

He turned to me. “He must have gotten his head caught somehow. For Christ's sake, try to hold him still.”

We both got a grip on the fireplace hood and tried to wrench it away from the tiles, but it was cemented by years of dust and rust and there was no getting it loose. Bryan was still screaming, but then suddenly he stopped, and his body slumped in the fireplace.

“Oh God,” said Dr. Jarvis. “Look.”

From under the fireplace hood, soaking Bryan's collar and tie, came a slow stain of bright red blood. Jane, standing right behind us, retched. There was far too much blood for a minor cut or a graze. It dripped down Bryan's shirt and over our hands, and then it began to creep along the cracks in between the tiles on the fireplace floor.

“Carefully now,” instructed Dr. Jarvis. “Pull him down carefully.”

Little by little, we shifted Bryan's body downward. It seemed as if his head was still firmly caught at first, but then there was a sickening give of flesh, and he came completely out of the chimney, collapsing in the grate.

I stared at his head in rising horror. I could hardly bear to look but then I couldn't look away, either. His whole head had been stripped of flesh, and all that was left was his bare skull, with only a few raw shreds of meat and a few sparse tufts of hair remaining. Even his eyes had gone from their sockets, leaving nothing but glutinous bone.

Jane, her voice trembling with nausea, said, “Oh, John. Oh, my God, what's happened?”

Dr. Jarvis carefully laid Bryan's body down. The skull made a sickening bonelike sound on the tiles. Dr. Jarvis's face was as white and shocked as mine must have been.

“I've never seen anything like it,” he whispered. “Never.”

I looked up toward the dark maw of the old Victorian fireplace. “What I want to know is
what did it
. For Christ's sake, Doctor, what's up there?”

Dr. Jarvis shook his head mutely. Neither of us was prepared to take a look. Whatever it was that had ripped the flesh off Bryan's head, whether it was a freak accident or some kind of malevolent animal, neither of us wanted to face it.

“Jane,” Dr. Jarvis said, taking a card out of his breast pocket, “this is the number of the Elmwood Foundation Hospital where I work. Call Dr. Speedwell and tell him what's happened. Tell him I'm here. And ask him to get an ambulance around here as fast as he can.”

“What about the police?” I said. “We can't just—”

Dr. Jarvis glanced cautiously across at the fireplace. “I don't know. Do you think they'll believe us?”

“For Christ's sake, if there's anything up that chimney that rips people apart, I'm not going to go up there and look for myself. And neither are you.”

Dr. Jarvis nodded. “Okay,” he said to Jane. “Dial the police as well.”

Jane was just about to leave the room when there was a soft knock at the door. Seymour Wallis's voice said, “Are you all right in there? I thought I heard shouting.”

I went across to the door and opened it. Wallis stood there pale and anxious, and he must have seen from the look on my face that something had gone wrong.

“There's been an accident,” I told him. “It's probably better if you don't come in.”

“Is someone hurt?” he asked, trying to look around my shoulder.

“Yes. Bryan is badly injured. But please, I suggest you don't look. Its pretty awful.”

Wallis pushed me aside. “It's my house, Mr. Hyatt. I want to know what goes on here.”

Well, I guess he was right. But when he walked into the bedroom and saw Bryan's body lying there, its skull grinning up at the ceiling, he froze, and he could neither speak nor move.

Dr. Jarvis looked up. “Get that ambulance,” he told Jane tersely. “The sooner we find out what happened here the better.”

Wallis sat down heavily on the narrow bed, his hands in his lap, and stared at Bryan in unabating horror.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Wallis,” said Dr. Jarvis. “He thought he heard some kind of noise in the chimney, and he poked his head up there to see what it was.”

Wallis opened his mouth, said nothing, then closed it again.

“We had the feeling that something or someone attacked him,” I explained. “When his head was up there and we were trying to tug him out, it was just like someone equally powerful was pulling him back.”